Tornadoes and Other Disasters

Last night was rough. Very, very rough.



I am burned to a deep-fried crisp, actually. I have abso-ever-fucking-lutely had it with my job--I am very nearly at the point of walking out.



Example, just for today:



Last week we had a meeting. (I say that as though we don't have a fucking meeting every fucking week--like, eight of them.) The meeting in question was about our addresses, and the fact that our data validation is for shit. We have no standard abbreviations, data is duplicated all over creation, and we're about to go to the next iteration of the database and none of these issues has been adequately dealt with. Anyway, in this meeting, I was given a task, which I very carefully wrote into my notes. The task involved finding out how many clients we had and how many zip codes would be within 20-mile radii of those clients if we wanted to target mailings to those areas.



Notice the 20-mile radii. That figure was suggested by Beverly, the Big Boss Bitch, and I specifically wrote that figure down because she said it, and I'm trying desperately to unfuck my wrongly-fucked reputation with her. This would be easier if she was not a scapegoating drama queen.



That task was due today. So Tuesday afternoon, I went through this ghastly long process I can't even begin to describe, because it's boring and geeky and database-y, and got the info together and did a kick-ass job, and e-mailed Amy with the results. I told her that if we DID try to pull data for those 20-mile radii, we were going to have our hands full and would probably need a temp to do the work.



This morning she fires back: "Please drop by my office to talk about this--I think you're misunderstanding the task." :::deep sigh::: Okay. Fine. I go to her office.



She explained to me that we didn't really need such a big radius, which sorta made sense when she explained her thinking, and would have made MORE sense had she actually told Beverly that it didn't make sense when she SAID "20 miles" instead of telling ME after I'd already spent a good chunk of time doing it.



At this point, Beverly walks into Amy's office to ask her about something else (another meeting, I believe). Amy says something to Beverly to the effect of "I was just telling Gladys that we probably ought to use something smaller than that 20-mile radius."



Beverly gets this blank expression like "20 mile what-now??" and Amy attempts to clarify. "Gladys said that in the last meeting, you said you wanted to pull all zips in a 20-mile radius."



"Well, I didn't say that," Beverly said. "I don't remember saying that."



"Okay," Amy says, and they pass a couple sentences about their whatever-it-is, and Beverly leaves.



Now, you have to understand something about my job, and it really is an immutable rule: If I say someone said something, and the other person claims they didn't, the other person is automatically believed. There really are no exceptions. I am the least-credible person there, and I have no idea why. I am assumed to be a liar although I have never actually been caught in a lie (I will not say I've never TOLD one, just that I've not been caught the once or twice I've done it)--and it is automatically assumed that anything I say is open to dispute. The only people to act on this assumption are my supervisors; the other staff believe me and listen to my professional judgement. Not the bosses. As you can imagine, this is very tiresome and demoralizing, especially when it happens again and again and when, on the occasions where my judgement has eventually been proven to be sound, no one ever acknowledges it.



But generally, I just suck it up and deal. I don't complain about it to them because I know: that's just how they are. Nothing I say or do will change them. This is a conclusion I've drawn after much conversation with several of my friends and co-workers, most of whom feel demoralized and dismissed in other ways. No one where I work is happy.



Anyway, when Beverly walked out of the room, I let out a big sigh; I'm wrong once again, I thought. Once again I'm being told I didn't hear what I heard. And when I let out this sigh, Amy says to me, in a SUPER-snotty tone, "Let it go, Gladys."



Yeah, THAT's a good way to validate your employee's feelings. I went back to my desk and sent out three more resumes.



Okay. Now, imagine stuff like that happening EVERY DAY. Often several times a day. How would YOU feel?



So yeah, I'm just fried. And in this condition, along with two exacerbating circumstances (1.I just dropped my methadone dose again, and 2. The last time I got laid was the night before Thanksgiving), I decided I needed something to read, and went downstairs where most of my books are. And picked "The Artist's Way".



For those of you who haven't read it, "The Artist's Way" is one of those courses in how to unblock your creativity and get back in touch with your essential self. And 99% of the time, my basic cynicism kicks in about a page or two in, and up goes the wall, and I READ whatever-it-is but it doesn't really have any emotional effect on me.



99% of the time, however, I'm not in quite such a fragile place.



I cried. Like, a LOT. Part of it was The Usual--there's a lot of talk about loss and acceptance, and neither of those things are things with which I am unfamiliar, and both of them are things I've not dealt with very well. I'm very good with building walls; they are many feet thick and surround a core of absolute gelatin. But actually DEALING with my pain--not so much. I am nowhere near as strong as I'd like to believe, and I'm fairly sure that everyone around me knows it.



There was a lot of other stuff that messed me up too, and by about 11:00 I was just sobbing. Which sucked especially because in my saner moments, I realize that a lot of what is in that book is recycled twelve-step-ism, which I have always disagreed with completely. (That's a post for another day.) But last night--lonely, unfucked, tired, burned-out, hating the way my life has changed and dreading the morning, when I would once again drag myself to a place I hate, to have my self-worth shat upon by people who respect only their own power...yeah, I kinda lost it.



One thing is very clear to me, though, and no matter how much twelve-step drivel you coat it with, it's still very true: I HAVE to make a change. And I HAVE to do it as soon as possible. If I try to swallow down my rage any longer, I know it's going to get messier and messier, and pretty soon I'm gonna do something that will jeopardize the parts of my life that actually DON'T suck.



...though at the moment, I couldn't convincingly tell you which parts that might describe.