2:32 AM - 19.02.05
Freedom
I got a call late this afternoon from the woman who interviewed me on Monday. The recruiter had said she had confirmed I had got the position yesterday, but I don`t believe in assuming anything until the ink is on the paper. Needless to say I was thrilled.
This morning I was wavering a bit because of the positive response I had receive at Wednesday`s meeting but things started sliding back downhill yesterday - nothing major that couldn`t be resolved with a little effort mind. Today by early afternoon had me praying that I was going to get the call. First up my tech for the election was away today. I think he caught the pneumonia from the one staff member. It isn`t her fault, but I think she is still too sick to be in the office. Problem is that the staff she has include the woman who tried to block me from cataloguing some of their data early on in the assignment and the jerk who still hasn`t got the message about leaving me alone. I don`t think that they carry their weight with respect to the tasks they have and her absence means that there is too much work that has piled up for her to stay away.
She is the one who came by with the liaison and her new assistant yesterday. I think the fact she needs another person says volumes. So she was by around 1:30 pm demanding that the work she asked for an assistant to do, be done by me because she has decided that the assistant won`t be able to find the documents that I`ve coded on the spreadsheet. Those documents are in either one of two rooms and they are mostly clustered together on the shelves. Unless that person can`t read, there shouldn`t be a problem. She demanded that I pull and get all the documents in her office immediately, so that the other woman could start work on them first thing Tuesday morning when she comes in, having had today off. I pointed out that I had been assigned other priorities by my supervisor and the liaison, but she wouldn`t accept that. Add in that the jerk was trolling by my workstation doing nothing but ogling most of the day because my tech`wasn`t in the office and I must admit a high level of frustration built up. Why doesn`t she make him do some work?
Then there was the liaison. I worked through my lunch hours yesterday and today trying to meet the deadlines set by her for the three critical spreadsheets she asked for. Again, it isn`t my fault the company chose to ignore regulatory requirements and are now past their deadline to demonstrate compliance. I wasn`t brought in to do this work earlier even though I was sitting at home trying desperately to find an assignment the two months previous to when I started. I think too, that with my contract up at the end of the month the idea she has is that if she pushes hard enough she can force all the work to be completed by that time. Now I`m coming in earlier even that when I was bussing to work, staying later and not taking breaks while the company`s staff and my co-worker sit and visit regularly for extended periods of time or talk on the phone or go for coffee or lunch, but I`m the one who is being told is not working fast enough. Uh huh.
Around 1 pm today I was just realizing that I was hungry and needed to eat when she came out of the meeting the staff had been in talking about this project. "I want you to change everything you`re doing with the spreadsheet you`re working with - the one I was halfway through by that time making major changes to the data at her direction from Wednesday. I want you to go back to square one and have it all done by the end of the day." and "Why can`t you do it by then." Well the changes and refinements you demanded be made and that I am halfway through won`t transfer back into the original spreadsheet without corrupting the original coding. that coding is part ofthe compliance requirements that your company must meet. I have serious concerns about the integrity of the original document if I have to go back and re configure the whole thing taking the two and a half spreadsheets already done and collapsing them back into the original or even worse having to reconfigure the workbook so everything is split out in a different way with the master list being totally disassembled as you`ve just demanded. If you insist then it will take longer." My mind was wondering at that point, what it was about the master list was so frightening that it was to be destroyed per her directions. Her directions on how she wanted the basic formatting also changed and she wanted any previous work destroyed as well. I don`t think so. This happened just before the little t�te a t�te with the other woman with the jerk for an assistant. So all of a sudden I`m supposed to accompish double the work with half the time. "Well get the co-worker to hel or the one scientist" Sure the one scientist who keeps trying to throw away or destroy key critical documents and the co-worker who wasn`t even in today. Uh huh.
Got my coat and went outside to call my supervisor. Ever since I started talking with the recruiters last week someone shows up to listen any time I`m using my cell phone and I wanted to be able to be blunt with him about what was going on. He wasn`t in so I left a voicemail and went to the little mom and pop cappuchino place for caffeine therapy. I was gone about 15 minutes altogether. When my superviosr returned my call on my cell phone, about 15 minutes after I got back to my desk, the receptionist showed up and "just hung out" for the balance of it. My superviosr wanted a very detailed description of what had transpired and it was difficult to be diplomatic and yet still convey what had happened. I think the diplomacy lost out in the end. He asked me to stop what I was doing and write a chronology of what all had happened in the past two and a half days starting with the meeting. I appreciated that he was listening and was obviously concerned but there went about another 45 minutes of productive time.
I did stay late again and bolted down the sandwich as I was working, but I`m am very glad I made that call last week and even happier that there is some place else that really wants me that I can go to instead of staying in another assignment where the old Japanese business model of "drive them until they literally drop dead" is being used - selectively of course. I don`t plan to be a human sacrifice for any of the gods of corporate profit. Crabby aren`t I?
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