Long Bad Day

Do you ever get that feeling where a bad day turns into a bad week? Nothing seems to go right, everything makes you unhappy and you just plod along through it all, wishing life would just go back to normal?

My bad week seems to be turning in to a bad month. I can’t wait for it to be over, but I suspect that maybe it won’t end until after Christmas, when I have the chance to be away from work for an extended period of time.

In all honesty, I think I just don’t like my job, and that’s why the bad day has gone on for so long. My boss is kind of a tool, and coming to work each day is making me miserable. But I don’t really know what else to do. Sadly, even though I’m almost 30, I still don’t know what I want to do for a living. It’s been a problem for me for as long as I can remember, because I had the opportunity straight after high school to study pretty much whatever I wanted, but because I had no idea what I wanted to do, I never really studied anything. I just sort of fell into this job. And I enjoyed it a lot in the beginning because it used to be really challenging and I was free to do a lot of different things, but now it’s kind of sucky because my boss is a control freak so I have no room to move. Also, he’s kind of a sexist, so he doesn’t give me anywhere near enough work to do – he just farms it all out to the guys.

Damn it, why couldn’t I have married some really rich guy who’s never home?! Then I could spend my days doing things I enjoy, like reading books, watching tv, shopping and playing scrabble. Then this wouldn’t even be an issue.

Ha!

Ha!

Last week I had a full blown argument with my boss, because he yelled at (that’s right, yelled, not asked) me to do something not by the book, despite having asked me never to let him get around the systems we have in place. When I reminded him that he told me not to let him, he went on a screaming tirade like a shitty teenager whose mother won’t let him go out on a school night.

Today his ‘sound reason’ for screaming at me and cracking the sads turned out to be a load of bullshit, and his incredibly inappropriate tantrum and insistence that we do things out of order has come to be totally unnecessary and has cost a lot of money.

I feel vindicated.

It’s incredibly petty of me, I know; but he was such a prick about it all that I don’t care.

So, Ha! I say. Ha!

Back at it

I’m back at a work and already it feels like I never even had a holiday. It doesn’t take long to slip back into all the old habits –singing out loud on the way to work, 5 hour long meetings with no point, too many cups of coffee and secretly wearing my slippers under the desk where no one can see my feet.

The only thing that felt any different yesterday on my first day back was that I was a little more relaxed than on a regular working day. It took me most of my 3 and a half weeks of holiday to wind down and by the time I did, it was time to go back to work.

That relaxed feeling has been obliterated now from being thrown headlong back into pointless tasks by my doddering boss. I feel as though I spend a great deal of time humouring him and his crazy ideas while trying to get my real work done. It’s like some movie where the multi-million dollar corporation is owned by the crazy old timer in the wheelchair and they nod and smile at him while some sleazy manager is making all the real decisions behind his back. Although that would make me the sleazy manager, so maybe it’s not like that at all, since I’m not a manager and I’m reasonably sure I’m not sleazy.

Actually I shouldn’t be saying all of this, because if there’s one thing those sorts of movies teach you, it’s that the sleazy manager always gets his come-uppance.

So.....Work is fine. My boss is wonderful.
Really.

The Invisible (and irate) Woman

I am so incredibly sick of working for a company staffed entirely with men. They are self consumed, self important, disgustingly messy and quite often inappropriate and rude in the most irritating ways imaginable.

Today one of the bosses told me that they would have to make sure someone else knew how to do my job too, because I would be making babies soon and that he'd broken his self imposed rule of never hiring women because then he has to deal with maternity leave. Like because I'm a woman I'm a freaking baby machine! Like having a womb makes me waaaay more unreliable than the men who work here!!

The new admin guy (who I've known for a number of years outside of work) keeps making jokes about me being paid too much money, which was mildly amusing the first 3 times, but not the 50 times after that. News flash dickhead - I've been doing this for nearly 10 years now - of COURSE I earn a stack more money than you - you've been doing it for 5 weeks!!!

Hmmm, can you tell I'm feeling a little irate today? A meeting where they talk about a subject for 3 hours only to come back to the point that I made in the first 5 minutes of the meeting will do that to me. I am the amazing invisible (and irate) woman.

Social Problems Solved!

While discussing my total and utter social retardation with my boss, he came up with the idea to take me out on his sales calls so I can see his small talk in action.

It could be good, I might be able to learn how to answer questions about pus without being sick all over the person I'm talking to.

Swap a little small talk?

Today I spoke to one of the guys who installs the playgrounds at work. I’ve never met him (I think he’s based somewhere in Sydney) and today was the first time I’ve ever spoken to him. I rang him at the boss’s request and using the boss’s phone because work calls are free between mobiles. The conversation went something like this:

Him: 'Hi Boss-Man'

Me: ‘Actually it’s Torrygirl'

Him: ‘Oh, g’day Torrygirl, how’s your day going?’ as though we had been introduced and knew each other well.

I would love to be able to be that at ease with new people. I’ve thought about it a bit and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m no good at small talk. I seem to be missing the small talk gene. Maybe it’s something that skips a generation. I might end up having excessively chatty children and nothing to talk to them about.

It’s because of this hideous genetic deficiency that I always find myself at a loss when it comes to meeting new people. I think this is why my relationship with KJ has worked so well over the years, because my shortcomings are his strengths. He is a masterful small-talker. He can talk about anything, anytime and never seems to create the kind of awkward silences that I seem to be able to elicit from people.

A good example of this is a family function we went to. We don’t see KJ’s family very often, so it was a lot of new people, hence a lot of social small talk was required. I spotted a Great-Uncle sitting on his own and I gathered together some kind of flimsy small talk plan in order to give this ‘getting to know a new person’ thing a go. The plan mostly involved talking about the weather. And as that’s the strongest plan I could think of, you can probably see how pitiful my small talk skills truly are. Also, the fact that I have to plan my small talk is a big clue.

That conversation went a little like this.

Him: 'Hello dear.'

Me (Thinking that speaking as though we’d met before might help the conversation along): 'Hello, how have you been?'

Him: 'Oh, well I’ve been in to the eye hospital and my eye was playing up and blah blah blah pus, blah blah blah festering, blah blah blah seeping everywhere!'

Me: (trying not to gag openly) 'Oh um, er, well…'

Enter KJ to flex his incredible small talking skills to ask the small, conversation moving questions that even now when I’m thinking back on this elude me. See! I can’t even small talk on paper.

I need to take a small talk class. Or maybe there’s somewhere where I can change some big talk for a bunch of small talk. I wonder what the exchange rate is on big talk to small talk?

Does anyone have any pointers to help me learn how to master this skill? Or am I a sad, lost cause in the world of talking about weather, health and whatever else it is that people talk about when they don’t really have anything to say?

Monster Monitor

I recently kind of tricked my boss into buying me an enormous computer monitor.

Last week, he bought himself a gigantic and very overpriced monitor and called me into his office to help him set it up. He is probably the last person in the office (or the state) who needs an enormous monitor, since his desk is set up in such a way that his face to monitor gap is only a few centimetres - but i guess he wanted an Imax-style computer experience. After setting it up for him, I suggested that he should move it back a little so as not to go completely blind and/or cross eyed, and after a few half-arsed attempts at pushing the monitor back a little, he ended up with it in the exact same position.
'I'd love to have a monitor like this,' I told him 'It would really help with the graphic design aspect of my work'
'Yeah, it's great' he enthused while bobbing his head from side to side like a confused turkey as he tried to take in the
entire picture on the screen.

I just shook my head and added the monitor to the list of pointless things that my boss thinks are cool to own, and went back to my desk. 5 minutes later, my phone rang - The boss.
'Hello?'
'You can have it.'
'Excuse me?'
'You can have it, it's too big. I'm going to buy a smaller one, and you can have this one'.
'Wow, gee thanks' I said, as I weighed up whether or not to point out that he could probably return the freakishly large monitor and exchange it for the smaller one instead of having to spend another small fortune on a useless toy. I decided it was worth letting it go for a while, and hoping that no one else would point out the very obvious (and much cheaper) option. After all, no one wants to be the one to point out to the boss that he's not that smart.

And that is how i came to own a monitor that is so big that i had to remove half of the items on my desk to accommodate it.

There is, however, a downfall to owning such a large monitor that i hadn't thought of before i hooked it up. I sit with my back to the rest of the office, and there are two desks behind me. There is also a walkthrough next to my desk, and with such an enormous screen, my ability to successfully bludge without detection has been severely compromised. Everything on the screen appears so large when maximised that it can be seen clearly from the other side of the office.

My work around so far has been to minimise whatever i am doing to the smallest window possible and place it directly in line with my body so that the people behind me can only see the maximised work and not that i am actually browsing the web for music or chatting on MSN. I haven't yet managed to work out what to do about the people who are walking past my desk, but I'm thinking it might involve disguising my web browser as some kind of playground-related work program. I'll have to come up with something, because I have just typed this in a window that is so small I can only see one word at a time, and even that is so big that I feel like everyone in the building can see every last word.

Reality Soapie

Today I had the strangest conversation with my boss. She called me into her office to tell me about some things that were going on in her personal life, because they had crossed over into her work life. She wanted to tell me about it before I heard about it as office gossip, because we’ve known each other a long time and she wanted me to know the truth about it all.

As she was telling me about what was going on, I got a little confused and thought maybe she was reading me the TV guide instead of telling me about her life, but no – she was definitely talking about herself. I felt like she was reading me a blurb about a TV soap opera.

I’m going to tell this story so that you can tell me if you think it sounds like real life or like a dodgy drama series.

Obviously I can’t use their real names, so instead I’ve named them all after characters from ‘The Young and the Restless’, ‘Days of our Lives’, and that great Australian soapie – ‘Neighbours’.

CAST

Female Boss – Charlene

Male Boss – Victor

Suave Salesman – Bo

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives….

Charlene has been very happily married for 6 years when she unexpectedly has an affair with the suave salesman, Bo. They are careless in covering it up, and are caught out. She splits with her husband.

Charlene’s husband works up a jealous rage and threatens to beat Bo to a pulp and dump him in the bottom of the bay, but ultimately ends up drinking himself almost comatose.

She is going to tell Victor that she is leaving her husband and that Bo is leaving his wife (who is 8 months pregnant) so that they can be together, but before she can, Victor receives an anonymous phone call outing their affair.

The anonymous phone call turns out to be from Charlene’s evil stepfather, Stefano, who somehow has a personal stake in the break up of Charlene’s marriage and has tracked down and called Victor without Charlene or Charlene’s mother knowing about it.

To be continued….

Is that day-time TV material or what? And I’m not making any of this up – this is the kind of melodrama that is happening while I’m off drawing playgrounds. All it needs is a nice rounded ending with someone in a coma and an evil plot by someone’s jealous wife. I think that Victor’s wife would be good at the jealous wife part, but I’m not too sure about the coma and the evil plot. Still, my boss told me all of this today and it’s only been two months since she split with her husband, so I guess there’s still plenty more time for B-grade drama to unfold.