mscleanslate

For many reasons, I am needing to “repackage” myself for my next career move. I am assuming that the next job I look for will be in the state I plan to move to…where no one knows me and so I have somewhat a new start. I am not sure what the job market there is like so I am thinking that I need to start repackaging now.

The big job is going to be remembering all of the places that I have my resume posted online and going to take each of them down. I am wondering if just completely erasing the accounts and starting all over again is maybe the best way to go.

This doesn’t mean that I intend to lie about my past or my experience. I think there are ways to make myself more marketable and appealing, though, and I can’t do that with the current look/feel of my resume.

The hardest part is going to be references, though. Once you’ve left a job and haven’t been there for a while, the people who knew you who might be good references go away, too. And the best reference letter I have… well…. the person who wrote it has moved on multiple times and I doubt he is still reachable.

I’m hoping to get everything tracked down and taken care of by the end of the month and then can start on the new stuff. Then, by June I will be up and running with the new look.

I’ve known for a week and a half or so that we have people coming in from out of town. I did everything I was supposed to do to make this go smoothly and… yeahhhh… not so much.

There are 6 people coming. 4 of them let me make their travel arrangements. 2 of them would not cooperate with that. Fine. At least they all got their flights booked. I did manage to get everyone booked into the same hotel but had one guy tell me he cannot sleep if there’s noise. As if I can do anything about the noise level at the hotel. Whatever.

I was supposed to have agendas early last week so I could plan refreshments and lunches. Guess what I still did not have when I left Friday night? If you said agendas, you would be correct. So there are no lunches or refreshments on deck. Nor have I made any plan to pick up breakfast for tomorrow because no one gave me any instructions.

I am supposed to talk to our Borg Cube representative to get badges for visitors. Guess who was on vacation last week? So, the pseudo replacement guy, who I told on MONDAY that I needed badges pops in on FRIDAY at 4:30 to let me know that he “forgot”. Well, that’s SUPER. I only talked to him 3-4 times last week and he sat in my office with his laptop allegedly ordering the badges but apparently only PRETENDING to do so to placate me or something.

Now… the other part of this is… to have computer access at our facility, Computer Guru needs to have informaiton. Which I asked our travelers for. Twice. ONE of them got the information to me. One of SIX. Again, FABULOUS.

So, here’s what’s going to happen… we are going to have a bunch of overtired, jet-lagged visitors who won’t have badges, won’t have breakfast, won’t have lunch, won’t have computer access and won’t get a damn thing accomplished because no one has any sort of organized PLAN and who is going to be the one who looks like a schmuck who didn’t do her job? Yeah, that would be me.

I only hope I have the presence of mind to smile, nod my head, and take being yelled at for things that were not in my control and not totally lose my shit. I hate the whole “I’m not going to let some stupid SECRETARY tell me what to do” mentality.

I’m also looking forward to planning this big site celebration that I found out about totally accidentally and it looks like I will be given approximately a week to put together something that would optimistically take a month to put together well.

My mantra is “this is a contract position and the contract has an end”. If this was going to be a long term gig, I’d be losing sleep over the problems I KNOW are coming, but.. ummmm… knowing it’s only temporary I’m just trying to roll with the punches. And I have every reason to believe it is gonna be one of “those” weeks. I’ll let you know.

I think I may have noted that I’ve been told I have very inferior communication skills. But yet another situation has come up where I have to wonder if it is really MY communication skills that are the issue?

I got an email today from HR Lady @ Corporate Office. She is traveling to my office. She asked about the site celebration that is planned for the time she is in town. Wait, what? Site celebration? Not one peep had been said to ME about any site celebration.

So, I dutifully pinged Mr. Bossman. And he said “ummm, yeah, that’s supposed to be a secret” and I responded that HR Lady believes that I am planning this celebration. Some of the things mentioned take WEEKS of planning. This isn’t the sort of thing you can just throw together, but yet I am going to be left with approximately 2 weeks to plan and execute it.

Honestly, I am good at what I do but I will have to say that it is rare that I can pull off miracles. I plan things so I don’t have to rush (rushing leads to mistakes that would have been avoided with planning) and I hate that the lack of communication now puts me on a “rush this” time schedule. Not cool.

But you all know as well as I do… when/if things don’t happen perfectly, it won’t be Mr. Bossman who takes the heat. It’ll be the person who was tasked, however last minute, with pulling off the amazing with not enough time.

Dear Little Hannity,

I know you’ll never read this but I need to write it anyways. Because if I don’t there may be random acts of unpleasantness in your future and I just think it’s better for both of us if I write you a little letter.

My friend, we’ll just call my friend “Downtrodden” for the rest of this letter, works for you. Downtrodden knew that there was an on-call portion to the job when he started. He was TOLD it would be one weekend a month and, really, that isn’t all THAT awful. But on-call means you are working for 12 days in a row and then have a weekend (a mere 2 days off). So when you are working on call every other frickin week that’s 12 on/2 off/12 on/2 off and THAT is simply inhuman and not what Downtrodden signed up for. Add to that the fact that on-call USED to mean overtime most of the time and there was at least a paltry financial reward for being tethered to your phone all frickin weekend, answering the beck and call of the lonely. And yeah, most of the weekend calls are from LONELY people who want SOMEONE to pay attention. But now you’ve decided that the best plan EVAR is to “short” hours before oncall time thus making sure your employees don’t get any financial bonus and are, instead, compelled to come into the office if they don’t get enough emergency call action.

Another thing I am going to take issue with. Downtrodden now uses his own phone instead of the company phone on his oncall weekends. When, exactly, are you going to start chipping in to pay part of our cell phone bill? Yeah… I thought as much…. Hrumph.

Also, your habit of telling Downtrodden lies because you haven’t got the balls to be upfront about what a lazy fuck you are is not appealing nor is it making you any friends. And telling Downtrodden to do X and then getting mad when he does X and claiming you never said to do X? Let’s just say that I believe you are still amongst the living after that bullshit only because Downtrodden doesn’t REALLY want to have to watch his ass (literally) in a prison shower. Pray he never develops a fetish for playing rousing games of “we don’t DROP the soap in here, son!”

Finally (for this letter anyways), I’d like to address your bullshit reason that you are out of the oncall rotation. If you are SO BUSY on weekends for a friggin’ month ahead of inventory time that you cannot take your turn oncall, then maybe your happy ass better figure out a better system. Of all the people on call, I think YOU are the one who SHOULD take extra shifts. You make more money as a base salary than Downtrodden.

Hate & Pinches,
MsCleanslate

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been involved in arranging travel as a part of my job. Back in “the old days” you called up a travel agent and they gave you the fare that made them the biggest commission lowest possible fare, you booked it and were done.

Oh, those were the days. Now, in addition to the airlines having websites and the hotels having websites and the rental car companies having websites there are all the sites like Orbitz and Expedia and Travelocity and Pleasescrewmetheleast.com and the information any given site gives you on any given day about any given itinerary could change if you don’t book right NOW! No, you don’t have time to ask the traveler… book NOW! Ooops, too late, now your fare goes up $50! BWAHAHAHAHAHAA!

And then I have the joy of trying to coordinate travelers and Traveler A can’t POSSIBLY get up for an 8:30AM flight and Traveler B has to have a Vegetarian Kosher No Nut Product Within a 500 Square Mile Radius Meal and Traveler C cannot sleep if there is any noise but won’t invest in a 50 cent pair of earplugs and don’t you DARE book Traveler D in one of those hotels where the beds are as hard as a rock! As if I have been to each local hotel to test their beds! Next thing you know they’ll want me to do a personal inspection with a blacklight to “see how many fluids have been liberated” in their rooms! No, I cannot tell you if a particular hotel has “the naughty channels” nor can I tell you the cost per adult movie at each of the fine hotel establishments in this town. I can sheepishly confess to having stayed in the cracktacular motel that is just down the road (because I didn’t know any better and was broker than a celibate hooker).

I think I need to go wash this day off now… it’s got me feeling a little icky…

Come take a walk down Memory Lane with Ms. Cleanslate…

If we go back to grade school, I think we find where this all began. I was never a popular kid. I was always taller and bigger than most of the other kids. Plus, I came to the state I live in now when I was 6 and was always quite vocal about how I am not FROM here, not catching the fact that saying that tended to make the natives quite hostile.

Going to a boarding school when your parents aren’t “somebody” and when your family doesn’t have money and all of your college money is going towards paying tuition and your parents not understanding or caring that you not having the money to go out like the other kids do is a SERIOUS social crippler. And again, I wasn’t svelte nor willing to puke up all of my meals to fit in.

So, I think it’s safe to say that I have pretty much a lifetime of social awkwardness under my belt.

Back to the present day… I am working at a VBC and my workgroup goes out weekly. They talk shop at lunch and because I am not a programmer or an engineer, I will admit to being completely lost and having absolutely NOTHING to contribute to conversations. Add to that the fact that I don’t own my own vehicle so have to hitch a ride with someone and complete the picture of awkwardness.

So, I am now attempting to come up with some acceptable reasons for skipping these lunches. If I drove, I’d just sortve slip out to run errands when it was lunchtime. I am thinking that perhaps just saying that there is naught but dustbunnies in my wallet might work. In any case, I just think it would be better for everyone if I stopped trying to fit in.

Which leads me to my next musing.. I’m getting older now and wonder if I will ever stop caring about what other people think and about fitting in. I’ve never really made peace with being a loner. I sortve pretend that I’m ok with it, but I spend alot of time feeling awkward and trying to fight back tears and it’s very draining to try so hard and know that you are just NOT going to be “one of them”… ever…. EVER. I think some of it has to do with accepting one’s lot in life. Admins usually do not have peers because most offices have one Admin. It is the nature of the job. I don’t have a degree so there’s really not somewhere “up the ladder” for me to go and there isn’t the money nor the time to go and GET a degree.

So, I think it’s time to step out of the lunch line and embrace the Lone Admin status once again.

As you may (or may not) recall from Friday’s post… Mr. Assclown asserted that he’s been waiting MONTHS for his copy of Project. Well, my friends, a little investigation put me in touch with the following nugget of knowledge…

Mr. Assclown ordered Project on March 4th. His request is still sitting UNAPPROVED by his manager, Euroboss. Remember, if you will, that another of his assertions was that Euroboss would want him to have Project over lowly lil’ me. Yeah, that’s why Euroboss has let that request just sit there without approving it… obviously Euroboss is losing sleep over the fact that Mr. Assclown cannot use Project “weeks ago”.

I know it’s petty and maybe juvenile of me to feel so… validated by the fact that I was 100% correct that the copy of Project that Mr. Assclown appropriated was supposed to be MINE. I hope I get SOME credit, though, for just dropping it and not letting it become the arguement that Mr. Assclown seemed so hot on making it become.

The underlying issue here, though, is that the software SHOULD have been clearly labeled who it was for so there would not have been an issue in the first place.

I don’t even really care how this gets resolved. I’ll either get the software or I won’t and I’m enough of a professional that I’m not going to gloat (much) when/if Mr. Assclown gets told that he was WRONG. I know I’ll never get an apology for him being such an asshat to me so what happens, at this point, is really not even something I am really emotionally invested in. I get the feeling more and more that Previous Person was pretty much a useless piece o’ fluff and I’ve been written off as the same. There are two roads I can take… I can bust my ass and prove that untrue or I can just keep my head down, do my job and not give a rat’s ass about what people think. And I’ll tell you right up front that I’m not gonna be busting my ass because that has never ONCE been a tactic that has resulted in any long-term gain for me. I’m more than willing to put in the hours and go the extra mile. I’ve done that at job after job… it’s not saved me from being downsized or phased out.

I just want to go and do the job and when I leave at night, the job stays where it is and I can walk away from it without having to think about it. If this was “the one”, I’d likely feel different. But, it’s not. I don’t even know if “the one” exists. Is it different anywhere out there or does this dysfunctional stuff exist everywhere and I should just lose the illusion that there is salvation waiting somewhere?