Self-Indulgent Ramblings

Uh oh… I’m getting grouchy again. I just got an email confirming that my admission to an upcoming ad club event has been paid. That’s nice. It’s particularly nice that my boss asked me first if I could/wanted to attend.

Oh… no she didn’t.

ARGH!

AND… this weekend I did a reading for this possible new project that might be happening in town. I know of at least one person who’s been contacted already… and it sure isn’t me. That makes me grouchy.

So… I sit here looking at zillions of websites for investment banking firms… and I grumble.

Okay… today is Cinco de Mayo. And my company is all about Cinco de Mayo. We love tequila, beer, pinatas, funny hats… the list goes on and on. But most of all, this year, Cinco seems to be about food. We came in this morning and found bags of candy on each of our chairs. For lunch we had a gigantic chili lunch (meat and vegetarian… yay!) complete with Mexican wedding cookies, chips & salsa, funky Mexican fruity sodas, little mini wraps, these AWESOME raspberry/strawberry/oatmeal bars… and tonight we’re having a massive fiesta.

If I survive, I’ll post more later.

…people have families. It’s not for the companionship and the love and the tax breaks. It’s so that they can actually schedule vacation time from work. All year, my coworkers schedule a week with their families in Jamaica or a long weekend on the coast… and no one questions it because they’re going with the family and you don’t change that.

Me… I don’t have a family. When I FINALLY find a hole in the schedule where I can take one measly day off, it’s easy to cancel that cuz, hey, it’s not like I’m going anywhere. It’s not like anyone else is affected by it. So sure, let’s just go ahead and cancel that day off. You can take it next month.

Until next month… when we have to cancel it again.

I’m so sick of this crap. And I am in an excruciatingly bad mood right now.

First spending the morning working on a client I don’t enjoy, then spending what should have been my lunch break talking about why it’s completely impossible to schedule a vacation day, and then… when I was about to go to lunch after all… getting roped into a conversation about real life desperate housewives who have nothing but money and leisure.

And now it’s raining so hard that I can’t run to my car for lunch.

It’s one of those days. One of those days when people asking you stupid questions will just make your head explode.

Okay… you know how much it pisses me off when people start a big hubbub about nothing, and then everyone else lets them turn it into a big hubbub. I hate it when people overreact. It just makes me angry. And I’m so pissy about my job these days anyway, that any time someone sets out to make it more unpleasant, I feel the need to scream. One person doesn’t understand that cookies are a necessary part of survey software (because they’re old and don’t understand computers to begin with) so they email our client to complain and, since our client doesn’t understand computers, they panic and email us. And because my account manager doesn’t understand computers, she has to panic and wants to call the survey company, and all they could possibly tell her is, “well, that’s how it’s built.” So I have to hear about it. I have to calm people down, I have to explain how things work… but all anyone else wants to do is make a big fat hairy deal out of it.

Just shut the hell up and stop bugging me! I can’t be responsible for one idiot.

Man… I am consistently in a bad mood lately.

AND… I was supposed to get to take this Friday off… since I have 5.5 days of vacation I’m supposed to use by the end of May (that we’ve actually had to extend into June because they keep turning down my requests)… and now it looks like I’m not going to be able to take Friday after all. What the hell.

I hate everyone.

I’ve said it before, and apparently I’ll say it again… why does business always have to be so feast or famine? I go for weeks with little more to do than read blogs and write the occasional bank headline. And now… I can’t even hold still. I just got back from a trip to Florida for a new client - a high-end landscaping service. It was a lot of fun. I had the best traveling buddies! Blake and Billy - these two guys I work with. I was the mom and the baby sister at the same time. There was laughter and much punning… and at one point Blake had the airport page Mr. Geronimoses Lieberman to gate D10. I wish I could always travel with those guys!

But… we got back… and it turns out that it’s just the beginning of some serious craziness. I’m going to be out of town for another client, traveling from city to city from March 29th until April 11th. Yup. Two weeks during which I won’t set foot in my apartment, won’t cuddle with my kitty, won’t get to go out on Thursday nights, won’t be at rehearsal for the show I’m stage managing, won’t be around to remind my {gulp} boyfriend that he does, in fact, have a {gulp} girlfriend. It’s going to be weird. Of course, in the meanwhile, we’re trying to fit in as many other projects as we can before I leave, so that I can be thoroughly loaded down. Heck, I had to turn down the title role in an upcoming show because of all these trips. I hate that.

But still… it’s better to be busy than to be bored.

And, to make things crazier, we are losing an account manager this week… and we’ve just hired four (possibly five) new people. So we’re in major transition mode. And, with the account manager leaving, our boss is paranoid about the rest of us leaving, so every meeting or conversation with her ends with, “And no one at this table is allowed to leave.” Last week she even made a comment to me about wanting to make me sign something that would keep me from leaving and going back to acting for at least two years.

I didn’t have the heart to remind her that she already DID make me sign that… and that I have 17 months left.

Of course… I keep stumbling upon things that might make it awfully hard to leave… which makes me very nervous. From the kinda neat plans coming up with my improv troupe to whatever will end up happening with my {gulp} boyfriend to the big question mark that is grad school… I dunno. There are days when I think that staying here a bit longer might not be that bad. But I also don’t want to wake up ten years from now and still be working at the same job and trying to fit in a little community theatre here and there.

{shrug}

I like to think about inanimate objects in terms of people and people in terms of inanimate objects. For example, today I decided that one of my bosses is an ellipsis. If he were punctuation, he would be “…” That’s always how I feel when I talk to him or read one of his rambling emails. He starts off on one thing, trails off and suddenly catches site of a butterfly he must immediately chase. So every thought that he utters ends up with an ellipsis at the end. I hate working on projects with him. He gives me a headache.

Okay… so today my friend Megan and I cleared our schedules so that we would have the entire day to devote to QA for this bank website we’ve been working on. It’s been frustrating. The client has missed every copy approval deadline by at least a week… while we’ve been turning around edits in less than 24 hours… sometimes less than 3 hours. Now, the programmers are dragging their heels on getting us the link to the beta site. SO… rather than spending the whole day testing the site… we spent the whole day emailing them, begging them for a link and talking about the fact that we wish we were testing the site. In other words… Jen has done ZERO billable work today. And really, no non-billable work either. Pretty much, I’ve been a complete waste of company time and money today.

Good times.

So… I played with redoing the theme on my blog. See. I’m such a dork.

After a particularly lousy day yesterday, and a particularly frustrating event I’ve been planning for this weekend (it’s a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues)… I just really have no desire to be at work today. Of course, to be honest, I haven’t felt like being at work all week… maybe longer. I am so unmotivated, I just might scream. But heck, I’m down to 18 1/2 months on my contract… which is doable, right? As of April I will have worked here for THREE YEARS. What’s a year and a half more?

I really need to do something to give myself a better outlook on the universe - start working out, read more, write more, sing more… SOMETHING! I will admit that the whole {gulp} boyfriend angle has gone a long way to improving my mood outside of work… but at work, I’m just getting tired. I think I can make it another 18 1/2 months. I mean, I’m sure that when I look back on it, the time will have flown by…

Right?

Okay… I really should not be allowed to deal with clients. I should do my research, I should build my insights, I should write my briefs… heck, I can even make presentations. Just don’t make me manage the buggers. I have one account on which I am the highly hesitant account manager… and it’s just a nightmare. The product is great, the owners are great… but they have this internal marketing guy (and by marketing guy, I mean ‘death-metal moron they’ve known since they were four’) who I hate with a fiery passion. He’s a short guy with a big head (and I’m not speaking metaphorically - this guy has a huge noggin) and he steamrolls over anyone with whom he has a conversation.

Today I came back from lunch to find an email in 30 point font (just so that I couldn’t mistake that I was being yelled at) as well as a voice mail with him yelling.

I called.

Apparently, they’re upset that the second sign for their store has been delayed. And they’re MY vendor and I need to take care of this.

Okay… So many problems with this statement.
1) We wanted to use another vendor, but they had worked with these guys before, so they chose them
2) The first time the sign was delayed was because they were several months late paying for their other sign
3) The next several times the sign was delayed was because they had not gotten the correct permits for this or the previous sign and the city was threatening the vendor and explicitly instructing them not to build the new sign until the permit issues were resolved
4) This time, there was an actual slight work slow down due to illness, so there is a legit delay on the sign.

So, if you’re counting… this sign is taking five months longer than we expected… and with the exception of this most recent two week delay due to illness, every single delay has been solely due to the client’s lack of responsibility.

And still, I’m the one getting yelled at.

I hate this guy.

I’ve been really irritable at work the last two days… particularly my boss is rubbing me the wrong way. I need to exhale… or I might just kick her in the face.

And that’s generally frowned upon.