12:31 a.m. - 2003-03-25
Power Time
Well, dear diary, it was obvious I was exhausted when I wrote my entry last night - it barely makes sense. It was 3:30 in the am before I finished it. Needless to say, this was the day my alarm didn't work, so I didn't wake up until it was nearly my normal time to leave. Missed my bus but managed to throw myself together quickly enough that I caught the next one. At the train station? An announcement that due to mechanical problems the trains were running late. Of course. Still I was only 15 minutes late for work, so it could have been worse. I made up the time at lunch.
Everyone on the team was quite chatty first thing this morning too. As well renovations are going on in the library, just behind me. Made it tougher to concentrate just on the work. The permanent staff were all in a meeting all morning and into the lunch hour. There had been a memo out last week in response to questions raised in the "state of the company meeting" I hadn't been allowed to attend. The gist of it was that there was going to be a major shake up in the entire hierarchy of the company and that the new structure would be posted on the intranet by mid-April. It must have been causing tremendous anxiety - hence this morning's meeting. Add in the international situation, which impacts directly on my work, and it becomes quite tense sometimes.
T2 obviously felt the need to show she was in control when she returned. The carpenters had had some questions during the morning for which C and I could not provide decisions - we're not even staff. T2 huffed that we should have come and pulled her out of the meeting. Well, if we'd been informed there was a meeting and we'd known where it was, that could have been an option. The only reason we knew that they were in one, was because C overheard B telling D to hurry so they wouldn't be late this morning. Second up, if the CEO of the company has called such a meeting, are we supposed to disrupt it for something that could wait an hour - not likely.
T2 spent the rest of the afternoon insisting everyone acknowledge she was in command. She had B standing beside her in the library intoning - "it's T2's call" - for about an hour with respect to the renovations. It appeared that B did not agree with a lot of the decisions, but felt the need to reinforce T2's power posturing.
I needed to call the IT people at one point because the software we use all day had crashed. She and one of the males in the group came and stood nearby talking as loudly as they could. I think the message was supposed to be "stay off the phone", but I couldn't proceed with what I was working on without the access. Besides as I've mentioned before, I don't use the phone other than for work purposes during work hours. I guess bad manners aren't just the purview of the hoi polloi.
At one point some work needed to be done that one of the other staff noted loudly should be done by the student interns due in in a month. She automatically turned to me and told me to get it done now, without even asking if it was convenient for me to break off what I was doing. My attitude is that it doesn't matter to me if she wanted to use company funds that way. The cost of my labour to the company is worth many times what is paid to the interns. Is that really the best use of their money and my skills? Anyway, since I get paid the same regardless, I saw it as a nice break. Took the wind right out of her sails when she couldn't get a rise out of me. I just asked where the standard equipment to do the job properly was kept - she didn't even know what I was asking for. It's material that is standard issue in this industry, and in a records department should be available automatically, because it both reduces the time spent on task and improves the end product. I managed to do what I needed to without it in the end.
I was glad to get home this evening.
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