I shouldn’t complain. But my job is frustrating me. Not that
I blame any one particular person and maybe I’m just getting rubbed the wrong
way by working for ‘the man’.
They’ve asked me to take on more responsibility for the
digital side of the company which I would gladly do and I’ve been preparing to
do, but I can’t with all these stupid assignments being thrown on top of the
pile.
Yesterday, by noon my legs were killing me because I had to
get up from my desk so many times to help people with their computer issues. I
had to run to the back server room and crouch under desks and fiddling with
boxes and wiring. I hate hardware.
You know, I don’t really feel like typing all this out even.
This kind of problem is so much easier to express via voice. I feel like I have
to outline all the problems in a list in order to justify my frustration and
that would take so long. And I’m not really in the mood to come up with an
elegant reader’s digest version. So I’m just going to pretend that everyone
works with me already and knows what I’m talking about.
Last night around 5:30 Bill called to ask me to re-run an
MMA report for the DMA but include more Index numbers based on nursing homes
and all the zips in each NTA. Not really a big deal. But in order to help him
along, I also sent him a copy of the Zip Dwelling Report which breaks down each NTA into
zipcodes and tells you the total number and the % of the entire mailed area.
You’d think that was going above and beyond. Apparently not.
Katherine asked me to submit a request to GIS to give them
not only that information for 4 ADDITIONAL areas but also recreate LA because that
Zip dwelling report was generated by a different research company and she wants
all 5 areas to MATCH when we show it to the client. So now I’ve got to submit
this ridiculously overblown request to GIS and here’s the rub- I don’t actually
hear about this report after I submit the request. I’m just doing the stupid
donkey-ass labor to get it in. Why am I doing this? This really shouldn’t be my
job when THEY are the ones who want it and they have all the same abilities I
do to complete it! It would take them less time and it’s their project! But
they don’t want to do the leg work. It’s hard to ‘rise to [my] potential’ with
stupid backhanded requests like this.
I have ONE assignment to do yesterday and all I could
manage was bouncing up and down fixing this and that. Anthony was dumb enough,
he *saw* me running around like a crazy person and decided that was the moment
to throw on another complaint. His phone wasn’t ringing. This wasn’t a new
problem, it had been happening since he got the phone, he just thought RIGHT
NOW would be the perfect time to complain about it. So I GET UP from my desk
AGAIN so I can’t finish this one little project I’ve had on my desk since that
morning. Guess what? It took me 3 seconds to figure out the volume on his
ringer was down. It’s not even a complicated process, there’s a freakn’ BUTTON
of the FRONT of the phone where if you push it one way or another, the volume
goes up and down. I told him I was going to strangle him with his own Ethernet cord.
This same dude in the same day also said his excel was
acting up because when he closed the window, the box that asked him if he
wanted to save didn’t pop up…. So he was losing all his work. Yes, you read
that correctly, he didn’t know how to FILE > SAVE. All his life on every
program he has been CLOSING the program and depending on the ‘do you want to
save this’ option before closing. I wanted to kill him. I hate hardware
problems and I’m a bad person because I don’t like stupid questions where if
the questioner had put in the SMALLEST amount of effort, could have figured it
out for themselves. I feel like a baby sitter and I’m not even babysitting kids
I like. At the same time, when big huge hardware problems and I can’t solve
them I feel helpless and lost and everyone needs me to know everything and fix
it ALL RIGHT NOW. It’s so much pressure
for something I don’t even like doing. I really don’t think this was in my job
description.
But what am I supposed to be doing with my life instead. That
itch to go overseas is getting unbearable. All my friends seem to travel there
and back with such ease it’s almost painful to watch. My penpal from China came
to see me a few weeks ago and it was so nice. He brought me gifts and trinkets
and told me all about transportation and the people. He said if I ever visited
him he’d take great care of me and made sure I ate the best foods.
Dave’s (you remember, that lawyer I was bonkers about last
summer who told me I wasn’t international enough to date him?) mother is
visiting him here in the states. And Teida’s mother (Northern China) is coming
next month and I want to meet her so badly just to see her and see what she
brought with her culturally and physically. Eric Chen and his bride just got
back from traveling Taiwan with the parent’s in law and took the most beautiful
pictures. Even Hua was over there for a while. But I’ve been swimming in my
Japanese lessons. In the car I listen to ‘drive time Japanese’ and I just learned
to count to 100. I had a dream last night that someone told me how old they
were and I translated it right away. When I get home I gobble the rosetta stone
Japanese lessons. Last night I spent 4
hours researching the course work and study abroad options for BYU MBA. I don’t
really want an MBA… I mean, I do- and I’d love to take the classes and go back
to a study schedule and steep myself back into the field I love so well, meet
with like minds and work with bright youth and feel like I’m going somewhere
again.
But I wonder if this craving will dissipate if I could just _go_.
If I could just get over it and see it, get it out of my system and then I can
settle down. Maybe my yellow fever would die down and I could find peace with myself
that if I never worked in marketing again and I never had a set of beautiful dark-haired
baby boys that I wouldn’t feel like I had failed. But I’m restless in this job.
People say, “Just go!” but I can’t. It’s so expensive and I’d need some kind of
guide or help or at least a translator to help me get around. I could go alone
technically but it would be a lot more expensive and dangerous. And how will I
ever save the money to do it anyway? I want at least ONE of these ventures I’m
working on to come through and show success but all that seems far away.
Even if I were to start a master’s program, it wouldn’t be
until Fall 2014. 2 years away until I gave away another 2 years of my life. I wouldn’t
get to see that beautiful place until Jan 2015. By then, I hope my Japanese is
shabby enough to use it but feel completely embarrassed about it.
It’s so far away from submitting this request to GIS.
