The Work-A-Day World
Let me walk you through my routine at work as I believe everyone can agree it’s pretty Sad Sigh worthy.
I get in to my office and unlock my door. It’s true, I have my very own office with a door, and yet it doubles as a storage closet and so I have to essentially stumble over boxes in order to get to my desk. Once I sit down, I take a good, long look at my inbox and decide of anything needs my immediate attention. Usually, there is something. This morning, for example, I arrived to see that a co-worker had forwarded me an email he had initially sent the copywriter without realizing she was on vacation. Of course, it needs my immediate (emphasis his) attention. It involves “coming up with a clever title” for a trip to Romania and an intro paragraph telling travelers what they can expect from the trip (I am tempted to write something along the lines of “Enjoy tourist cheesiness like you’ve never seen before at Dracula’s Castle and thrill to the discovery of the loss of your petty cash as gypsies pick your pockets in other parts of Transylvania”). I don’t know why he can’t do this himself as I have never been to Romania and he has been multiple times.
So, I start thinking about that when 8 emails from my boss arrive, each with 1 individual website update, mostly small, all entirely unnecessary, and ALL flagged with the “IMPORTANT!!” flag. So I work on those for awhile, go back and write an intro paragraph and then I spend the rest of my day in one of two ways. Either I a) am ferrying myself around the office fixing stupid tech things that actually have very little to do with tech support and a lot to do with plain, annoying ignorance (”How do I empty my email?” “Why isn’t this Excel formula working?” “How come my iPod isn’t syncing up with iTunes”) or b) I give up and spend the rest of the day reading Go Fug Yourself praying for Bai Ling to make my day worthwhile and tell everyone I’m “working on projects” and stop answering my email.
When the clock finally runs out, I get home, I check Craig’s List, I discover there are no well paying jobs in New York I am qualified for, and then I cry myself to sleep because I have done nothing – literally, nothing – for my job that qualifies as actual progress toward any attainable goal. Whenever I try to push a project forward, I end up exchanging emails with my boss all day as to why a new website is necessary or why we really should not have our servers in an unventilated, tiny room where they have previously melted some of the wiring. Then she stops replying and two weeks later when I ask her if I can move forward with the project, the cycle repeats itself.
True story.
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Comments
“How do I empty my email”
I would ask “really” except I was the person who got to handle all tech stuff at the catering company… except for obvious stuff like networking printers (which, by the way, I COULD have done given the proper amount of time, it’s really not difficult) and fixing our database (which, there wasn’t much the FileMaker guy did that I could have had him walk me through over the phone).
*hugs you*
Mostly because when i come home, I scroll through Craigslist in Denver.
Idealist, baby!
And I’m surprised that you’re not stalking Politico at this point.
I’m the FileMaker maven at my workplace as well!
I think the saddest thing is this all likely happened before I even woke up for work. Har har!