Battered
Your job situation is giving me flash backs to the last Dilbert book I read. How does it feel to be a character in a Dilbert cartoon?
By Anonymous, at
3:55 PM
Remarkably familiar. Unfortunately, I believe that I am the Wally of this scenario, in more ways than one.
Without a blogger account I must from Tokyo anonymously say "Happy Birthday" to those who have had, and who are about to have, a birthday.
By Anonymous, at
6:07 PM
Monday, June 28, 2004
Feeling pretty weatherworn this morning after a few days of ups and downs. Coming to work has, to my great lack of surprise, completely failed to cheer me up.
Polly and Gray were in town over the weekend, so we got together on Thursday night and had a good old-fashioned wine and chat night. They’re about to pull up stakes in Grafton (turns out it’s a bit too much of a racist, homophobic, rednecked backwater for them) and relocate to wherever. They tend to travel about until they find somewhere they want to live and then just settle for a while. I envy them their sense of freedom, but I really don’t think that would work for me. I crave familiar things…
Saturday morning we did some hardware shopping. The new sander is fabulous. I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence. Then the usual mad frenzy of cleaning in time for our open house, which Fiona abandoned me to manage solo while she went off to her cousin’s baby shower (bearing a gift of a toy power tool set, which she assures me is exactly the kind of toy she would have loved when she was growing up…).
The open house it self was a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we had quite a few people through the house and expressing interest – though no offers yet – but on the other hand, one of them was a thief. She (I’m pretty sure I know which person it was, just as I am certain that the name and number they left was false) took a bottle of Fiona’s perfume, some not-cheap skin butter and a few other small trinkets. Nothing major that we know about, but expensive enough that their replacement will sting.
We didn’t discover that anything was missing until the next day, which was just as well, otherwise it might have ruined dinner on Saturday night. We went out to Dijon to celebrate our birthdays (hers yesterday, mine tomorrow). It was very pleasant, thanks for asking, and would have been much less so had we realised how much the weekend was going to end up costing. Grrr.
When we found out I actually felt quite sick. Not so much because I felt responsible because I was at home at the time and should have done something (shoulda, coulda, woulda) and not exactly because it was some great violation of our privacy – you kinda get over that after having strangers into your home every weekend for five or six months. The real reason was that I was really conscientious and attentive to everyone that came in, and that without exception everyone responded well to my big attempt at customer relations. And it sickens me that at least one person was lying to my face, pretending to be interested in the house and asking questions about the location and possible renovations, and that I didn’t for one second become suspicious. It didn’t even cross my mind that someone was looking me in the eye knowing that they had just ripped me off. I will allow myself that I got a very negative vibe about the person that I am now sure was responsible, but I put it down to being annoyed by her weird comments and unusual nosiness (“Why did you pick these colours? I’m a pinks and blues and purples person myself.” Yeah, I just bet you are, you flake). In retrospect, I find her entire ‘performance’ (that’s really the only word for it) to have been ridiculously attention-grabbing, entirely the antithesis of what I would have expected from a practised thief.
Come to think of it, I suppose that might have been the point. Doesn’t make me feel any better though.
So anyway, we discover all this on Sunday, much too late to do anything constructive (apart from resolve always to have one of us hovering around on each floor to make sure no-one is comfortably out of sight), so we sigh and then go to do our usual renovating. And then halfway through the day it belatedly occurs that we now know of at least one person of larcenous proclivities who knows where all our good, expensive stuff is kept (“Oh, someone got married recently? I just love Waterford crystal, don’t you?” Looking back, it was almost compulsively blatant. Great, now I feel like even more of a frigging tool!). So gripped with paranoia we rushed back home and packed up everything light and portable and valuable – crystalware, alcohol, DVDs, other non-cheap stuff – and bundled it all over to the new house. We figure it’s safer there since (a) all of the doors lock there and (b) Fiona’s deceptively scary-looking brother Alastair spends most of time there.
So by Sunday night we were pretty exhausted, partly from renovating (the laurels accorded to the Power Sander Above the Head Workout are not overstated) but mostly from stress. Fortunately, Jimbo’s birthday gift (the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD), a bottle of wine and a homemade butter chicken made most of the pain go away.
Tell you what, though. I am really over trying to sell this house. Someone just buy it, for crying out loud!
This morning I have learned that the breakup of my section at work is essentially a fait accompli, and that the area which will now be responsible for managing this project does not want me to be transferred along with it. While I can’t help feel a little rejected by this, I’m not that worried. What does concern me is that once again I will almost certainly be flung into some random job in which I have not interest and probably no aptitude. That, and the project that I have been working on will, if the current approach is held, fail on such a colossal and spectacular scale that everyone who ever had anything to do with it will be permanently tarnished. Oh, except, that is, for anyone that might have been responsible for the mess in the first place. Their arses are covered, you betcha.
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Jenny E.
