Caterwauling

Any of you who see me on Instant Messenger may recognize today’s post title from my status bar. Because it’s Thursday night and I’m now past 40 hours into the workweek, and what have I achieved? NOT FUCKING MUCH.

I’m still working on restoring world order from last week. I’ve had it with e-mail chains and cc: lines and one cook to fuck up a meal but 17 cooks to tell you how they think you really meant to tell them how to fix it. AAARRRGGGHHHH.

I don’t know the secret handshake and I don’t want to know it. I want to stop having to fix everybody else’s issues so I can work on some of my own because after I’ve played nice in the sandbox all day, I have to go to my people and tell them how my real work isn’t getting done.

I got a grand suggestion from someone today and I’m going to take it. Next week, I’m on vacation — figuratively, of course. Everyone else can deal with the regular business, the crapfest stuff goes to the wayside and I work on the project that needed to be launched this week but is actually delayed for a month because I don’t have any time to do it. And in fixing others’ costly mistakes, I’ve got advertisers with no place to advertise and boy isn’t THAT great for business?!?!

We had a training this morning in which we were talking about “How to Say It” — coming up with how to appropriately address problem employees and employee problems. There was this one case scenario that my group got, that an employee is overworked and putting in tons of hours and has tons of Styrofoam food boxes in their office because they’re practically living there.

One person in my group said, “I don’t understand the problem with that.” Another said, “Perhaps it’s a recycling issue?” And I said, “Give ’em a pat on the back.”

And boy, if that isn’t telling of what kind of manager I am becoming. Sheesh. So they work late — so what? My thought was to ask what kind of food they were eating and whether they’d recommend it, although I didn’t say that out loud. 😉

The correct answer, of course, was to talk to the employee about the workload and see about redistributing some tasks among other team members or easing up on expectations. Ha. Of the 50 people in my training session, we were all bleary-eyed from being at work late and up early to do tasks so we could afford to be in a 2 1/2 hour training session. This isn’t a group that’s sympathetic to giving up personal time to work on projects! How can someone be expected to address burnout issues when they themselves are actively perpetuating them?

Tiff Twittered that there’s something awesome going on, on Friday night. Which, heh. Me? Free on a Friday night? But you know, I think I need to do that “on vacation” thing, which may mean leaving the office at 7 instead of 9 and not technically being able to claim vacay time on the timesheet. Lord knows I haven’t accomplished shit else this week — why not knock off “early” and NOT have another moment in which I’m not pissed off about the fact that I am no further ahead on my to-do list than I was on Monday morning?!!?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 5:23 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.