Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored.
Yesterday the doorknob fell off. As I was trying to leave for work. LJ was at the block; though I could have gotten out through the back door, there was this gaping doorknob hole through which anyone with even the most rudimentary grasp of locksmithing (in other words, anyone other than me!) could have grabbed the little levers with a screwdriver, pried out the latch, and come in and ransacked our shit. And frankly I wasn't really in the mood to come home after a long day and find my belongings gone. Of course, I wasn't really in the mood to endure the administrative tonguelashing for being late to work, either. (Which is a whooooole nother story, how much I currently can't hate my job any more than I already do.)
I called a locksmith and went back to bed, on the understanding that the locksmith was going to call back at 8 when he got to the office. At 8:20 I woke up and called a different locksmith, who said he'd be here within an hour; I went back to bed. At 10:25, I woke up and called the locksmith back; he said he was 5 minutes away.
$219 out of the car fund later, we had a new doorknob and a well-deserved lecture on the perils of buying so-called "brand name" locks at Home Depot; apparently the locks branded as Schlage or whatever are actually made on the cheap, ESPECIALLY for Home Depot. "My cost on a lock is about twice what you pay at Home Depot," the locksmith told me.
By now it was about 11:30, so the Purple Line had stopped running express; there was no way I was going to get to the office before 2 if I went on the El. So I did the irresponsible thing--I called Mom, and she came and gave me a ride to work, and I got there at 1. And there wasn't much of a lecture once I got there; just a pointed remark from Amy--Boss #2-- to the effect of "Gladys, have you noticed that a lot of things seem to be going wrong with this house?" I told her Yes, as a matter of fact I have, and managed not to add the word Bitch to the end of it.
Amy is my third-most-unfavoritemost person in that office, following Nancy and Noreen; in fact, Noreen may actually have sunk below Amy in the People-I-Hate Hit Parade. Noreen may be irritatingly superior, and detail-oriented to the point of insanity; she may be hypercritical, controlling and annoying and remind me of all my mother's worst habits and Aunt Evelyn's worst habits too--but Noreen, for all her flaws, is EXCELLENT at her job and does it to the best of her ability. Everything she does that I find intolerable, I still have to grant that she's doing it so that she can be serene in the knowledge that HER job is done well and thoroughly. Though I can't count the times I've wanted to strangle her til she turns blue, I have to respect her.
On the other hand, Nancy is just a whiny little social-climbing ratfink UTF (Utterly Typical Female), a Lincoln-Park-Trixie wannabe who's "trained" her hubby to the point that I'm surprised the man has a penis left. And she looks down on ME because I'm fat, because I don't CARE that I'm fat, because I'm not starving myself or snarfing down proteins to make myself NOT be fat anymore; because I don't care about fashion, because I'd rather be comfortable, because I'm happy with LJ even though he's not pussywhipped beyond repair; because I'm not a socially adept person, because I don't live in a trendy place or do trendy things; in short, because I'm not like her and (more mystifying to her) because I don't WANT to be like her. I'm not the only one she looks down on--Stella says Nancy even talks about the bosses behind THEIR backs, talking about what they're doing wrong and how SHE would do it better if SHE was in charge, and I know she looks down on Stella too--which pisses me off to no end, because Stella is absolutely the most generous person I've ever met, and though we don't see eye-to-eye about a lot of stuff, I respect Stella's opinions for the most part; and she has WAY more life experience than Nancy does!
The worst thing about Nancy, though, is that she's a tattletale. Now, Noreen was a tattletale at one point, too--the period during which she was absolutely my worst enemy at that office--but she at least confined the whole tattling thing to actual events or incidents she witnessed. Nancy, on the other hand, actually went to Amy to complain that I wasn't working on a task she'd given me to do--TWO DAYS BEFORE the deadline. Apparently when she'd interrupted me to ask if I was going to have it done on time, I hadn't been "responsive" enough to her. So I got hauled into Amy's office, with Beverly sitting in--Big Boss Beverly--and lectured for the better part of an hour on my "inability" to meet deadlines.
The point of which I completely cannot convince these people is this, and a crucial point it is:
The more time I spend talking about how I do or do not do my work, the less time I have to actually DO my work.
This is a major tenet of my entire worldview when it comes to the workplace, the core reason behind why I loathe meetings so wholeheartedly. They are similarly uncomprehending, it seems, of Gladys's Oppositional Work Theorem: If you give me a task to do and a deadline by which it needs to be done, and then leave me alone, there is a great likelihood that it will be done by the deadline. If, however, you give me a task and a deadline, then spend the intervening time carping, questioning, nagging, and interfering with my work, there is a similarly-great likelihood that your task will remain undone. Not because you have taken up my time, though that's a small part of the problem; no, the main reason the task will remain undone is that I don't respond well to nagging and will, under such provocation, respond with a silent-but-hearty passive-aggressive "Fuck You" and go do something for someone less controlling. Nancy is one of the most-determined disregarders of this theorem; Noreen tends to ignore it as well, and Ruth Anne (Boss #3) just doesn't care. Ruth Anne is a wonderful person, but there is no earthly reason she should be a supervisor. She did an excellent job when she was just a program manager; like Noreen, everything was done with attention to detail, thoroughly and well; but supervising people is not her forte. She wants everyone to like her, and as a result no one respects her; what's more, she's scatterbrained and disorganized, so major projects take way more time and resources than they need to. I'm scatterbrained at times, and disorganized quite often--but first, I'm only responsible for my work and for the one layer of disruption that's caused if I don't do it right, and second, there are people who tell me if I'm fucking up. Ruth Anne, on the other hand, has no one to rein her in, and a lot of people and projects depending on what she does or fails to do. Joseph and I were talking the other day, in the midst of working up a Ruth Anne-necessitated contingency plan, and we agreed that she's mainly responsible for the vast turnover in the departments she heads up. Everyone in Amy's departments has been here for a long time; all Beverly's people have stayed; but Ruth Anne's departments have had almost an 80% turnover since I've been there.
A huge part of what gets on my nerves about this place, though, is the hypocrisy; the way situations are handled differently depending on who's in them. When I'm not "responsive" to Nancy, Amy and Beverly intervene immediately and I get a 90-minute lecture; when Nancy gives me only two days notice for a major deadline during the busiest part of the year despite my repeated requests for a 5-day lead-in, Amy responds to my request for her intervention with "Have you discussed this issue with Nancy?" When Delora snaps my head off for no reason, that's somehow fine; when I post a sign on my office door asking people not to interrupt me, I'm being "ogrelike"--Amy's word. (The sign explained what I was doing and why I needed not to be interrupted; then said "If you have something that needs to be done, please e-mail me; if it's something urgent that cannot wait, THEN you can knock. Thanks!--Gladys". But apparently because I didn't specify that my e-mail was constantly on and being checked every 10 minutes, and because I didn't say that I would be "happy" to help them if they knocked--apparently that's "ogrelike". So because I won't lie and say "oh, it's cool if you totally knock my train of thought completely off the rails" when it's NOT cool at ALL, somehow that makes me a mean person. Yet Delora can verbally bite the head off anyone who gets in her path before 9:30 AM--even for just saying "good morning" or asking a simple question--and that's just fine.)
I know I'm not an easy person to get along with. I know people are put off by me, by the way I handle certain issues, by the fact that I speak my mind about things that irritate me. Beverly does the same thing, far more cruelly in many cases, but since she's the boss she can get away with it. If you ask me, the fact that she's the boss just makes it WORSE when she tears people apart over little things. I may be sharp, but I never direct it AT people; I get annoyed at situations, I don't try to cut people down. I may not make them feel WELCOME, or pretend that I'm happy that they're interrupting me, but I do what they ask and I help them. I don't imply that they're not doing their jobs--like Beverly does, when something doesn't work right--or tell them they don't know how to do THEIR jobs. I do get impatient when the question they're asking is something I've answered before, or when they've done something that makes it harder for me to figure out the problem--for example, my favorite tech-support call:
"Gladys? My computer's broken."
"Okay...what's it doing?"
"Well, a message came up, but I clicked OK and it went away, and now it doesn't work."
"What did the message say?"
"I don't know. Something about an error, I think."
"What kind of error?"
"I don't remember. I just clicked OK and it went away, but now I can't move my mouse or type anything...."
"What were you doing when it happened?"
"Working on the same file I've been working on all day."
"Okay, you should restart your computer..."
"Will my file still be there when I restart?"
"It will if you saved it....you DID save it, right?"
"No....was I supposed to?" (Generally said by someone who has lost a file in exactly the same way in the past.)
That, along with "I need to change my password" and "How do I get on the server?" are the sort of questions that make me nuts. These are repetitive tasks, things that happen all the time, yet most of the people I work with act as though they've never changed a password or accessed their files before. And it's not just the Women of a Certain Age--from whom I can ALMOST excuse such things. It's people who should know better, people in charge. I change Beverly's password for her EVERY TIME--because she can't be bothered. She's not dumb; she just thinks it's beneath her to have to think about anything as low-echelon as technology.
This is why I want to work for myself someday.
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