Friday, September 23, 2011

You have GOT to be kidding me

Please know that any food that is left in the refrigerator is not up for grabs. If there is food leftover from a meeting it does not mean that you can help yourself. Please only help yourself if an email goes out telling you it is okay to do so.

The 2nd floor refrigerator is very full. Please be considerate of what you put in there. Please remember this is a shared space.

Thanks.


Yes I actually received this email today, because evidently I work at a sit-com of some sort.  I would so love a laugh track - and better lighting.  Today I had to make fundraising calls to lots of people, including ones named Elizabeth Taylor, LaToya Jackson and Lana Turner.  None of them were the people you'd hope.  I also had to stop myself from giggling hysterically into the phone when the voice mail I got to intoned that I was being processed by IP VoiceNet (say it out loud - yes I am a twelve year old).

In the last two weeks I've been at this place I've had both stomach flu and the cold from hell (that no one will give me antibiotics for!!!!)  My throat is absolutely killing me from talking on the phone for four hours straight begging for donations and my ears hurt from, well I don't know - they just hurt!

All in all, I can't say this experiment is going very well, but I've only got three weeks left.  During those three weeks we're having an 80th birthday party for my dad, we have guests staying with us from Australia for a week, we're hosting a dinner party for a friend we haven't seen since college (shit must loose 10 pounds pronto!),  and there are three week days with no school.  You know it's bad when you're kind of wishing you get hit with just some small space debris so you can rest up in the hospital for  a few days.

Maybe I'll amuse myself my moving around the food in the 2nd floor refrigerator.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

How Quickly Things Change

It is amazing how quickly one can go from, "Wow, what a great organization.  I can help a lot of people live better lives by working here"  to, "You just erased all the work I did over the whole day by pressing one button?  Fuck it, I get paid by the hour."  It took me less than a week.

Yes, yesterday at the very end of the day yesterday, my boss erased the email I'd spent all day adding bccs to, with a charming "Oops"  and then the admittance that she really isn't all that great with computers and had no idea how to undo.  I then got to utter the immortal words, "Well I guess I should reconstruct before I move on to the next project."  or in my head, "Fuck it, I get paid by the hour."

Today I tried to talk on the phone with donors while hacking through the worst cold in the known universe.  Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Random Stupidity in Corporate America Edition

So it isn't even really corporate - it's non-profit, and the stupidity is astounding.  This is an organization that hires new temps every year to produce their major benefit, yet surrounds itself with so much jargon that it takes a week to explain its version of the English language to the newly hired corps. 

The best example so far?  Did a person on our calling list participate in this fundraiser last year?  The simple English answer would be yes or no, (no rocket science, right?).  Instead the company insists on true and false, and refers to them as trues or false.  (Yes, as in this person is a true.  That person is a false.)  The organizing mom in me wants to ask why on earth they are making life more complicated than it needs to be, but it's a national corporate directive and I'm a temp in a small satellite office.  All my years of yoga breathing, flew out the window in the first fifteen minutes of cubedom.

I shouldn't complain, because I do have a view out the window behind someone else's cube.  But I don't get to decide if the shade is up or down.  The lucky window cube owner has that distinction.  And my boss keeps walking over to my desk and turning on the small florescent light that attaches to my cube.  She doesn't seem to understand I prefer it off.  But the absolute grossest thing?  She turns pages by licking her fingers - not the usual gross enough index finger lick, but instead by squeezing her tongue in between her index finger and thumb to moisten them both thoroughly before touching each page.  I shudder just writing about it.

Friday's stupidity will surely come back to bite me in the butt on Monday.  My boss (at this office, not my boss I've never met in the main office) told me to send an email to a high ranking politician, thanking him for attending our kick-off event.  Even though I asked her if maybe someone that important should be handled by someone way more knowledgeable than a temp in her first week.  Even though I asked if they had someone who was supposed to handle the VIPs. And even though I mentioned to her (a lot!) that the info we had on the database was wrong all over the place, she told me I had to assume in every case the data base was right (the data base is after all,  sacred) and write the email without further checking in to the facts.  And even though his office said to send all communications to his Chief-of-Staff, she wanted the email sent only to him to try to do an end run around. (She doesn't seem to understand that he probably isn't reading his .gov emails himself.)  Monday will surely find me yelled at by the other boss for sending a communication to such a high ranking official without her authorization.  I can't wait.  The most amazing part of the day was when this boss later wanted me to wait for her approval of my copy before I sent out the same email to all the rest of the people on my list.  Can't be too careful you know.

Last week

Last week I started a new experiment.  After fifteen years of at home momdom, working on a novel and keeping the place from falling down around our ears, I took a short-term temp job.  I'm working 20 hours a week for the next four weeks at a non-profit, helping them gear up for their major fundraiser of the year.

Twenty hours didn't seem like much, until I didn't have them in my week any more.  I started the week with a stomach bug, no knowledge of spreadsheets and not enough laundry done.  I pretty much ended the week the same way. 

We had only one family meal together (down from our usual five) and that one was cobbled together from left overs and a supermarket rotisserie chicken.  The girl ran out of shirts.  The boy ran out of shorts.  And by Friday I went grocery shopping at CVS.  Friday night I was doing laundry at 10:50PM.

Today the hubby and I went grocery shopping together.  (Sunday grocery shopping sucks.  There is NO food in the supermarket!) He's making dinner tonight.  I've got a list (and all the ingredients) for everything I'm going to cook all week.  What could possibly go wrong? Oh yeah, now I have a head cold.

I'm done threatening

It's true.  I've started a blog.  (with a lot of help from a certain teenager, because I am old, and occasionally a technological idiot).  Watch this space for rants, reviews and TMI.  Yoga, writing, momhood, fashion, beauty, whatever....Because I Said So. (and yes that is me wearing stripes and patterns of all sorts - it's freezing bloody cold at Hadrian's wall, even in the summer.)