paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- crankiness and disappointment Craziness and crankiness All day, I kept having to be cranky. I hate that. Typically I am only cranky between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Strangely, I was like this even as a baby�. But today was one of those days where my cordiality got scraped off by too many people who steal their personal power from others instead of generating it from inside. One of those days where my head, all dented in from banging it quietly against the wall when it comes to dealing with the university�s bureaucracy, just exploded today. The Esquire decided to take another week off, namely today through next Thursday. She felt guilty enough to come in before her morning meeting and have a fit because she does not like the way Stella�s new desk in the new part of the office is turned. �Piper, this does not make me happy. How could you do this? Where is your sense of aesthetic? It is so closed off. I hate it. I can�t live with it. You will have to fix it. I don�t know what you are going to do. This is a tremendous mistake. This is intolerable. � A tangent for another day � I never want to ever work for anyone who has not worked their way up ever again. It should not be allowed, frankly, and if I were the big boss I would never hire anyone who has never seen the other side of the power relationship. CYA is as annoying as FYI in the world of acronyms. But it is the way of the world. Out came the folder labeled �expansion project.� Out came the plans drafted by the university space planner and approved by the Esquire. Out came the furniture order approved by the Esquire. Out came my memo discussing the left versus right hand return on the front desk, weighing the merits of both. With the left hand return circled and initialed by the Esquire. And as I spoke I took my thickest darn highlighter and highlighted the darn date that the plans were approved: April 13. �So I should have caught this. I should have known that you of all people could not envision what we need to have envisioned. You have to fix it somehow. Stella will be cut off from the hallway, cut off from the conference room.� You see, this is the point. It is called personal work space for Stella. It is called having some protection to sit on her foot with a skirt on without an entire conference room seeing the bottom portion of her slip. It is called being able to hop on the Internet and grab a recipe without the world seeing. Sending a quick e-mail to her husband. Because people are not machines. They focus and grind stuff out and then take a breath. Stella, who is so new and so nice, looked at me a little scared. Stella started saying �I guess I could have it the other way.� But I dug in for a host of reasons, including we still can�t get accounting to write the check for these custom monstrosities (aka workstations) that the Esquire must have in the office. Because after the thing has been built, after people have worked until 10 p.m. and followed the plan, it is just stupid to redo it based on the whim of a spoiled rich woman. The Esquire was reacting to so many other things in her life, which are driving me crazy, because she cannot see it. But it is completely obvious to me. And Stella, thinks I am some sort of a god. I told the Esquire that this is Stella�s space and she should be able to make the decisions regarding how things are situated. And Stella, took a deep breath and said, �I am willing to give it a shot the way it is. If it becomes a problem, then we can get the guys out here to reconfigure later.� Let us not forget that I am doing my job, the manager�s job and the Esquire�s job, in addition to training Stella. But Stella is wonderful � this paragraph could turn into a love fest about how wonderful Stella is and a fear fest that the Esquire will drive her away. So I am motivated to be a good buffer, to wrangle, to get cranky at all ridiculous forces�. Yesterday, I spent the entire afternoon placating accounting and working with Stella to get the purchase orders and requisitions approved, for the eighth or ninth time, it seems. Today, after the Esquire�s fit and after sending her off on another week away from the office, I settled in to fight the battle of moving Stella�s phone and computer from one end of the office to the other. At one point the telecommunications people fired up the main phone line in the new part of the office, but then they turned it off. I put in a work order for this May 23. But all of the directors were out of the office. And the mean people who answer the phones said �put in a service order. We�ll get someone out there in the next 10 business days.� I hate this. All they have to do is go in the �closet� as it is called and flip a freaking switch. Ten working days? So I start calling up the food chain. Then I call around the food chain. Then I recall the food chain, slightly crankier. And I call every fifteen minutes, insisting that they can send someone out. And with each call, I become a bigger and bigger thorn in the side. My sources, namely extremely kind technology guy across the hall who is the source of most of my work sanity. His BTQ (bureaucracy tolerance quotient) is extremely high. Almost as high as his intelligence. Almost as deep as his subtle, caring sense of humor. I have a brainstorm that would involve a long piece of data cable, taped down our hallway�. He agrees to do it, if I can�t shake some apple loose from the telephone tree. More importantly, he helps me place the computer orders and tells his boss on telecommunications and she, because she is of the same rare caliber, decides to make a few calls on my behalf. It pays to treat people well. It pays to go across the hall on Friday afternoon and announce that I am making a limeade run and ask if anyone wants anything. It pays to write little thank you notes. As cheesy as it sounds, relationships matter, and they really are what makes the world go round. So I hate having to be cranky at telecommunications, accounting, purchasing, human resources. But the people there have such horrible attitudes. There is no befriending them and every encounter ends in frustration, irritation, a bag of chips, a head on the desk. I have plenty to do, but spend so much time dealing with all that is so wrong with the university and the way it is run, that I just go home defeated on so many days. The fact that a really cool faculty member and I are designing a great interactive web resource library for faculty working on incorporating civic education and learning opportunities in their classes gets lost in this endless haze of budgets, paperwork, moving guys, furniture installers, �. The fact that someone in communications wants to reprint three articles from my newsletter verbatim for a big deal publication gets lost in the haze�. And of course in that haze the former manager of communications will get all the credit even though I wrote the articles and did the layout. But I just let it go, always thinking, there will be another opportunity for me to get some credit. I keep letting this stuff go, and somehow there is always someone waiting in the wings to snatch it out of my hands and run off with it, get a promotion, get a raise, �. The Esquire always blows stuff off and then claims my work as her own. I keep telling myself that someday, someone will notice. But deep down I know they never will. And it cannot matter because I tell myself that I have endless amounts of ideas. It is my job to have endless amounts of ideas. And sooner or later they all step in it. Life without believing in karma of some sort would be a hard life. So my day ended a bit late. I picked Quinn up at her work site. We ran by the grocery store. And did I ever feel weird. My heart was racing sort of uneasily. I felt a bit spaced out. The only thing that it could be was too much adrenaline from such a ridiculous day doing things that do not come naturally to me like get cranky with people for giving me intentionally misleading information, for contradicting themselves and their colleagues, for trying to be more forceful because that is what it takes. I tried being nice for three months and got no where with these people. I tried trying to befriend them, but they don�t have an ounce of compassion in their bodies when it comes to work stuff. They may be fine once they go home, but it is hard to imagine them away from their function. It is the price we pay for Taylorism/Fordism. For giving people only one widget to oversee that becomes the sum total of their work lives. I would be the same way. I would be frustrated that no one cares about my widget. That people want to wedge my widget out, or force my widget to change. I would resent having no authority to alter the procedure based on my judgment. To be stripped of my judgment, even. I find it hard to believe that anyone can truly be comfortable with this sort of environment. It kills the spirit and leaves us all tired and withered. And I get disappointed in myself for not being able to find some sort of more compassionate way around the problem. I get disappointed in myself for being, in the end, just like every other person trying to meet impossible demands, unable to learn the intricate procedures of every office at the university, frustrated that they seem to change without warning all the time. 9:56 p.m. - 2002-08-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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