LaughAtlantis

I really haven't been enjoying my job much lately. I got a promotion in January and loved my job for about five months, until my new boss took over. He decided to make some sweeping changes that occasionally want to make me tear my hair out by its roots. So I have begun to think about what the job market might hold for me beyond my little company.

I tried monster and hotjobs but I really think that I found my niche when I hit this listing.

Frankly, I think I might even be overqualified.

I am slowly coming to hate my job.

I have been at my company for two years now. It's a small company that does market research. Basically, if you call up a mutual fund or annuity company, you may hear the automated line say, "This call may be monitored or recorded for customer service quality." My company does the recording and monitoring of many of these places. Basically, we're corporate spies.

For the first year and a half that I worked here, I was a service analyst. I got to evaluate what the customer service reps were doing right, and what they were doing wrong. I also made calls using a fake ID - essentially I got to pretend to be someone that I wasn't in order to interact with reps. It was fun - a little acting was involved and it broke up the day. Then my job changed and they took that part out, leaving me with just the evaluation part. That was fine for a little while, but then I really needed to move to something more challenging.

It took me months to be convince the company that I should even be able to interview for the position I now have. They wanted to hire outside the company for whatever reason. I took the bull by the horns, got the interview, got the job, and loved it for five months. It was a job that offered lots of creativity - there were deadlines and there was multi-tasking and there was always something new. I was creating new methods of evaluating our data - I was like Q to the James Bonds of the corporate spying world! I was in heaven.

Then my boss got pregnant and decided to leave her job. My new boss is a guy who has a history of being somewhat... cantankerous. He came into the department not knowing a whole lot about the operations end of our business, but with a whole lot of ideas for how everything could be "improved." His improvements are making me into a mindless drone.

Now I get to be creative once a week, at best. The rest of the time I pretty much just listen to calls. I listen; I log what happens in them. Yippee. I feel like my brain might actually implode from lack of stimulation. I got really excited today when somebody asked me to read something they had written so I could check it for proper grammar. That's just sad. I crave real work. I want desperately to just DO things. I stare at a screen all day watching sound waves and wondering where it all ends. Make it stop!

*breathing*

Maybe I am making the proverbial mountain out of a molehill, maybe this is just a transition phase, maybe there's light at the end of this tunnel... but in the meantime, it just sucks.

This morning I moved my desk for the seventh time in my two-year tenure at my company. But this time, things have changed.

Yes, I still have a gray-walled cubicle and a job that sometimes makes me want to pull out my hair. But now I have a view!!

A half-turn away from my desk affords me a view of Boston Harbor from the thirtieth floor. I can watch boats coming in and out and planes taking off from Logan Airport. I have a bird's-eye view of the Children's Museum, complete with the giant milk bottle beside it and Arthur the Aardvark sitting atop it.

Life is good.

So, you may have read my blog and thought to yourself, "Gee, she does all this blogging at work. Doesn't she have better things to do?" The answer, of course, is yes. I need to IM friends, I need to search the net, I need to read other blogs, I need to tease my brother about his lack of computer skills. These are important, nay, VITAL parts of my working day.

But lately I have found that many a request I make to search the web results in a screen that simply says "REQUEST DENIED BY COMPANY FIREWALL." Excuse me? I wanted to read blog, not search for porn! I mean, really. I can't go look at a site where Biblical scenes are acted out by Legos? Apparently not - which makes the fact that I have bookmarked it as one of my favorites sorta moot.

I understand that our company is trying to prevent people from searching for porn on the net - this has, in fact, been a concern in the past here. But anything that is hosted by blogspot is now off-limits to me.

Where is the sense in all of this?

They can't possibly expect me to work all day, can they?

Yay!

I got a laptop from work today so I can do work at home on nights and weekends!

Wait, why am I applauding this?

Most of my entries regarding work are bitch-fests. In normal times, my job has a tendency to get tedious, with momentary bursts of frantic work.

But December is different at my company. December is a flurry of activity attempting to get all the programs and projects for next year up and running before January 1 rolls around and steps on us. This year, pretty much all of this responsibility has been laid on me. And I love it.

I work best with deadlines and lots of responsibility, so this is fabulous. I get to put my own personal stamp on the future of my company. I've wanted this opportunity for so long and it just feels great to be given the chance to do it. I've always had a (relatively) good work ethic, but right now I just feel *inspired* to work. It's a great feeling.

Gotta go. Work to do.

In the course of a half-hour meeting this afternoon which I was not privy to, the president of my company threw out seven months of my research and development and basically spit on an idea that up until now had been well-received by everyone from the grunts to the clients to the vice presidents.

Tell me why I shouldn't kill him. Or quit.

It's Friday and I am finally back at work and lo and behold, there is yet another change being laid down by my company president. The thing is, I'm no longer even blaming him. He's a man who is completely uninterested in the finer details or the logistics of things - he thinks in general concepts and philosophies and expects others to work out the logistics. Which sorta makes sense - I mean, we're the ones working the operations end of things, right? But his ideas get passed down to the vice president and she interprets them - often miscommunicating a whole bunch of stuff in the bargain - for the product development and client service folks. Not helpful. And of course, neither of them is actually in today to deal with this or address these new issues. The pres just decided this at home on Monday when his daughter (who is a telecommuter) asked him a random question about our new program.

And kerflooie. With two work days left before the new year - and thus the deadline - I'm rewriting yet again.

Actually, I have decided to go on a work strike for the day. I'm sitting at my desk, staring at my computer, and typing stuff, but fuck work. If I can't do the damn project right, I'm not doing it at all.

For now, at least.

ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH!
AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!
AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!

So, I guess what I'm saying is ARGH.

So, yeah.

Normally I am not terribly forthcoming about my blog with the people that I work with. A handful of folks know about it - well, three people, all of whom are friends outside of work. I think only one of them actually reads this thing. (Hi Cheryl!)

Anyway, yesterday I was having a chat with Cheryl and two other people at my office and she mentioned my blog. They glommed onto this and one of them threatened to just Google me until he found out the website name if I didn't reveal the URL then and there. So I offered it up.

And now I keep thinking about it...

I know that for a long time, my blog was up there in the list of google pages under the search heading for the word 'fucker' because of an entry from over a year ago about the president of my company. So, that's not good. And I know that I have multiple complaints about my current job from further back than that - though they are that far back, and not recent. I guess I have better things to write about of late. Or rather, I just haven't been writing about anything lately...

It's weird how I compartmentalize my life. I have work people, improv people, family people, and other. It's strange - Cheryl is classified in my own mind as an improv person despite the fact that I work with her. I went to a show that she was in and was somewhat stunned to find one of my co-workers there. I just don't expect the circles to overlap like that.

The blogging thing is also its own entity. On some level, I feel like it's entirely separate from real life, though I know that people in my real life read it. It's funny, I had a "secret" wedding blog on a wedding website - not Rod's and my wedding blog, but another - and I always felt a little more free about writing whatever I pleased over there because I knew that nobody in my real life read it. Here I feel like I have to edit things, at least slightly.

So it's odd that work people know about this blog. I really hope this is not a spate of work people - it may be advisable for me to take down some entries, and I don't like doing that. It's my blog, dammit, I want to be able to say whatever I want.

Well, as close to "whatever I want" as I'm willing to come in a public forum that my in-laws read...

Okay, so, there are a couple of new guys at work, who are situated in the two cubicles sort of diagonal from mine.

And they're Republicans.

Now, I don't have that big of a beef with Republicans in and of themselves. There are most certainly good people in the world who happen to be Republican. There are normal folks who vote Republican becaue they like one aspect of the party or another. But then there are essence-of-evil Republicans - and sadly, I now work with one.

This guy - let's call him Biff, for want of a better name - is an older gentleman who's been a lifelong conservative Republican and proudly proclaims that he's never missed an election. I think that last part is great, personally, because voting's an important thing. But Biff drops by my cube at least twice a day to throw digs at Democratic presidential candidates, to compliment John Ashcroft, to discuss how great the Patriot Act is, to chat about homeland security issues, to tell me that he believes in book banning.

Give me a reason not to punch him.

I don't care what his views are; I really don't. If he wants to have a realistic exchange of ideas, fine, but I really think he's just spouting stuff that he knows is going to piss me off. I was talking to the other new guy, Mark, about policies that I think do and don't work, and political viewpoints that are, for me, dealbreakers as far as who I cast my vote for. And Biff will poke his head over and say, "Vote Lieberman... there's a winner. Or Kerry. God, I like him about as much as I liked Clinton. What a jerk he is."

I'm not a Lieberman fan, and I'm not a huge Kerry fan either. I like Clark and I like Edwards, and Rod's a Deanster, but let's face facts here on Bill Clinton... Bill Clinton was a damned good politician. You can put aside his personal life; it means nothing in light of his politics. I think he could put Dubya to shame in a debate, and as a public speaker, the current president is laughable by comparison. And as a president, Clinton outranks Georgie by a long shot.

All that is neither here nor there. My point is about BIFF.

I come in later in the morning than most folks - just by about twenty minutes, but whatever, it is still later. I do that partly because I'm not a morning person, partly because my boss has told me it doesn't bother him, and partly because I eat my lunch at my desk, thus taking a shorter lunch, and I work late fairly frequently. When I come in, Biff announces, "Well, I guess we can all begin now. Joy has arrived."

Bite me.

I have to walk by the man en route to ... well, to anywhere, actually... and he calls out to me every damn time. Yesterday he called me a Communist.

I really think I might throttle him.