Housewarming

It's been a while. I know.

I think it's time to move on. Find me at my new home, irreverence press, if you're interested.

Hope you drop by!

The rules of detachment

I took three days of vacation this past week. I've been stressed and needing a bit of a mini-break, plus my aunt is in town, visiting for the first time in the 25 years we've lived here. Excellent timing!

Dealing with the public is never easy. As a front-line-ish employee, my team and I are often the focal point for everyone's frustrations. And that's at the best of times. At the worst of times (which it admittedly it is as my company has just announced further impending service cuts, layoffs and the like) it's...well, it's worse. Couple that stress with the change in my job, etc., and it's been a challenge. It's been building up.

So I took some days, and my aunt and my mom and I played Seattle tourists for one of the days, visiting the Space Needle (I stayed on the ground, ah-thankyou) and Pike Place Market. We shopped, lunched, and generally had a great time.

The other two days? I did nothing. And it was everything I thought it could be.

I slept late. Like, LATE. For a girl who's used to getting up before 6, sleeping until 10 was deliciously indulgent. Waking up when my body wanted to wake up, that first morning stretch in my sunlit room, an extra fluffy and snuggly pup at my side.

Coffee. At least three cups every morning. Slurped leisurely-style, over the newz and interwebz.

Loo walks. Plentiful. Sunny.

I never checked work email. I never checked our company Facebook page. Ignorance was truly bliss. I made the grave mistake of logging on to my work email once this morning, and the stress and irritation and frustration boomed back into my world like a sledgehammer.

So I'm creating the rules of detachment.

1. It's not personal. This is my new mantra. I will repeat it to myself a thousand times daily if needed until it hits home. Me? I'm just a worker bee. I have no decision-making power. I'm not the reason that my company is where it is, nor will I be the one to "fix" the situation. It couldn't have less to do with me. When people are mean or combative, it's not personal. Remember this.
2. Be reasonable with my time and level of involvement. Facebook is 24/7. That means I get notifications by the minute when people are posting, ranting, raving. It's not all the time, but sometimes it sucks to have that telltale phone notification infiltrate my peace and quiet at home. So, set limits. Be reasonable. It can wait until I'm at my desk the next day. So can checking my work email. Shut it down.
3. Remove myself. Get out for lunch. Go for a walk, do my shopping or errands during that time. When I go out to lunch with friends, no work talk. Just shut it down.
4. Work out. I've only been doing this for a week or two, and still trying to figure out how best to fit it in my schedule. But the days I go, I feel the stress leaving my body through every muscle flex and every exhalation. It's helping me sleep better. It'll help me shed my "winter coat." Keep it up.
5. Stop trying to do everything. I am paid to do one job, and even though it's not the one I was hired for, it's my responsibility to do it the best I can. Stop picking up slack, stop troubleshooting. Watch the balls get dropped, as hard as that is to do. I cannot be the one to fix the situation. 
6. Focus on life external. If work isn't going to be what fulfills me right now, I need to find other outlets. Leave by 5pm every day. Travel more. Actually use my vacation. Take a class. DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

Any other rules I should look to?

Sour grapes make bad whine

I am doing something I've never done before: deleting a previous post. Not because I don't feel it, but because it's just bad shit to put out there right now and I should've known better. And also I might need to look for a place with a little more anonymity. :)

Cacao!

Today I'm over it. Writing it out helped me vent and today I feel lighter and clearer.

If anything, this helps me clarify my path. Funny how that works sometimes...

Reorg'd

There. I said it. The dirty word that I've been struggling to swallow for the past several months.

Remember how, a year or two ago, I wrote about my fear of losing the job that I loved so much? Yeah. It kind of happened. Still employed, but significantly reorg'd.

I've swallowed this because I have nowhere to go with it. We're losing good people - friends and coworkers whose time left at work is ticking down way too quickly. How can I be so disappointed when at least I'm still employed?

Because I'm now doing a job that I wasn't hired for, that I wouldn't have applied for. I sit between two teams of people and feel completely on my own, because I no longer fit with the team I left, and I don't belong to the team I joined. I finally changed my email signature, and it just about killed me. I miss my (former) boss who I rarely see anymore.

Every day, I try to put on my big girl panties and just suck it up and hope for the best. And every day, I come home emotionally exhausted, thinking only about putting on my pajamas and cracking open a beer. What an awesome way to spend my time. What a delight I am to be around.

I'm not the only one - though I am the only one who had the drastic job change.  But we're all pretty damn miserable. Politics, lack of budget, impending doom, future layoffs just waiting in the wings. We're all affected. I'm not special.

But I'm miserable. All I want is to love what I'm doing. But maybe this is how the other 99% live.

Yaaaaaaaaaaay.

The worst

Me. I'm the worst. I haven't written in eons. I learned from a friend that Wordpress has a "write a blog a day" challenge for 2011, or a blog a week for the more casual writer. Despite my Blogger allegiance, I was going to try and get in on that, and I've already royally fucked up. Le sigh.

I'ma try to get on this. I almost wrote one last week. Does this one count?

The waiting game

We had a "huddle" on Friday at work, where our Directors laid out the timeline for the impending layoffs. Those of us who are being let go will be notified by Sept. 28. Ouch. The silver lining is that the actual layoffs won't come until April 1 (April Fool's Day, really??!?), 2011, which allows plenty of time for planning - very generous of our company and truly a rare thing these days.

I've never known what it's like to dread every meeting with my boss - I adore her and I would walk through fire for her, so it's not normal for me to feel a sense of doom when I have either my regular weekly meeting or something more impromptu. I know everyone's feeling this way. I know it's hard on her, too - having to make these kind of calls.

I just want to KNOW, you know? I've never been good at the waiting game.

Cold hearted

I discovered this on a break today: if you play Hearts on your computer, it's waaaaaaaay more fun if you change the names of the computer players to people you have hated at one point or another.
"Ha ha, ____________! You got stuck with the queen of spades!"

"Suck it, ___________! I totally jacked up your sorry attempt at shooting the moon."

It's the little things in life that entertain me.

--posted from my badass htc evo--

Uncertaintea

Ain't much water in the workplace water cooler these days. Instead, we all huddle and whisper around a tall carafe of strong-brewed uncertaintea. We know the layoffs are coming...we're just waiting to see when and who and how many.

The heavies go into closed-door meeting after closed-door meeting. Our bosses emerge looking stressed and depressed, because they know they have to let some of us go. It's unavoidable. And they might be going themselves.

I feel like we're all lined up in a row with our necks stretched across guillotines. You're laying there with friends and coworkers on either side, not knowing when your blade is going to fall or whether it's going to fall at all. You're as worried about the blade slicing down on your coworkers as you are about the blade poised above your own neck. Nobody is going to walk away from this unscathed, no matter whose blades stay standing.

This uncertaintea is poison.

Gummy epiphany

It has taken me forever to realize that spending the money to buy more expensive gummy vitamins is actually well worth it, because I will actually take them. Tasty little bastards.

-posted from my badass htc evo-