19 posts tagged “work”
I’ve had the same morning ritual at work for years now. The first thing I do when I get to campus is swing by the coffee shop in the Commons and get me a cuppa to start my day. I get a large steaming cup of “signature blend” or sometimes vanilla or hazelnut, or crème brulee if they have it, and I’m on my way.
The same woman has worked the morning shift there for, it seems, as long as I’ve had this ritual. She is always warm and perky and friendly. Since she’s such a talker, I know that she generally has to get to work by 6 a.m. to get everything set up for when those of us who think we’re the campus early birds (we got nothin’ on her!) start straggling in looking for our caffeine fixes. She loves the Ravens and is always eager to talk about them, what she did over the weekend, and her boyfriend.
Although I’ve become an early riser out of necessity, I’m not very social in the morning. I tend to prefer to start my days quietly, and ease into dealing with others at work. But in spite of that side of my nature, I always look forward to buying my coffee from her. She’s just one of those “ray of sunshine” people.
She also knows all the regulars and jabs at them good-naturedly. She’s got a little inside joke for everyone. Most of the students on campus don’t come to coffee shop until long after I’ve gone on about my day, but those that do find that she remembers what their majors are or that they were studying for some big exam the last time she spoke to them, and she always asks how they did.
The campus maintenance crew is always there in the morning, too. One of them is seriously into politics, and he thinks along the same bleeding-heart liberal lines as myself, only even more extremely. We commiserate over the cream and sugar. Another is a die-hard Steelers fan. He wears his Steelers jacket long after it has gotten far too hot outside for any coat at all, because he can’t stand being without it. He wears black and gold shoes, too. We cheerfully talk football long into the off-season, and the coffee shop clerk jumps in to tease us about not showing the Ravens more love.
These are my morning rituals. I may not look forward to going to work, but I do enjoy those few minutes with these people, in this place that smells like coffee and muffins.
Yesterday, as I was paying for my coffee, the clerk told me that her “last day” would be July 2nd. She’s not leaving the university, but the contract for our current food service provider ended this spring and a new one has come in. They’re making major changes, and shutting down most of the shops and counters this summer to do renovations and start anew. So they’re moving her up into the lunchroom for the remainder of the summer.
The coffee shop will not reopen in the fall, at least not as it is. The new company is bringing in chains, a Dunkin Donuts and a Starbucks and Chick Filet.
I’m a little sad. Don’t get me wrong. I love me some Starbucks coffee, and Dunkin’s java too. I’m going to be waging a mental war in my brain each morning about which one I’m in the mood for that day.
But somehow, I have a feeling that it won’t be quite the same. The unique, small-town, “our corner of the world” feel the current coffee shop has early in the morning will be lost in that “just another link in the chain stores across America” feel of a Dunkin’s or a Starbucks.
Change is inevitable, and usually brings with it some combination of good and bad. This will be no different. But when she told me that yesterday, I looked around and realized just how much I appreciate that place, the early morning crew, and our predictable conversations.
And I wondered why I didn’t appreciate them quite so much until I realized they were going away.
I haven't done a Ten On Tuesday in a while. But thanks to Florinda, I realized that this week's topic is "Ten Things That Annoy You About Work." And you all know I couldn't skip that one, even if it is Friday now!
1. Having at least 40 hours of heads-down work to do a week, but consistently spending 25-30 hours in meetings. Since the heads-down work can never gets put off, the math = No. Life. For. Me.
2. Going through a major implementation and 2 new bosses in the same year. Stress, anyone?
3. The fact that at work, someone deemed "a stakeholder" can be a flat-out rude, mean asshole to you and you are supposed to take it with a smile. I don't do that very well.
4. Dreaming about work when I'm sleeping. Seriously, I sometimes see project plans or the system I'm configuring in my dreams, and wake up thinking I'm talking or typing. There are sooooo many things I'd rather dream about.
5. Dress codes.
6. Poorly air conditioned buildings.
7. Having people repeatedly say you're highly under-resourced, but still constantly jab at you about the things that aren't getting done on time. So you explain "Things That Annoy Me" #1 to them, and they say you've got a point, so they schedule a meeting to talk about it more.
8. Sharing a bathroom with a bunch of other people. Blech.
9. Spreadsheets and project plans. I'm just sick of'em. I feel like they're eating my creativity the way the zombies in the bad 80's movies eat brains.
10. Being underpaid to put up with all of the above.
So, one of the things I dislike most about work is the whole notion of being "stuck" at a particular place for a defined period of time. I'm not lazy - I just like to do things accordingly to my own schedule. Let me figure out the whens and wheres sometimes and you'll get 12 hours of work out of me. Put me in a box and I tend to be climbing walls after 8.
It goes back to that whole P-ness thing I wrote about a few days ago. I'm a critter who thrives on flexibility. I just ran into an old friend who told me he's gotten his employer to let him work at home 2 days a week now, and I was practically drooling with jealousy while we talked.
All that is just to say that yesterday was a beautiful spring day here in Baltimore. It was warm and sunny with clear blue skies and a very slight breeze that made the trees sway just a bit. It was short sleeves and no jacket and you'll be warm, but not roasting, kind of weather. We get far too few of those days around here - maybe a few week's worth in April and May and then again in October and November. The rest tend to be hot, cold or rainy.
So I got to work and I realized the thought of spending this entire rare, gorgeous day at my desk was making me downright sad. Up on deck first thing in the morning was a 2-hour meeting with a small group of us from the project. I'd scheduled this particular session, and I THOUGHT I'd booked us a conference room, but I'd forgotten. I swear, I didn't plan it that way. There were too many of us to meet in the project office I share with someone else, unless we wanted to sit on each other's laps, and the rooms had all been taken by people who were smart enough to schedule them. So we got creative and decided to meet outside.
We found an open outdoor table near the little cafe where I grab my coffee in the morning. Our meeting was to go through descriptions of over 100 reports we use and determine the best way to re-create them in the new system we're bringing up. I seriously underbooked our time when I thought we could do this in 2 hours. We ended up needing 4. But miraculously, none of us had anything else scheduled until later in the afternoon, so we just stayed there, stopping now and then to grab coffees or food.
The sun gradually rose in the sky. The day grew brighter and the air warmer. There were no walls or flourescent lights. We heard snippets of funny conversations as students or other staff strolled by. We looked up now and then at a canopy of leaves and we breathed in fresh air. And still, we worked our bums off.
It was wonderful.
One of the guys who was in this meeting is a consultant from Florida. He commutes to Maryland and stays here 4 days a week to be on our project. He has told me over and over again that "our weather sucks." He's used to heat and sunshine and surfing. He chuckles over what the rest of us consider "warm."
At one point, he laughed as he looked around yesterday. This kind of weather brings out lots of arms and legs that have been buried under cold-weather clothes for a long time. He said "Man, ya'll have the whitest white people I've ever seen!" I looked down at my own pale arms, knowing I was one of them.
Fast-forward to late afternoon. He and I were standing in our lobby with another co-worker, waiting for the elevator. I was chatting with the other co-worker when suddenly he burst out laughing. I looked down, and saw that the way I was carrying my meeting materials had pushed the sleeve of my left arm a bit - just enough so that you could see the glaring line where the sunburn I'd managed to get from our day of working outdoors ended.
I looked like I spent the day driving to the beach with one arm hanging out the window. The other is still perfectly pale, because I was sitting in a spot that was half in the sun and half in the shade. I'm a human checkerboard, or maybe a tie-dye shirt. Usually I try to even myself out when I sit outdoors, but you don't really think about that kind of stuff when you're in "work-mode." And you definitely don't remember to bring sunscreen to a day-drone office job.
"Damn," I joked. "I'm always telling my boyfriend and my family how friggin' hard my job is. How am I going to get them to believe me if I leave work all pale and come home with a sunburn?"
But today, as I sit here looking down at my one sun-kissed arm, which is already turning from red to brown, it makes me happy. Office drones aren't supposed to get a tan until they get a long sunny weekend or a beach vacation. We're supposed to be pale, flourescent-lit, bleary-eyed lab rats who blink when we step outside. That's the price we pay for a paycheck.
And we all know I just LOVE bucking the system, even if all I have to show for it is a lopsided tan.
If you're at any job long enough, you start to notice signs of the passage of time. When I started at my current workplace, there were secretaries working in Word and databases who remembered having to do letters on typewriters. Stick around like they do (or like I have, since that was ten years ago), and you see changes in how you do your work, office fashions, and bosses. Co-workers who were young and single when you started are grown-up and married with children.
That's anywhere you work. For me, I have the added layer of my employer also being the college where I earned my degree. I started working there 3 years after graduation. When I returned, all the faculty who had been in the English department (my major) were pretty much still there, except for my advisor, who had hightailed it for a life of freelance writing.
Over time, they've retired or moved on. A few have passed away. The prof I remember most for the bright blue socks he wore with sandals and the way he always seemed incredibly nervous in front of a classroom is now directing an honors program across the country.
Last week, I ran into one of my old instructors, Mike, at the cafe where a lot of us grab lunch. We ended up grabbing a table and eating together, catching up. Back in my student days, he was a younger man who taught a few creative writing courses. He also taught a transcendentalist lit class that I absolutely loved. Instead of sitting in our stuffy classroom, we'd take our books out to the pond on campus when the weather allowed and just talk ... freeform, mostly, about what we were reading. I got more out of that class than most of my others. He was a poet too. I remember going to a reading when he published his first book of poetry and feeling honored that I was working on my own writing skills with someone so talented.
We spent some time catching up. He told me he hoped I was still reading and writing, and I assured him I was. I didn't tell him most of my writing tends to be process documentation for work or blogs about weasel poop these days. We realized during our conversation that only he and one other faculty member from my student days are still around. I'm in touch with the other one now and then too. I call that one "The Poet," because he was one too.
Being with him made me embarrassed about not spending more time on my words, even though it was good to see him. It reminded me that I've veered off track and while I've made quite a career for myself, it often has little to do with what I wanted to be back when I was his student, sitting in a patch of sunlight with Leaves of Grass open in my lap.
But then as I listened to Mike talk about what he's doing now, it hit me how much we've all changed. Mike still teaches creative writing. But he also runs the writing program, and spends an awful lot of his time doing administrative stuff and dealing with bureaucracy. I get the sense that he likes his leadership role. But sometimes, like me, it grates on him, because it eats away time and energy that was once spent creating. The good news is that this means I'll be working closely with Mike at some point in my project, as part of it will be setting up degree audits and graduation processes for all of our programs. Some of the faculty I'll be working with are tough personalities at times. It is reassuring to know I'll also get to work with a friend. I may even ask Mike to go first, so I can iron out my own rougher edges with it while working with someone who won't give me hell.
So that encounter was good. But a small part of me felt a little sad when I went back to my office after lunch. I realized I missed the days when Mike was the age I am now and I was barely in my 20's, and we read and wrote and wrote and read and bureaucracy and task lists weren't as big a part of our days. I missed them for me, and for Mike too.
We're still here, I thought. But we're different. The passage of time is marked.
If you're anything like me, sometimes the fact that there are so many asses in the world amazes and saddens you. You see them everywhere. In your neighborhood, at work, on the news, on political campaigns, and on reality shows. God knows you see them when you have to venture out to places like the mall or Walmart.
How did the world become so full them?
My workplace has given me the answer. There's a tree in the courtyard behind the building where my project office is, where I go for breaks with my co-workers at least once a day. We realized the other day that it is an ass-tree. We'll never need to wonder how our lives got so full of them again, because we have proof that asses grow on trees.
See for yourself. I know I'm juvenile sometimes, but I swear this tree has butts growing out of it. Especially the top one.
Maybe money doesn't grow on trees, but butts do. Gives a whole new meaning to saying your workplace is full of asses, doesn't it?
So, obviously they did come and hook my internet back up on Friday.
But I haven’t written because I have been a completely and totally blissfully lazy sloth for the last two days. I was off work Friday. The last 48 hours have found me either reading Stephen King, playing the Sims, napping, chatting on the phone, or surfing the internet. I haven’t been THIS lazy for an extended stretch in a really long time. Yesterday was the perfect day for this kind of uselessness, too, since it was windy and stormy most of the day.
Oh, and Lee and I watched “Elizabeth” yesterday. What an awesome movie!
Anyway, I don’t know what got into me. I’m certainly not depressed, and I don’t feel under the weather. I think I was just mentally drained from an exceptionally busy and somewhat emotionally charged workweek. We made a lot of progress on some issues that have been holding us back, but getting there required me to do a lot of speaking and be extra convincing. I can do that and do it well, but in the aftermath I always feel like a limp noodle for a day or two. That’s one of the drawbacks of being an introvert in an extraverted job. Extraverts do this kind of work and get an emotional charge from it – the experience actually fuels their productivity and makes them want to keep truckin’. Introverts like me react the same way someone who never exercised and was totally out of shape might feel after completing an obstacle course.
I also blame it just a bit on getting too into The Sims 2 on the Playstation. I got bored with Castaway and popped in the other game, even though a little voice in my head kept saying “bad idea … in this slug state if you pop this thing in you’re gonna waste a day.” I didn’t listen to the voice. As a result, I have spent far too much time entertaining myself with a ghost that runs around possessing Sims and making them dance like chickens, and with a mean-spirited irritable Sim who likes to pick fights by giving other Sims wedgies and burping in their faces.
Oh, and by making my character get enough creativity points that she can earn a living selling her paintings instead of going to work. It is ever so much easier to get a Sim there than a real person like me who spends all day playing silly games rather than writing her way out of a day jobbing lifestyle.
So between today and the time we head the airport tomorrow, I have boatloads of laundry to do before I can pack, and then the packing itself. And I have to head out and find a new bathing suit. Mine got weaseled last summer … one of the little buggers chewed one of the straps right in half. We’re determined to take advantage of the pool at the resort, and hoping for a hot tub, too. Since I have to go shopping anyway, I’m hoping to find a few springy things to wear, too. It is supposed to be in the 70’s and sunny all of next week in Vegas, and that sounds like an excuse to expand the wardrobe to me!
For me, a good chunk of the trip will be spent working, of course. We arrive in Vegas late Monday night, and I have conference sessions all day Tuesday, all day Wednesday, and Thursday morning. My project teammates all want to go to dinner together Wednesday night, so Lee will get to meet everyone. The conference ends at noon on Thursday, and we don’t fly out until almost 11 at night, so we’ll have some daytime hours for exploring too before we go.
The good news is the conference sessions don’t start until 9-ish in the mornings, and as early as I’m used to getting up at home (5 a.m.) that feels like an opportunity to sleep in. There’s no commute, either, just a walk across the resort to the conference center. So I can stay up late at night and play and still get enough sleep to have a bit of brainpower in my sessions.
Lee’s job while I’m doing the work stuff will be to explore the resort and the surrounding areas and pick the most fun stuff for us to do together when I’m not working. Oh, and to win lots and lots of money in the slots so that we can both come home and quit our jobs and be lazy forever. Hey, a girl can dream, right?
I’m doing it again. I just wrote out that to-do list and I’m still sitting here wasting time. I’ve gotta kick this lazy streak in the butt and get motivated. Catch you all in a week!
Yesterday was an icy, sleety, rainy, slushy mess around these parts. So I stayed home.
I really miss winter. Real winter, not this ice and slush crap. It looks like we're going to move right into spring without a real dumping of snow. Every time we've had any snow this winter, it changes over to sleet and freezing rain. Snow can be pretty. Sleet and freezing rain do nothing but suck.
Working at home, though, that doesn't suck. I stared at spreadsheets so long yesterday that my eyes started to burn. I was catching up on various things for the project that I just never get to in the office. I know that not everyone can work from home now and then. If your job is to deal with customers face to face, you probably don't want them redirected to your house.
But I'll never understand companies or bosses that don't let people work from home now and then to catch up on stuff that doesn't require dealing with people. I started working earlier yesterday, because I didn't have to deal with putting on makeup or doing my hair or finding something that looked halfway professional but wasn't all wrinkled to wear. I didn't have to go anywhere. No one popped by my office to socialize or bitch and moan. I just ... worked.
I wish I could do that more. I would make a really good hermit.
Tonight we're having a wake for Bud, the guy who was a regular at my father's bar long before it was my father's bar, so I'll be heading to the pub.
And even though I slept plenty last night, I'm thinking about crawling back in bed for a while. It is one of those grey mucky days where you either sleep or clean, because going outside is blah, and sleeping sounds much better than cleaning.
For me, "Monday" and "good" rarely go together, unless I'm off work. And I wasn't off yesterday. My workplace uses the Presidents' Day holiday as well as some others to be off between Christmas and New Year, so we work on the actual day.
But you know what? As Mondays go, it was good.
The new bus route gets me there in 15 minutes as opposed to almost an hour. Since the thing I consider most precious (other than Lee and the Vinster, of course), is time, this is like getting a big fat raise. Sure, I know I'll most likely spend it blogging and reading blogs and doing other things that won't save the world, but that stuff makes me happy. I had a much better attitude than usual (especially for a Monday) when I got to work, not to mention lots of extra time to get a jump start on things and not end up behind at the end of the day. It has been a while since I was able to leave for the day at 5 and NOT leave something undone.
Lee was off yesterday, and I got home to find that he'd lit all my favorite candles in the house AND run me a bubble bath. No one has ever done something like that for me before, and I was like a giddy little kid. What a perfect way to end a workday. And not just because good-smelling candles and a bubble bath are the most awesome relaxation tools ever. Just knowing you have someone so thoughtful and kind and caring in your life ... well, that makes everything easier.
I'm a lucky girl.
I've been a bit on the lame side as far as blogging goes lately, in both the writing and reading categories. The stuff of life has been catching up to me these days, I guess.
Like Bailey. Poor guy. My mom and sister brought him home on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning they could tell he was going downhill again fast. They took him back to the vet, and it turned out things weren't healing properly and they had to go back in and do some "reconnection." Scary stuff. This time, they want to keep him until at least Tuesday. One of the vets says the prognosis is good, the other is much more cautious. Mom is really scared.
That's a picture of Bailey from this summer, hanging out by the pool. My parents have an in-ground pool and he loves climbing down the first two steps and just laying there in the water. He doesn't swim, he just chills. I want him to be able to do that again this summer so badly.
And of course, there's work, the neverending curse of those not born rich. It seems to get more insane by the hour.
We're also holding a retirement party for my ex-boss this coming week. He actually retired back in January, but he's still working part-time as a consultant. We share the office I work in on the project I'm on, so I actually see more of him than when he was my boss. That makes it weird to plan his retirement party.
On top of that, most of the details have been left up to me, and I truly suck at grown-up parties. I'm really bad at planning details like foo-foo desserts and finding the right people to give speeches. I don't do elegant, or classy, and that's kind of on purpose. I've played social organizer in my group of friends before, but all that entails is figuring out where everyone wants to meet for dinner or beers. I can't cook, my house has always been too small for parties where I play the grown-up hostess rather than the college dorm-style booze and pizza fest, and I'm lazy. So this is a serious challenge for me. What makes it even crazier is that since I do share an office with the ex-boss, and there's no sure way to keep him from hearing my phone conversations or seeing my email, I have to do things like hide out in the lady's room with my cell phone.
He's totally worth it. He was an awesome boss and is still an awesome coworker and friend. But he deserves someone much more Martha Stewartish than I'll ever be for a party planner.
Lee and I had a quiet Valentine's day. Java Janie wrote about how for her and Steve, Valentine's Day seems to come daily. We're much like that too, always doing little things to celebrate our love and our happiness at being together without really thinking about it. So on V-day, we worked, had dinner, exchanged small gifts, and snuggled with each other and the Vinster.
And now the weekend is here, which always rocks.
Yesterday was a strange day, as far as January in Baltimore goes. It was almost 70 degrees in the afternoon, and a warm wind was kicking up serious steam. Sometimes, the sky was full of huge, white clouds that almost seemed like you could reach out and touch them as they rolled by. Other times, the sky was grey, and the clouds were much more ominous. A few fat, heavy raindrops fell throughout the day, but it never actually stormed.
I spent most of it holed up in my office on the sixth floor. But every now and then, I'd hear a strange noise at my window. From up there, the wind sounded like a horse whinnying, or at least it did to me. The treetops just beneath my line of vision were bending and blowing, and the tiny people rushing along the walkway were a mass of billowing coats and hair.
The long days of project work this week are seriously mucking up both my creativity and my ability to get my lazy on. I am generally at work by 7:30, and I don't leave until 6. I am feeling very much like a pod person, or a bubble girl. And the sad thing is that with all we've got going on, I don't do this to get ahead at work. I do it simply to stay not that far behind.
But Lee got home early yesterday, and took some photos of our oddly beautiful day, and I was able to see a bit of it through his eyes instead of through a tiny square of office window that lets me watch the world when I uncurl my cramped limbs from around my laptop and stretch something other than my brain. Looking at these, I could almost feel the wind in my hair.
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