karina jean

I got caught twice in the last 10 minutes having fun today! Oh, El B., how I’ve failed you…

Michelle and I used to joke about our professional wrestling names. I was going to be The Fun Ruiner, and I’d bust out in a cape and say in a deep, scary, Andre the Giant voice “Mothers, Hide your Children. I am here to Rain On Your PaRade…” She’d be my sidekick, The Purple Grape, and her wrestling move would be The Steamroller (which I’ve seen in action, and it is surprisingly effective). At about this time we’d start to crack up so hard that we couldn’t really continue. I can’t remember why we were talking about being professional wrestlers, probably it had something to do with the movie “Billy Madison,” but with us, there’s really no telling where a whacko idea comes from.

Example: a paraphrased and probably incorrectly recollected conversation from our drive cross-country:

Michelle (looking at map): “Hey, there’s a town called Lolita coming up!”

Kari (driving): “Libido? Weird.”

Michelle: “Burrito? No, it’s called Lolita!”

And then we’d chorus the next few days “Lolita? Libido? Burrito?” and crack up. This was really helpful when we didn’t have a tape deck or CD player to listen to, b/c the jerks in San Francisco had stolen both of them, and all of Michelle’s CDs. Between the never ending Ricky Martin songs, that really dirty Jordan Knight song (“Give it to you”) that was playing constantly that summer, and the rousing renditions of Figaro performed by Michelle, it was good to have something we could repeat to each other over and over that would never lose it’s humor.

While I’m repeating conversations from cross country, here’s a golden one between my brother and I, when I called home after the car had been totally burglarized in San Francisco to find out what kind of info insurance would need:

Kari (very sad, in hotel lobby): “Oh, DanAaron, They broke into our car and stole everything!”

DanAaron: “Who did? . . . Never mind, you don’t know. Oops. I’m sorry!”

Kari (sniffle): “It was the JERKS!”

And then we both started laughing, which I really needed.

Other things said (but might not have been conversations):

Thing Rob-at-work has said today that crack me up:

“Politics is gouging the price of V8 today.”

Only he really said “the man in the box is gouging the price of V8 today.”

I can’t decide which is funnier, the real one or the kari-one.

(And Rob isn’t nuts, there are men in boxes here in NYC who sell us things to eat. Like Bagels and Coffee in the morning. Really, they’re in Tin Boxes. Now, he may be referring to guy who isn’t actually in a box as a man in a box, but that’s just an eccentricity – he’s definitely not nuts.)

This is why I need a blog, or something. The web page requires so much work to write twice in one day! I would get some kind of blog script going, but I have a very limited hosting plan…

I am so frustrated with work.

Honestly, I feel like I need a 12-step program to deal with El Bosso!

Here’s a constantly repeating scenario:

I’m on my way somewhere: the printer, the bathroom, obviously I’m GOING somewhere, b/c I’m walking pretty fast and purposefully. He’ll holler out of his office “Karina!” so I’ll stop by. He will be ON THE PHONE, with Someone, and will be talking about some aspect of the project that a task manager under him has directed this someone to work on. He will get upset, b/c he doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, and the task manager isn’t immediately reachable, and Someone has called El B with a question. He will start sighing loudly, sometimes pounding on his desk, and flipping furiously through the report in question. He will start making rhetorical statements about how x should have been done, and y should have been done, and everyone has known about this since z happened. He won’t listen to anything I or Someone has to say, because he’s too busy explaining how this is entirely Task Manager’s fault, because he (El B) was very explicit in his direction, and nothing has been done, or it’s all been done wrong, or it all seems to not be done or to have been done wrong. He will talk over us. He will roll his eyes. But it doesn’t help! It doesn’t help at all!

This makes me think a lot about my place in this workplace. I want to call Someone back, after all is said, and apologize for El B! But that’s not my job – I’m not paid enough to do that stuff. I worry that I’m being an enabler by allowing him to get away with this kind of reaction to a simple question. I worry that my own reputation is harmed by my non-action, by how I just stand by in the door jam of his office while he tirades. I am frustrated that he is not a professional person, and that he reacts more than he listens and thinks.

This is what I would like to happen:

I’ll be going somewhere. He’ll holler Karina. I’ll say “Sorry, El B, I’m on my way to the ladies room” and I’ll keep walking.

Or, if I stop, he’ll start with the rhetorical questions and I’ll say “I’m sorry, but I don’t really see how this is helping us to find a solution.” Or I’ll say “that may be so, but it’s not Someone’s fault, and it doesn’t answer Someone’s question.” Or “you don’t expect us to answer these questions, do you?” But these responses are not professional! I don’t feel they’re the right way to deal with a coworker! And it really frustrates me to question my own professionalism in these situations, and to worry about being brought down to his level.

I guess luckily for me, it’s not my job to teach him how to live. It’s not my job to teach him how to interact with his coworkers. It’s not my job to explain to him the precepts of good management. All I can do is my real job, picking up loose ends, answering questions, and formatting tables. And hope that he’s not the norm, and the next place I find myself spending the bulk of my waking-life at will be different.

My dad called just now, and I got to hash this all out with him. He’s very understanding, and helpful. But sadly, he wasn’t able to assure me that this is an unusual El B situation. Ugh. I just wish El B was a vicious, nasty person with an obvious agenda. That would be so much easier for me to deal with.

Work. I am an environmental engineer. There are a few kinds of environmental engineers. There are the waste water/waste management environmental engineers. They make our water safe to drink, and our poop stinkless. That’s not the kind I am. I work with hazardous waste. Not with my own two hands, though I’m certified by OSHA and the federal government to do that if I need to, but from several hundred miles away.

I work on a nasty hazardous waste site. I’ll call it Lake Nasty. We’re busy quantifying the wastes, and figuring out how it affects people and animals. Next, we’ll figure out how to clean it up. It’s an interesting project – one I could build a career from if I wanted to.

It’s hard for me to explain exactly what I do and why I am working so hard lately. Maybe this will help: I am involved in rewriting a 7-volume report. Each volume is 4 inches thick. I have to look at every table. Every figure. Reformat everything before it goes out. I don’t spend lots of time on the science, but I am still coordinating some of the work. These reports are due at the end of the year, but there’s a big (and nasty) internal review process that requires us to finish the report completely three times. The reports are so big and involved, and so open for dispute, because the site is several square miles big, and there are at least three different kinds of toxic chemicals which have been historically disposed of onsite (and not in nice easy to manage barrels, either) over the last 100 years. Plus, we’re working on a court-ordered deadline, so we can’t even beg off for exhaustion, computer problems, lack of data, or insanity.

So I’m working really hard. I’m a consultant, so it’s kind of the way things are to make the junior level people do all kinds of huge work because they’re cheap. It’s kind of common to have a couple of well paid PhDs doing the thinking, and for each PhD to have a couple of lower level scientists or engineers at their beck-and-call to make tables and figures to help well paid PhD understand the data quickly, and to write the text for them to check.

Yep – I’m a peon. For 40+ hours a week. Time to go back to grad school, so I’ll be a well paid and glamorous PhD!