have a cathartic whinge from time to time

I am really angry at the way they treat people here. Unless the magic word manager follows your position/title, and it doesn’t matter how senior in your position you are, they will continue to show you have no voice, you are no-body. You just don’t count. Anything you want to improve, alter, extend, have needs your direct manager approval. And they shamelessly make a pan-European VP bother about a desk lamp (d-e-s-k l-a-m-p!!!) that costs more or less 50€, not to mention this normally is should be a part of standard office equipment…. They even seem proud of it. Procedures, you know…
Argh. If I request reimbursment for software that I need at work, and even though use of this software was formerly and officially accepted by boss (even though it’s only me who uses it…), I still need another approval. Gosh, what a crazy place.
And why the emails – old written (this seems the key!) evidence, meaningless though – can speak against a person’s performance, even if the ultimate results are very good and documented and the project was successfully finalized?
Argh. What a stupid world place it is.

quite as irritating as the sound of a person sitting behind you scraping every last bit of yoghurt out of the pot. For five bloody minutes.

Argh! I do wish I could be less sensitive to noise sometimes.

with cinemas, cafe’s, concert halls and lots of other great things the city has to offer within walking distance.
But I am starting to miss living closer to the forest, so it would be easier to walk Cora in places with fewer people and fewer dogs. It can really be a challenge walking her around here.

Today on our walk, one dog came running towards us, a big and energetic young dog. The owner asked if he could play with Cora, and I said she’s very scared of other dogs, so I think it would be too much for her. And he said “oh, but my dog is so well socialized, he loves to play!” Well, that’s hardly the point now, is it! But he kept letting his dog run around Cora, who was stressed from being on leash, so in the end I gave up and let her off leash. Then another dog joined, there was a lot of running around, which makes Cora start barking hysterically. It’s just who she is, a combination of being very scared and getting excited by all the running. I am working on it, but the work with her involves precicely keeping other dogs at a distance so that she feels safe. Which is impossible around here.
Then both dogowners started lecturing me about how I should teach Cora not to bark, that I should really tell her off and be very firm and harsh with her every time. Being harsh with a dog that is already scared is simply not the solution, so I explained that that doesn’t work with this dog and this situation. And they both went “Well, you would have to really work with her of course”. What?? They are both new dog owners with dogs under one year old, and they are being condescending about me not spending enough time training Cora?
At that point, one of the dogs was chewing away on the other dog owners shoe, and his owner was completely helpless and unable to get his dog to let the shoe go. So he gave up and just sat there. If your dog steals things from people in the park and destroys them, and you can do nothing about it but sit there saying, “Ops, I can’t help it if he tears your shoe apart, he thinks the shoe is his now, sorry about that”, you really, really shouldn’t be lecturing other dog owners about how to train their dogs. OMG.

At that point, I put Cora on a leash and left. Only to meet parents with a three year old a few meters up the street. The kid yelled “Oh, nice doggie!” and ran towards us. Cora is no danger in any way to anyone, but she can get scared and bark if kids run straight up to her like that, which would result in a screaming kid and angry parents. So I pulled her along, out of the street, clearly signaling to the parents that I don’t want my dog to play with your kid. They just gave me “isn’t our kid cute”-smiles and kept letting him run towards us. So I had to tell them to get their kid, explaining that my dog isn’t good with children. At which point they of course gave me a “Oh, terrible woman with murder wolf”-look and ran hysterically to get him.
But what on earth posesses parents to let their kids run freely up to big dogs they know nothing about, when the dog owner is clearly trying to get away from them? Do they want dogs to bite their kids? Really, it’s absurd. I do let Cora say hello to nice, calm, well-behaved children, she is good with them. But kids who are running directly towards her, not giving her time and room to find out that they are not threatening, that is scary to a dog. Three year-olds cannot understand that, and I can’t do any more than keep my dog on a leash and try to move out of the way, it’s really all up to the parents. It’s not the first time this happens, I really don’t understand what goes through these people’s minds! Argh!

I am in a vile mood! (or at least I was till a mysterious person sent me a cheery message… you know who you are, mysterious person!)

Just have to get this off my chest.

So yesterday there’s the finance team working away and thinking “Mmm it’s about lunchtime!” At this precise moment the office admin person announces that it’s time for her to go and see the flower guy, who happens to have arranged the meeting in a nearby bar. And just for the hell of it, she decides to take along the admin assistant for no particular reason. So some of the rest of the office, ravenous as the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal by this stage, have to stay at their desks in order to man the phones. The pair of them come back an hour later bragging loudly about how they have been drinking wine with flower guy.

Today, further supexitment as the office admin team leave their desks unattended for long periods. Cue me and my minion D having to answer their phones. D is already struggling with the workload and the last thing I need it her constantly getting interrupted.

This evening I decide to stay late to get some work done. The office admin person’s phone rings at 5.25. Since I shouldn’t be in the office, I take an executive decision not to answer it. It rings about 30 times, then the office admin person pops out of whatever cupboard she was hiding in, in a fury with me for not answering the phone as it turns out to be someone in the IT dept who can help with our website. This is the website that hasn’t been updated since last September. Now while I’m as eager as anybody to see the website get updated, it seems to me it could perhaps wait till tomorrow. And then Big Phil gives me a bollocking for not answering the phone. It’s tempting to ask if he’d like me to move to the office so I could provide a 24 hour phone-answering service for the admin person, but fortunately I manage to resist this.

She is really pissing me off at the moment. I hope things get better soon.

So it’s 11:55 and I am supposed to finish at 12. I don’t mind doing extra time, I actually stay over my hours most days – but I don’t think this should be taken for granted…Anyway it is 11:55, I have just finished the stack of marking I had to get done this week and was printing off the feedback sheets (mini whinge, it would help if the admin team mentioned they had put transcript blanks in the printer before I did this so I didn’t have to do them all again…), and just had to do a stack of moderation, and a final check of incoming emails before I felt I had completed all the this week deadline tasks. Currently it is impossible to do anything more than deadline imminent tasks.

Anyway 11:55 and TA walks in. She has not spoken to me since Easter and chooses 11:55 to come in, and starts casually asking about what I did at Easter. Quite frankly I had no time for chit chat so I was probably a bit curt, and intimated that the Easter weekend was no holiday for me as I normally don’t work Mons and Tues, but yes I went to London to see friends (BMG actually but she wouldn’t understand that). She says something about am I hiding she hasn’t seen me all week, I indicate the stack of marking and say I have been in my office working through this and I still have the moderation to do before 12:00 (ha ha).

She makes some cryptic comment that I didn’t really understand to do with how they work out our working hours and what is or is not allocated to moderation (I wonder idly now that if there are no hours allocated to it then maybe I don’t do it??), and then she asks what have I done about marketing the programme I tutor. (Obviously she has been asked to check up on this and this is the real reason for her ‘visit’)

The truth is that I have sent some stuff to our marketing people and not had a reply – yes I should have followed this up, but quite honestly I have deadlines with current student work and feedback that are being missed, and if we got a whole lot more due to advertising the damn stuff I would be less able to cope. I don’t see this as a priority right now – but I guess student numbers enrolled are a KPI, not timely and supportive feedback given to existing students.

I was so mad I chucked the moderation in my bag, did a check of outstanding emails since this morning (and responded to two students wanting some support) and then switched off and came home.

Whinge whinge….

Thanks, feel better now.

Joining you for a while on this goal. I know it’s not positive thinking or being cheery – but right now a good whinge will keep me from falling over the brink into the Gloomy Trap.

Grrrrrrr!!!!!

A team mate!

_{oops, am supposed to be whinging ;)}

ideally about half in the morning when I’m having breakfast, to hand out to overnight comments/FTFers, and half in the evening to hand out to stuff that’s happened during the day or is indeed happening right now… there’s nothing I enjoy more than a nice game of cheer table-tennis ;)

Now: I get them all in the morning and none whatsobloodyever when I get home! Where’s that cheerbot, I want to give it a damned good kicking!

Edit: guess what, they just came through! threatening the cheerbot works! ;)

The Difficult Person, that is. Why do I let her get to me? Why does she annoy me so much?

This week I am covering for Min II who decided to take 3 days off work at what is possibly the busiest time of year. As Min II is a temp we weren’t really in a position to dictate terms. This is something I need to talk to Big Phil about as it makes me very uneasy – she could pack up at any time and there is no effective notice period.

Anyway, this morning the DP managed to imply that I should not only a) be doing my job, and b) be doing Min II’s job but also c) be doing her (current) job by doing the January management accounts. Which would leave the DP doing, er, nothing much between now and the end of March. How nice for her.

Grrrrrrr!

On top of that there has been the usual hooting, sniffing and being unnecesarily snippy to people on the phone.

The office is going to be rearranged soon to accommodate various new people. I currently sit next to the DP so I wonder if I might be able to use this as an opportunity to move… The problem is exacerbated by the fact that we still don’t have any sideways desk dividers – we have them splitting the desk opposite off so ironically I can’t see nice colleague Z who sits opposite me (we talk looking at each other’s reflections in the window!) but I am painfully aware every time the DP sneakily completes a clue in the sudoku puzzle which she has hidden behind her keyboard.

Argh. Just need to get it out of my system. This is probably completely the wrong thing to do – the Mind Gym book goes on about how to have better relationships with people you’ve got to attribute the best of intentions to them and basically pretend you like them and then they will like you, but I don’t feel capable of doing that today.

write my gratitude entry now, but I can’t think of anything much to say so instead I’m going to have a moan!

• no cheers all bloody day! assuming I get some later they’ll probably all arrive when I want to go to bed
• the horrible horrible woman who had a real go at me today about something ridiculous (the Slow Minion had put the wrong reference on something). I can totally see the horrible woman’s point of view and I sent her an email giving her the references that she needed but what got me what how she was so unnecessarily unpleasant about it. I ended up crying in the loos instead of huqing. Yeah, not good. Am feeling better now and nobody noticed, fortunately, but I really need to grow a thicker skin to cope with dreadful people like that
• recycling not done
• haven’t been to the gym for ages
• have used up my Nano ending already and now have to bullshit for 14,000 words which is a challenge even for me! zonino!

Sorry. This is my cathartic whinge goal. I’ll try to be cheerier tomorrow.

In the meantime has anything good happened?

• I was able to take the piss out of Min II who accidentally stole the DP’s cows-shagging mug – she didn’t realise it belonged to the DP. Nevertheless, a dreadful lapse of taste on the part of Min II as there were plenty of other mugs available. Actually come to think of it Min III unloaded the dishwasher and put the mugs in a different cupboard, so to be fair to Min II perhaps she thought the cows-shagging mug was the only mug available. This won’t stop me relentlessly teasing her about it…
• I revised the whizzy spreadsheet twice for the chief exec and he was very pleased with it. World Domination beckons!
• I’ve written 1500 words today already and it’s not 8.00 yet
• Madam Ish is cheering me on and I can’t let her down ;)
• the flat is clean and tidy (apart from the pile of recycling)