“Relax…” Part Three

Stress Reason the Third – my job(s) and related issues.

I have no real reason to complain, but I’m not exactly rational these days and this shit is piling up.

I work at a really great office with people (almost all of them male) who are a joy to be around. The work is right in my wheelhouse – CAD drafting in the civil engineering field.

The trouble is that The Boss is very busy and doesn’t have proper time to lay out the work he wants me to do. He has obviously forgotten how well and how quickly I do my job (that’s not a brag – it’s my Super Power) causing me to spend a lot of time doing nothing. Surfing the ‘net doesn’t count. I’m getting bored.

The thing is, I could do a certain amount of the design myself – water flows downhill, right? But The Boss is micromanaging everything. It’s just the way he is and I know this about him, so what’s my problem, right?

I feel undervalued and unappreciated. I’m bored. Did I already say that? The Boss comes into my office or calls often enough that I can’t really work on a personal project, and that chafes. There are so many things that I need to get online but I just can’t find the time or energy to do them and Work is taking up all my energy. These days, even staying conscious all day is a struggle, so I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and behind schedule, what with all this wasted time at Work. Sigh.

Add to that work for The Other Boss is getting busier. His EIT has become an engineer and flown the nest, leaving TOB, who is nearing retirement, to run the office by himself. He’s not very tech savvy, although I did see him texting the other day, which freaked me out just a little. Any work I do for him now necessitates a trip out to his office after work to upload and plot the drawings, taking up even more time that I just don’t feel I have. He does pay well and is great to work for, but still.

AND Crazy Dog Lady is calling me up every other day with various computer and internet problems. I’ve had enough of her but cutting her loose isn’t practical and I know she means well – she has a rather selfish view of life and I think she’s pretty oblivious as to how she treats people – but her shit is getting old. She says she’s going to write me into her will, but that’s another post…She calls me during work hours, as many as ten times a day, despite my having told her not to call me at work. No, I don’t answer the phone – it always goes to voicemail. She also calls after 8:30 in the evening, despite my telling her that I won’t pick up that late. I tend to let her messages pile up and get back to her when it’s convenient for ME. She hasn’t gotten the hint yet. Maybe she never will. Whatever. It’s like herding toddlers but what can I do?

All this takes up so much of my energy that I’m feeling like I have nothing left for the Fun Stuff. The Sweatshop Girls have done some stuff this Summer, but there is so much more to get done and the project list just gets longer and longer while all I can think about is a long nap.

Okay, one more entry and I think y’all will be caught up. Tune in tomorrow-ish.

 

 

A Typical Work Day

Hot on the heels of my Frustrations post, Aussa posted a snapshot of her typical work day. This post was followed by Goldfish’s Average Day, which looks an awful like mine – not all that strange when you consider we do similar work for (what sounds like) similarly idiotic people.

My day –

0730-ish: Arrive at the office. Leave the dog in the car as an excuse to go outside in an hour.

0732: Make the first of what usually ends up being six cups of hot tea.

0735: Sit down at desk and open web browser. Doesn’t matter what else is on my plate for the day. Those emails won’t answer themselves and if I don’t check up on social media a baby will cry in Japan or something equally horrible.

0830: Retrieve dog from car and walk around the block. If I’m lucky she’ll poop. If I’m unlucky she won’t and will keep up a high-pitched whine for the next 90 minutes until we go out again.

0845: Return to desk. Glance over Work for the day. If it appears it will take longer than 30 minutes to complete, open the relevant files and draw a couple of lines.

0900: Back to the interwebs for inspiration because while I was “working” 827 new ideas flew into my brain.

1000: Walk the dog. Hopefully come away with the prize in the plastic bag if I didn’t on the earlier walk.

1015: Back to my desk and interwebs or Work, depending on which seems more pressing.

1130: Whoa! Lost track of time there! Doesn’t matter, though, because now it’s lunch time 🙂

1230: Back to work. Actually work on assigned project. Get 90% done and await the inevitable changes by micro-managing co-worker. They arrive right on cue at 1330 and I am ready, having refreshed myself by looking at clothes storage ideas on Pinterest.

1345-1400: Make changes micro-managing co-worker took 15 minutes to explain in 3.2 minutes and head outside for a smoke break.

1415: Look around my desk to see if any of the files contain anything interesting to work on. Everything has information pending and nothing is a rush job. Great! Back to the internet, where I write a blog post, work on my website or edit patterns. I feel woefully behind on all the personal stuff I really want to get done, what with all the interruptions throughout the day, none of which are as important as the person harassing me thinks they are.

1530: Time to walk the dog again! If the sun is shining the neighbors will be out and I might get lucky enough to glean some gossip or let someone pet my dog.

1545-1650: Make the last cup of hot tea for the day. Check in with The Boss to make sure he hasn’t thought up something else for me to do. Back at my desk it’s more time wasting after finishing up the work I was expected to finish today. If I get lucky there will be more work tomorrow. If I’m really lucky it will prove to be challenging.

1700: Quitting time! We don’t punch a time clock and I am often the first out the door.

I don’t consider myself exceptionally bright but when held up against the right people I am fucking brilliant and my talents are wasted.

AND I’ll be totally fucked if they’ve installed a keylogger on my computer 🙂

Srsly, I love my job. My co-workers are all wonderful people who just don’t give me much fodder for this here blog. No scandals. No one is hooking up with anyone else in the office. No boozers. No drug users. No sexist assholes. No bad language or inappropriate gossip.

Wait. WTF am I doing at such a boring place? Oh, right – the paycheck.

What does your average day look like?

 

Work Irritations

I’ve mentioned before that I have two jobs – my everyday-at-the-office job and an occasional-part-time-whenever job. Both involve drafting and I’m not complaining even though it sounds like maybe I am. I love both jobs, really I do, and I’m grateful to have them.

But. Spring is here and I always get cranky this time of year, impatient to Get On With Summer Already. The constant switch from warm & sunny to chilly & breezy means I never have on the right clothes and going out without a hat and getting rained on just buggers up my whole day. Being inside without even a window to gaze out of while the weather is lovely makes my left eye twitch.

So, I’m not the most patient person right now and I’m being forced to hold my tongue and be a Team Player. Awana just gasped in horror. That’s right, this Lone Wolf is having to slow down and work with others.

I don’t have anything against the men I work with – they’re generally a great bunch of guys, but their brains operate on another wavelength and some of them seem to think I don’t know what I’m doing, or at least that’s the way it comes across to me.

There’s this job I’ve been working on. It’s not a big deal, a small subdivision. Several people have been in the drawings, changing this, changing that, shifting things here and there and now the client has decided on a final design and it’s time to get the drawings ready for submittal. Naturally nothing lines up with anything else and it’s my job to go in there and delete all the Bad Cad the slackers put in. Okie-dokie! It’s what I do.

This job should be mine entirely but The Boss is feeling pressured and not sure it will be finished for submittal on Thursday. Today, as far as I can tell, is Tuesday. He put the redlines on my desk yesterday afternoon. It’s not a lot of work. Maybe five hours working at a moderate pace, at most.

Yeah. Fun times. I know how to do my job. I’m very good at it, actually. I never blow a deadline. Ever. Now I’m stuck in second gear, waiting for someone else to do his part before I can do more of my part and the whole farce won’t be finished until after noon on Thursday because that’s how the other guy rolls.

I have nothing against my co-worker, but fuck, he’s slow and he can’t communicate well. He likes to be condescending and act surprised whenever I show I know what I’m doing. Grrrrr!

I resent The Boss thinking I need “help” with this one. I resent not being given full rein to design the storm and sewer lines – I may not have an engineering degree under my belt, but I do have a calculator and 25 fucking years experience. Shit flows downhill.* It’s not a complicated design.  I resent my coworker interrupting my blogging every twenty minutes to “keep [me] in the loop” about changes The Boss is making as he gets more information from The City.

Sigh. It’s shaping up to be a long week and I haven’t even started on the drafting for The Other Boss.

* Unless you pump it uphill, but that’s not relevant here.

 

 

Irritations @ Work

Really had enough of the men at work lying when I ask a question they don’t know the answer to. It’s irritating and makes me want to slap them. Just say you don’t know, okay?

Today was just the latest example. I need to do a very specific thing that I’m pretty sure can be done but I’ve not done it and want to know the best way to accomplish my goal without causing anyone to blow a gasket when they have to make changes behind me.* I ask the self-proclaimed “CAD expert” in the office and he gave me an answer that was so full of bullshit I can still smell it.

Did he think I wouldn’t notice that his answer was crap? Does he think I’ve learned nothing in the last 25 years working in this industry? Does he think I’m a moron and will try to make it work “his” way? Fuck no. I’ll be on the Autodesk CAD boards online if anyone needs me and I won’t bother asking questions I suspect they can’t answer in future.

* Which brings me to my next complaint – stay the fuck out of my drawings! If you want changes, just ask instead of going in there, fucking things up and then apologizing later. It really pisses me off to have to re-do someone else’s work when I could have done it perfectly myself in a fraction of the time. AND when things are changed and I go back in some time later I don’t know what’s been done and since y’all can’t seem to agree on anything the layout is totally different and I have to waste my time asking even more questions and making myself look stoopid, and I hate that more than just about anything. Less than puking, but more than picking up dog shit. Gahhhh

 

Five Free Hours

At the end of the day Wednesday The Boss promised to have a bunch of stuff red-lined for me to work on Thursday as he was going “out in the field” all day with The Other Boss. Okie-dokie.

I arrived at work and there was one little sheet on my desk. “Need a plan & profile sheet for this job.” Uh-huh. It’s a tiny little job and would take about 30 minutes to complete. Crap. I like the money they pay me, but I hate sitting around doing nothing*.

As I was contemplating how to fill the rest of the day, The Boss called on the phone (there is no extension at my desk – are they trying to tell me something?) and when I expressed my dismay at not having a full day’s worth of work he said that he was totally okay with me working on projects for The Other Boss in the office, so long as I wasn’t double billing, heh, heh, heh. As if, but I know he was joking. Considering what happened with the guy they had to fire, I understand it’s a valid concern.

I told him that I didn’t have any other work, but if he didn’t have anything for me, I would be happy to go home and take a nap. He was surprised by that, but I’ve been living on part-time minimum wage money for four years and doing just fine – one afternoon off is not going to blow my budget!

He said that between him and TOB they were committed to giving me full-time work. That will not happen this month and I know it. There are a couple of large projects coming in, but it won’t be until late this month or early next month and then I won’t have a minute to breathe, so taking a few hours now is a Smart Move. I think he was relieved that I understand that the company can’t afford to pay me for sitting around and that I’m willing to go home if I’m not needed. I’ll be writing my own ticket before you know it 🙂

So I left at noon and found myself with five “free” hours. A gentle rain was falling outside, so no one was around (maybe the folks in the trailerhood aren’t waterproof?) if I wanted to be outside. But, oh, a nap would be so lovely!

And so I did. Take a nap that is. Three full hours in the afternoon on a Thursday. Know what? It felt good! It felt so good that I want to make it a Regular Thing.

After our refreshing sleep, Sabu and I went walking and ran into another resident that we hadn’t yet met, Noreen and her dog Boo Boo. She informed me that we are allowed to let our dogs loose in the mule pasture so long as they won’t chase the mules. Well, huh! Cool! Off we went.

Two white mules were grazing at the far end of the pasture – I missed them when I was looking the other day because the pasture is much larger than I thought and I didn’t look around that big tree. As far as I know, Sabu has not been loose around livestock, so I had no idea how she would react. They shoot dogs ’round here for chasing livestock, but there’s only one way to find out if she’s a chaser.

The dogs were eager to play so we let them loose and they started running and acting like idiots right away, pals for life now. And then Sabu spied the mules over there. She took off like a shot, right for them. These are experienced mules who do not tolerate any crap from any dog, and they responded as you would expect to her attempts to herd them – they tried to take her head off with their hooves.

Oh, what fun! Luckily Sabu is very quick on her feet. Unluckily she was rather slow to pick up that these mules were serious about doing her harm. They actually ganged up on her and might have done for her if I hadn’t run up swinging her leash to distract them long enough to get that stupid dog to run back towards the gate. The mules followed pretty closely to be sure we left their domain. Scary smart creatures, mules. Hank and Henrietta are their names. I plan to go out without Crazy Dog and make friends another day.

Boo Boo was confused as to why Sabu would want to chase those mean mules when she could play with him, and being a smart guy, he did not even attempt to join in her moment of insanity.

No one was harmed and my heart rate returned to normal. Noreen and I will take the dogs to the dog park next time.

An hour of “free” time left and the vacuum came out. Exciting, I know!

It just feels really nice to be able to do some things that have fallen by the wayside for lack of time. It’s nice to feel rested at last.

Life is good!

* I’m good at my job. Fantastic, even. I regularly perform CAD miracles when someone else blows a deadline, or is about to. They can count on me to take care of things when no one else can. I have never met a drafter who can draw as fast as I can. I don’t say that to brag, it’s a true fact, and I have a theory as to why – it’s a good job that no one wants to lose, so they pad their hours, make it look difficult, lie about how fast something can be done and otherwise deceive The Boss to make their lives as cushy as possible. At three different companies I had to leave because the blatant wasting of time made me crazy and because when the bosses figured out that I was the fastest drafter, they insisted on using me and that caused some serious problems with the other drafters and well, I just can’t keep my mouth shut about that shit. I was even asked by one Boss to find ways the company could save time, paper and redundant mistakes. I found plenty of crap that should not have been going on. The other employees began a smear campaign – their theory was that since I was just one person and they were more, it made sense to train me in their methods as it would be quicker. They had it all worked out and were not willing to give up any of their (false) hours.  Sigh. It’s a huge problem. You might have guessed by now that I don’t do Office Politics 🙂

 

The Road Trip

Oh, man, it’s been a long day!

Made it over to The Valley in time for the meeting (after a stop at Winco to pick up supplies for the Sweet Shop – I always combine my driving trips :-)) which lasted longer than usual with The Boss.

Found out that we have an AutoCAD compatibility problem – I have an older version (not that old, but AutoDesk put up a Do Not Cross Until You Upgrade barrier) on my desktop  computer that won’t enable me to do the work. A few minutes of trying to find a solution without re-doing anything led TB to give me a sooper-dooper souped-up laptop to take home! Score! It also opens some new portability options and I have permission from D to work on the drafting at the Shop if it’s slow, so long as customers come first. Double score!!

Had to fuss around with the darned thing to get it online and the anti-virus up and running, but all systems are go.

Except for the one that I really need – seems the program is in “trial” mode and wants a special code or $6825 to load my drawings. Le sigh. Blasted off an email to get that corrected and will try again tomorrow.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Came sliding back into town 1/2 hour late, forgot the inventory sheets I needed to take to the Shop, ran back out to D’s, and opened late. Damn! If it hadn’t been for that slow-moving car on the highway, I would have made it.

Errands and more errands, but everything is done, the pug-faced posse and their fearless (and shedding terribly) leader are laying around in various poses awaiting the next adventure. If I can get the laptop going as it should I can start moving out of D&D’s house and back into Towanda.

I wonder how well the pug-faced posse would travel…