i got issues, people

you know that hot-skin, not feeling well, panic sort of feeling? BAC is giving it to me in a big way. i’m putting off going to work right now because it sets in when I pull into the parking lot. and that’s a bad thing.

Sunday

Saturdays are fabulous in every way. Sunday’s, not so much. I don’t knock being able to sleep in for another day, I’m a big fan of that. I’m a big fan of not being at work. But the dread factor for what is coming on Monday, that I’m not a big fan of.

I dreamed that the little ass company (hereforward lac) that I interviewed with two weeks ago called me to tell me that I was going to be hired, of course, because the other people they interviewed just didn’t have the right blend of experience to do the job. My dreaming self was very pleased, but my awake self is rightly convinced this is wishful thinking and that I ought to be a little more realistic about the fact that they haven’t called any of my references. Also: I was rather arrogant through the whole thing. I mean, basically the job is more involved but what I was doing at TxInc with a stronger emphasis on writing and a much better long-term career path.

On the other hand, I am conflicted about it all. I’d be back to commuting for two hours a day with this one and I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, buy yourself a Nano and get on with it, that’s two hours of guarenteed writing time. On the other hand… I like being at home. I don’t know how flexible my working hours are going to be–4 10-hour days would be nice–and I’m not sure how they are going to feel about my rather strongly-confirmed belief that you get paid for 40 hours a week and no more. 40 hours a week at a given salary is one thing. 60 hours a week at the same salary cuts into how much you are getting paid per hour and is in essence a reduction in your pay. Work less, get paid more. Besides, I like to think I have a life outside of work that I am willing to defend. I’ve never been an American with no sense of perspective.

And there are other applications in at other places, places closer to home. LAC could be the opportunity of a lifetime, BAC isn’t tenable in the long-run, but am I willing to run the risk of being in an environment where 60 hour work weeks are expected?

I don’t know. I really have no clue.

you’d think

Well, here is the thing. Working while you are waiting for an axe to fall and the next terrible thing to happen is actually a really crappy way to spend 8 hours a day. What we know is that the new manager, the hr guy and her manager have been in a meeting, so at least part of the cat is out of the bag. So now everyone is walking around with lots of knowledge about what is going on, but no one acknowledges that anyone knows anything. Is actually quite stressful.

There should be something else. But nothing.

Going to Jersey this weekend. And watching CSI while trying to avoid seeing too much of the whole bone saw scalple shit. Sounds too much like sheep being butchered, actually.

Morocco seems a very long way away. Hubby says that he misses Morocco. I miss sitting in his mother’s living room, writing. I miss sleeping.

But I am enjoying having a glass of wine when I feel like it.

hamster

i’ve taken to going to the gym with all of the other hamsters running away from stuff and getting no further away. i think i’ve gone every day since last wed., with the exception of saturday. i am no further away, which comes as a bit of a disappointment, as i was beginning to think that the hamsters knew something i didn’t. disappointment on all fronts, apparently.

and the work thing gets progressivly worse. we are approaching the end of the first two weeks and already everyone is beginning to show signs of strain. i can’t sleep, i’ve got tension headaches and it is all because there is this air of expectancy, like an axe is going to fall and my job is to be sure i’m not in its way. but who knows when and where, or for that matter, why. and so we bumble along with her hawk eyes burning holes in the backs of our heads. she waits to catch someone fucking up some how and we try to find other jobs while we do what we can not to be the one who fucks up.

i’ve been home from morocco for two weeks and already, i am the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t cure.

monday it is

God, what an awful return home. Not that the flight was hideous; it wasn’t. Not that our bed wasn’t lovely; it was.

The awful bit is when you come to the new manager and the fact that it has taken less than a week for us to become a group of paranoid people: afraid of being seen in the lunch room lingering for a moment too long, afraid to have a conversation with the door open, afraid that any assignment is a ruse to trick you into betraying a weakness.

Miserable. Freaking miserable.

surveying the wreckage

of the weekend. It’s Monday evening and I’m just now getting the house back in order from Saturday night.

Friday night was the BAC holiday party. We went. My husband was his normal charming self. I played my misanthropic self, which doesn’t really deviate from the norm either. The band was satisfactory – nothing amazing. The food sufficed, though also not as amazing. Honestly, the husband’s holiday party when he was working downtown was MUCH better, but never mind that. Those days are long gone. So party: loud. A ton of my fellow dorky employees milling around and making fools of themselves on the dance floor.

There were bright spots, but they are the same bright spots that happen every day at work: CS, JW, MP

I was encouraged to dance, but even against a backdrop of convulsive white folk trying to work out the funk, I still refused. I don’t know what to do with my arms. My feet occasionally find the rhythm, but never consistently enough to count. I hate it. I hate parties like that. I don’t know what to say to people, they are so inorganic and unnatural. Seriously? I could see myself becoming agoraphobic as I get progressively ‘more so’ as I age.

Anyway. Saturday, I barely get out of my pj’s. I keep up the good work on my project to preserve my dad’s negatives. I made theoretical plans to see HAF Saturday night. Those morphed into very frustrating hours waiting for the Cheesecake Factory to keep their tables turning over. We finally gave up in frustration and ducked over to PFChangs. The food was fine – they serve brown rice, which makes me very happy. The original plan didn’t really involve coming back to my disaster of a house, but HAF’s boyfriend is of the opinion that life is too short to go to bed early, so we brought our merry asses back to my house.

And I started pouring. We started with hot apple cider and rum. When the bottle of rum was gone, the vodka came out.

For a variety of reasons, the husband isn’t always around for these events. ‘Tis partially because of a very long story and ’tis partially because we have our own lives. He gets one night a week where he is a free man, well, free enough to go hang out with his friends and leave me behind. Those are usually the nights I see HAF, or anyone at all for that matter. My world really is pretty isolated these days.

Saturday was a different story. He met us at the Cheescake Factory, walked to PFChangs with us and it was cool. He checked out a little early to go give something to a friend of his, then was back home for the drunken discussion on whether we’d rather live in Centreville or Anacostia. Centreville being a pretty conservative, homogenous locale filled with Dan Ryan special disposable houses (pretty and huge, but designed to fall apart after about 15 years). Anacostia having a wretched reputation in the DC area for being violent, poverty-stricken and basically scary. HAF and I would rather live in Anacostia and be part of the solution than live in Centreville and be part of the problem. The husband and the boyfriend disagreed. Lively, smart conversation, drunkenness… What else would you ask for from a Saturday night? It was nice.

The hangover the next morning was not quite as fun. Oy. I woke up drunk. We pulled together a Salvadorian breakfast: Tortillas, fried eggs, pureed black beans, avocado and crema. Done right, there would have been fried plantains, but they weren’t ripe enough to fry.

From there, I worked on some beaded necklaces for one of HAF’s coworkers. Then my mom showed up, I spent some quality time with my mother and shooed her out of the house when it came time to go to my father’s house. The dishes from breakfast never left the table.

I had this theory about waking up early this morning to take care of the mess, but that didn’t happen. Not to worry: the disaster waited for me. And now I’m thinking about trying a Wasabi fish thing again (the last one was a disaster). With brown rice. For the husband who discovered he has high cholesterol (at 27) and is sure that he must immediately reform his lifestyle and eliminate all of his favorite things.

I think that dismantling the futon will have to wait for another night.

chutzpah much?

I amaze myself.  My big mouth has no limits, no bounds and no sense of self preservation.    

So I woke up this morning with a big idea for BAC.  I got to work and started looking for evidence that my big ideas had already been implemented.  Not only were my efforts futile, I discovered that there is a dearth of information about the larger BAC: we are stove-piped in the worst way possible, making cross-organizational transfer of lessons learned virtually non-existent.  Or, if it is happening, it is in spite of the organization, not because the organization fosters this sort of thing.  Don’t they know that the most flexible, responsive and productive organizations embrace a degree of chaos and have information flying back and forth (securely, of course) over tools like IM.  Guess not. 

So I dug and dug and then dug some more.  Finally I discovered a minuscule website of the pertinent office at HQ.  No org chart for that office, mind…  So I got into the “contact us� page and there, lo and behold, the officers and admin assistants.

I started with a quick question e-mailed to the admin assistant.  She responded back enthusiastically.  So I did it.  I laid out all of the things I thought ought to be happening from the corporate office: a comprehensive plan, leadership development programs, elevating the function in question to one of our competitive differentiators, making the program more accessible and understandable to employees, diversifying the employees in this function and I’m sure I said more.  A little bold, you think?

She wrote back.  “Let’s have lunch next week.�  An exchange of further e-mails and I am due at corporate at 12:30 next Tuesday.  I thanked her and told her I was looking forward to Tuesday.  She said she’s looking forward to it as well. 

And now I obsess. 

I talked to Tink last night and she said that she’s given up on her worrying about that which is beyond her control.  Apparently the universe insists on balance, because I’ve picked up where she left off.

six flags

And all of them are white.

As in, I surrender.

So perhaps it isn’t yet obvious that I am obsessed, consumed even, by opressive uncertainty as to what I ought to be doing professionally. I thought that I had found a reasonable calling yesterday with this opportunity in the UK. I talked to the dude on the phone today and the intermediate steps between me and this position aren’t all that pretty. It turns out I’m actually better qualified for what they outlined in the ad than I am for ‘lesser’ positions outlined in other ads – most of them domestic. So, unless the dude wants to train me (and I imagine that the husband isn’t really pushing for that) it’s a no go.

My manager sent me the milestones that I ought to be looking at meeting for such time as evaluations come around. I’ve only been here six months, so I’m not exactly up for promotion any time soon. But in searching for the place where I am supposed to input these milestones, I stumbled across BAC’s self assessment page. As assessing my interests was the best use of my time I could come up with, I started.

The assessment was comprised of a number of cards with a word like ‘teaching’ on them and a little picture. You digitally divided the cards into ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ stacks, and then ranked your like pile into a group of your top ten likes. It then calcuated and divided the possible areas of preference into four: data, things, ideas and people. I scored exactly 0% on data and things, 80% for ideas and 20% for people.

Some time a long time ago, I developed a picture of where I thought I was going to be as an adult. The mental image was a little fuzzy on the hairstyle, but I was dressed all in black, I had a cozy cottage and I was a professor of something at a costal university. For as long as I remember, that was who I thought I was going to be. My only comment on the blog thus far suggests exactly that for me: professor of humanities.

The job description certainly focuses on ideas and people. But goddess knows there is a lot of school left between me and even hoping for such a thing: another year to get my MA out of the way and then to decide on some sort of a major for the PhD and a program to get it in. Distance learning history anyone? Humanities?

But I’d still need publication to rise to the top of the pile of candidates.

And that’s it folks. Back on the rollercoaster.

weaseling: the trilogy

This whole weaseling thing is becoming a way of life here at BAC.

Okay, so at my last two jobs, I really thought that the problem was that I was squandering my talents on stuff that I wasn’t really that good at.  If I could write, I told myself, I would be so much more motivated in the morning.  So I rewrote my resume, tilted it heavily towards writing and started sending it all over the place.  A colleague put me in contact with a recruiter, I sat through an interview where my soon-to-be manager told me that he didn’t think I was really qualified for the position, and got the job anyway.  Probably based on my ability to bluff.

Of the many things that he said to me in the interview: a concern that I was more interested in the creative aspects of writing and that those interests would not be served well in this position.  I told him that any writing was creative and I thought I’d be just fine.  I believed it too.  But I also had in mind sorting out the writing of mechanical engineers talking about failing HVAC equipment, not binary code.  So point to the manager for being right.  I don’t give a shit about binary code, nor do I want to learn enough about it to understand what the documents that I am editing are actually trying to say.  Take it up a level.  I don’t care about routers, LANs or work stations.  I just want MS Word to work in its standard screwy way and my internet explorer to be available reliably so that I can look for Leonard Cohen quotes. 

Anyway, so it now becomes clear that, while I love writing, too much of this could kill the love.  And here we are back at the original question:  what should I be doing with myself?  I thought I should be writing professionally, even if that meant being a technical writer.  I was wrong.  No one is going to pay me to drive around the country taking photographs, so that career choice is clearly out.  I’m not going back to school so I can go broke as a costume designer while I hope that Peter Jackson will pick me to design the clothes for his next movie.  Making a reasonable living as a novelist seems unlikely.  My latest rejection from failbetter.com (which seems to print poetry with glaring mistakes—it’s for its—see here: http://www.failbetter.com/2005-3/RosserDiscounting.htm) has convinced me that getting published enough to make it as a professor of poetry somewhere small and depressing is unlikely as well (not that I’m overly pessimistic these days).

So, having ruled out doing what I love for a living, why does it matter so much what I do?  I can’t even begin to fathom, actually.  Except that feeling dull and useless and utterly uninterested in what I’m supposed to be doing 8 hours out of 24 just isn’t working for me. And I have no idea what the magic bullet is that is going to remedy the problem.  Something active, slightly analytical, broad in scope and varied, I’d imagine.  That’s like describing your pet of choice as being hairy, brown and intimidating.  That covers a range of animals from grizzly bear to Doberman.  Good luck with that. 

Anyway, I’m weaseling my way around BAC again.  I ran a search for jobs that would keep my credentials active and e-mailed the manager about a position that seems like it would satisfy the above criteria.  Of course, that position happens to be in the UK, which presents a whole new set of issues (like what to do with the house) but never mind that.  I’m waiting to talk to the guy on the phone, if he could ever get his shit together and tell me what time I ought to call.  Not that I’m impatient or anything. 

And that’s it.  A striking lack of progress from one year to the next.
 

what started it all

On the days that I worked at the client site there was a wee man who was also a contractor, except that he worked for BAC and I worked for TxInc. The wee man connected me to a BAC recruiter and the rest is history. Well, sort of.

So I come to the interview. I’m wearing a power suit. I look like I have my shit together. The girl that comes to get me into the building is wearing jeans. I have on heels. So I sit down with the man who is now my manager and start the interview. He basically tells me straight up that he doesn’t think I can do the job that they need done. Then I get into the interview with the lady who is supposed to be my team lead. I like her a lot.

The recruiter lets me know that they are offering the position to someone else, but that the someone else might not take it. They don’t, the job is offered to me and I accept, then have to sit through an agonizing two weeks while my pee test goes to confirm that I am indeed drug free.

Long story short, I just saw the wee man in the hallway. Normally he is on site with the client, but not today. So I told him to say hello to my old friends and that’s about it.

Meanwhile, my secret plan to regain focus isn’t working just yet. Blame it on the very odd night of sleep I had last night, where I obsessed over the name of the brother of some dude who went to school with me when I was 13. Bruce. I had to ask my sister, though.

Instead, I’ve been wondering what I really should be doing, since bits and bytes is clearly not my thing. I was looking on BAC’s job page and found a position that I know a little about in California, and one in Colorado Springs. Of course, finding a job that I could do in another state means that I must immediately check in with realtor.com to see what kind of house we could afford there. Unfortunately, it would appear as if Colorado Springs offers the home of my dreams: http://www.realtor.com/Prop/1042223498. Complete, as you might note, with apple and pear trees.

Hubby says no.

The reasons hubby says no are very reasonable. They go like this:

Hubby does not want to have to start over with his credits in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
Living here means that Hubby can work for Dad. Working for dad is good for hubby and good for dad.

The reasons Entropy says yes are not so reasonable. They go like this:

I’m ready to leave the DC metro area far behind.
I’m bored.
The house is to die for.
The house is cheaper than the townhouse we currently own.
I want to.