Category Archives: jobby job job

tonight I’m picking up ruthie and michelle at the train station and we’re driving south for 5 days at assateague for a vacation starring my friends and family. not as many friends as there usually are, which bums me out, but it will be incredible for different reasons, namely: daniel james will be there, and maybe I’ll teach him to body surf. maybe. if he’s ok with getting his head wet.

there’s another reason why I’m so much looking forward to this vacation, and that reason is WORK. now, I have a really horrible track record for getting out of work and onto a beach vacation, at least at this job. but this week was really crummy for another reason: I kind of got demoted. Oh, everything is just the same except for my role on the Very Big and Important Project that has been FILLING my days for the last year+. On that project, I’m demoted. Just a tiny bit, and I am supposedly very important to the project still, but. But! demoted. my ego hurts. I’m kind of ticked off. and I feel like I’m in the uncomfortable position of trying to convince everyone around me (especially upper management) that I am NOT a screw up, but that there may be some politics involved. Obviously I’m not going to get into the details here, but I feel uncomfortable in general. and ticked off. and hurt feelings. did I mention the hurt feelings?

So you can see why vacation looks so beautiful to me right now! and you can be assured I am NOT going to be leaving late for this trip.

seen from the train this morning on my bidnez trip to baltimore. I kind of feel like trenton right now. sigh.

after a long couple of drizzly days, yesterday evening everything looked like it was underwater. today was fine and dry and sharp, yesterday was dark and damp and soft.

it seems so inappropriate that today, the dry, almost sunny day, was the day that I felt like I couldn’t stay ahead lf the game, that I was paralyzed by stress, that I couldn’t even keep my head above water. I went for a quick drive to drop off my glasses frames for new lenses and felt the stress melt away. by the time I got back work I had a hard-knock afternoon, and had to put my head down on my desk and try not to think about how great it would be go to home to bed and curl up underneath my covers and stay there for two weeks. I can’t believe it’s only tuesday.

it’s a good thing that mariss keeps reminding me that I am The Man, because I’m at work still and it’s 11:21. there were several events that culminated to this occasion: dude who does figures never did them, even though I constantly reminded him of the deadline and he constantly assured me that he’d be done with them “tomorrow.” also lovely lady who is normally totally on top of things apparently blew off my project in the face of louder and more masculine blowhards, and we are both at work refining the calculations. also, I have a confession that many of you may be totally jaw-droppingly shocked to learn: I am a big fat procrastinator. so when I say I am at work at this time of night, you should also know that I just exhausted the internet and am finally ready to get down to work. (though in my own defense I did have a meeting from 6:30 to 11 with the lovely lady, and we did have order-in chinese food. so it wasn’t all goofing on the internet. just the stuff I should have done during the day. shoot.)

I was awfully pleasantly surprised in my year-end review to receive a “very good” rating and to get an additional small raise. When I got my promotion and raise in september, they’d told me not to expect an end of year raise because it was included in my 3/4 year increase. and then? I got another one! I am so excited. I guess I am holding things together pretty well. and on top of that, my boss really values the way I’ve been trying hard to mentor staff and create a pleasent working environment. (though I think it’s everyone’s responsibility to create a work environment as best they can in which they want to work.) I feel, well, incredibly competent. that is a wonderful feeling.

and then on the other hand, yesterday I bought toilet paper after being out for just over 5 days. Nice way to be responsible, no? Kleenex and work bathrooms, you are my friends.

today I got to take the train into work in nyc. I have a client meeting at the very cool new york times building, and am meeting some people after work on the west side, so thought it behooved me to, instead of driving to edison, training to ny, training to edison, driving to the path, training to ny, training to my car, and driving home, I took the train in to nyc and worked from the nyc office all day with a break for my client meeting. this way I save a lot of time moving around the ny-nj area but also get to pretend like I live the typical nj commuter lifestyle.

I’m not very good at trains, by the way. this morning I forgot my laptop power cord and had to run back and get it, so I didn’t have time to get a ticket on the platform and lived in FEAR that they would collect tickets on that one day, and then ! I didn’t know what I would do! because I didn’t have ANY cash in my wallet. I DID have an old ticket that had never been collected between my town and hoboken, which is for the same amount of money as a ticket between my town and secaucus, but I didn’t want to have to talk the conductor into taking it. luckily it’s only 10 minutes between my town and secaucus and they rarely collect tickets. so, yeah. I almost missed my train and then stole a train ride into secaucus. sigh. not a good commuter at all.

but! I’m sitting in 1 penn plaza looking over the very weird circular roof of madison square garden and am so happy to not be in nj for the day. I mean, nj is ok, it’s definately not as bad as I thought it would be. And the whole train commute thing is probably very hard to do every day what with having to make a certain train on schedule. but it’s a nice break from the turnpike drive down to edison, that’s for sure.

I was on-base for work training today, and was sitting in my car during the lunch break checking my messages when there was a big BOOM of an explosion. Well. I listened for a few minutes to see if there were any sirens, and when there wasn’t I assumed they did it on purpose.

it IS an army base, and they ARE actively testing munitions, but still. BOOM.

sat. michelle and I drove down to philly for their office party. it was on a boat, and I’ll do just about anything that is on a boat. we got a hotel room and planned to make a weekend of it but got a late start on sat. and didn’t sleep much on sunday. anyway, I’m not sure what the highlight of the evening was but it might have been me arm-wrestling with a colleague. it was a tie. and MAN does my arm hurt today! I’ve been talking about arm-wrestling for a long time at work, you know, as a method of conflict resolution, but I’m not so sure anymore. my muscles! they are aching!

I have been so busy at work that I don’t get much of a chance to post lots of stuff. But I keep thinking: hey, that would be a great blog post. So I’ve started to make a list of posts in my wordpress admin window, and that’s a good start. I just worry that I’ll put up, oh, 10,000 posts on one day and then go for 3 weeks without posting, and that’s no good!

Speaking of work, it’s been going very well. I’ve been working extra hard and have been getting good results. my biggest problem is, I think, my tendency to take things personally. Like having to tell a client about newly discovered contamination at a site – I take that kind of personally. it’s not like I’m carrying around a sack of PCBs and sprinkling it around, but I am overly invested in the issues, maybe, or I just want to make everyone happy.  I’m trying to let go of things like this and it is sort of working… I am not woken in the middle of the night anymore, anyway! but it’s a long struggle to revise the way you approach a problem.

there are two reasons why it’s nice to get to work at 6 or 6:30 in the morning:

1. my regular 45 min. or 1 hour of goofing off gets packed in before the day starts, and

2. the sunrise over edison is awfully pretty.

Excitement is being asked to choose a dinner location for a group of out-of-town work colleagues close to the office, even though you’re not really a local, and finding out that the thai restaurant you’ve picked and said was “nice” is not the one you’ve brought everyone to at all. At least the one we did end up at was very wonderful, with a menu in both thai and english and really fantastic food. not so much with the ambiance, though the napkins were cloth. my coworkers took a photo with their camera phone and promised to reciprocate with an equally exciting dining experience the next time I was in baltimore. heck! I bet that photo makes it into a presentation sometime.

in other news, what are the odds that me having thai food 3x in 4 days contributed to the coup in thailand? when a butterfly flaps its wings, that’s what I say. anyone got any special food binge requests for me?