Palm Mishap

I need to develop a cut-off time for leaving Ron’s place on weeknights. I, again, ended up falling asleep on the futon and then I have to get up extra early and freeze my nuts off waiting for the bus and then get everything together at my place to then get back on the bus (or train) and get to work or to work out. The starch fest on Sunday turned out ot not be as mammoth as I was hoping. That’s the thing I remember from doing the Body for Life diet – that the free day is in there to remind yourself how gross you feel when you’re packed full of food. I will say the Ann Sater cinnamon rolls rocked my world though. I just like the heart of the roll – where iti is all warm and moist and gooey (I’m sure Brigitte will cringe when she reads that statemenet). It makes me think of the Seinfeld were Elaine decides to open a store called Muffin Tops since everyone loves to eat the tops of muffins and at the end fo the episode Newman is brought in to eat all of the muffin stumps. Hysterical. Last night was the first half of the final episode of the show- which I thought comedically was a huge letdown but conceptually was a great idea – that after seven years this quartet of monstrous people get their comeuppance – the bad thing is it seemed to show the crass racism inherent in the show’s writing – that so many of the antagonists were non-white.

I’m working with my coach this month on the three-level time management perspective which is monthly-weekly-daily. Where you take an hour on the cusp of the month and figure out what you need to do during the coming month, what you didn’t get to in the previous month and how this all aligns with your values. Then you check in on Sundays or so and plan the coming week – compare it to the previous week and then daily you do the samething. I like this method because I’m not assigning everything a date from the get go – it allows for more flexible. We’re integrating this with Covey’s four-quadrant time management system.

Had a nice little mini-disaster at work last week. I left my Palm in a meeting that my boss and uber-boss (G_____ and C_____) were leading and C_____ (an associate vice president) grabbed my Palm at the end of the day thinking it was hers. She gave it to me the next morning and said, ‘I knew it wasn’t mine when I looked at the To Do list and the first thing was ‘Make $100,000 by the end of the year.’ My blood froze. I wonder if she’d read my second To Do list item which was ‘Leave (my company)’. She didn’t say anything else. But she should know that I don’t like my current work environment and all of my training in a field unrelated to my current work assgment should be a tip-off – and like she cares. I doubt C_____ would flinch if I resigned – I think because she knows that I don’t have the balls to just walk out – I would give at least a month notice and do all I could to ensure a smooth transition and knowlege sharing with my replacement. But my thoughts changed yesterday when G_____ came by desk and said, ‘Can I talk to you for a minute?’ Oh fuck, I thought. Oh shit. She took me into one of those terribly claustrophobic conference rooms and I immediately began focusing on deep breathing in case anxiety started to surface. But at least there weren’t any tissues in the room – that’s one thing I’ve learned from witnessing many rounds of layoffs – if you ever walk into a room empty except for a box of Kleenex – know that you’re about to get canned. No Kleenex – so I felt a little better. The door closed. We sat down. My face grew warm and tried to focus my breath down in my cetner to stay calm. G_____ looked at me hard and said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about your bonus.’ Whew! I wasn’t even expecting a bonus this year after all the bullshit they’d posted about how we had the worst quarter in the history of the company. But I’m getting a cool $750. Which I will probably be responsible and throw at my credit cards – or taxes. And she also wanted to talk about my being out of the office last week – I was out Tuesday afternoon to get my cable modem repaired and then then they had to come back the next morning again and thought why go in for just one hour when I can dial in remote. And she wanted to re-iterate the need for more face-time in the office. Plus I had told them that I had to audition yesterday afternoon (a look-see for some kind of magazine shoot) and that I’d be out Friday for my final weekend of coaching training. So all of these absenses sort of clustered and she was nervous about that. My entire job could be run from teleconference, email and voicemail. I just want to say, ‘No one gives a shit.’ The customers don’t care where I’m calling from – just the Screamer always wants to make sure I’m accesible for her drive-by shoutings – micromanagement on the infinite-nth degree.

________ drives me nuts. She’s one reason I don’t enjoy my job right now. I am sure she is a loving mother and wife and woman but as a manager she’s just a tough nut. She’s got a hearing loss so she’s always talking louder than needed – this paired with a confrontational conversational style… put me in small conference room with her and it’s a teleconference and I think I’ll go mad – everyone is screaming at this small little phone that didn’t do anything to anybody. That combined with the coffee halitosis of certain other co-workers is just very trying at times. I have my performance review this week as well – it better be good, if it’s not then oh well…

I am very good at keeping the customers from knowing the chaos that is going on with al of these systems that I administrate and play scapegoat. The latest nuts-ness is that our Compensation depaprtment bought a system and didn’t boter telling the IT department and so nobody took it though Quality Assurance or testing or even platform standards. So now we’re learning that the HR-dunderheads had no evident budget, project plan or system standards as part of this project. And get this… this application was supposed to be distributed on every machine in the company and networked. Well, IT did a discovery session and it turns out the application was never meant to run on a network. HR master said, ‘well, it’s on the desktop so it’s networked right?’ RULE: Never let HR make IT decisions – that seems to be the biggest problem right now in our department. These fluffy HR people are making million dollar decisions and not thinking through the IT impact of their ideas. Like it turns out we have to have JRUN to run some kind of courseware and no one seems to know what the hell JRUN is – hmm…. I know how to use google so I type in JRUN. It’s Macromedia’s versino of Java on a server level – something that the vendor didn’t tell us was required on the content servers. As Ripley says, ‘Did IQs drop sharply while I was gone?’

No doubt you’ve heard about the scaffolding falling from the Hancock building and killing four people, injuring dozens others and smashing cars and street signs. 65 mile-per-hour gusts and the workers didn’t tether the platform when they left for teh weekend – tether it on the ground level – like they did on the other side of the building. A third of the platform is still hanging up there with all the windows they’ve had to board up after glass and steel rained down on the unsuspecting shoppers. What I don’t get is this: the workers would have had to bring the platform down to the ground level to get off to go home for the weekend, right? So they hoisted it back up to the 44th floor after they got off and left it up there over the weekend. City codes say that if winds are over 35mph that hanging platforms like that must be secured at ground level. And as I look out of the bus rigiht now there are platforms going up buildings on Chicago and Michigan. Totally crazy. Like since this guy got killed by an icicle they now put out CAUTION FALLING ICE signs whenever it gets below 40 degrees. Like that is supposed to excuse some kind of liability?


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