Tuesday PM/Wednesday

Yes, I know. A brillant and titillatingly title for a post... Come on, what do you expect? Creativity? Hah!

To set the stage for last night, I was working (shockers) when the CFO of the company (one of my superiors, but not a direct boss) came back from a trip to the bank to get money out. She was trying to close on a home to retire too in a few years. The bank was having problems so she had a lot of trouble getting the cashier's check she needed. She came back in a fowl mood after fighting with them for over an hour.

A little later she was mucking about in the storage room that also houses our color workhorse of a printing station. I hear this yell of anger about how she told me to unpack these four boxes of paper (40 reams) the other day and it's still not unpacked and how I need to do what she says faster. The she starts on about how the printing stations were out of paper and 'blah, blah, blah'. I protested that the printing stations were not out of paper, they were at least half full and the storage areas beneath them were at least half full as well. She stalks out and slams open the closest print station... looks at me and snarls that she said 'full' not half full. Then storms off back to her meeting.

She rounds the corner and is out of sight, every eye in the place is on me, and I literally pantomime blowing her head off. Snickers follow. Feeling stupid and embarrassed for being dressed down in front of the whole office just because she's having a bad day, I limp into the storage room to do as the mistress commands. I'm bent in half over the boxes, cutting the plastic thingies, slapping the reams from two of the boxes into the storage room's paper supply area. Only two fit and barely considering that I pride myself on it being well stocked. I have to shuffle a ream into the various print drawers of the workhorse printer to not have a single spare lying around. Then I start loading the two remaining boxes onto a spare rolling chair to move about the office and re-fill the print stations.

Queue CFO screaming my name again demanding to know if I pulled her office door closed. Ticked to high heaven by this point, I snap that I was just leaving the storage room and was stocking the print stations like she asked and hadn't been near her office. Silence as she snarls about her door being locked and having to go fetch the spare keys. Another co-worker, one of the President of the company's personal assistant duo, comes out and corners me going 'why is she yelling at you now?' I explain what's going on and she gets angry red talking loudly about how if I won't complain, she will. "She can't treat you like that. If I feel that you are being harassed, even if you don't, then it IS harassment" and she was complaining to the Office Manager. Joy. This'll brand me a bigger trouble maker than I already am. Nice.

I fill the two other print stations, barely took one box. So I push the last box around giving everyone with a private printer a ream... Accounting gets four and so does the CFO. (Who's office is open again.) I carefully place the four reams on the closest surface in her office, test the lock, close the door, test open the door, close the door and go to the conference room where she, her husband and the agent are talking over forms and paperwork.

She's ignoring me, but her husband smiles at me. I tell him to please tell her that there are four reams of paper waiting for her and that I didn't lock her out of her office. That said I leave and get back to work.

Meeting over. She's fuming. She didn't close one the house because she couldn't get to the money in time. Now I'm just stewing in anger and she wisely walks off bitching to herself.

It's 20 minutes to closing. I hear her giving BAD directions on what to do with the items in the spare office to her son (who's interning for us). I shrug and say NOTHING. Let her screw it up. Her son, however, is smarter than that and came over to ASK politely for my help. I walk in, sort stuff into "storage", "trash", "media property", & "uncertain - requires senior staff decision". He thanks me, I grab a few of the little things and go stow them away in the proper places. I don't do a single other thing to help with the office move. She didn't tell me too. ::raspberries:: I leave only a few minutes late... like 20 minutes late.

Now I have to wait for her to finalize who is moving into the other empty office now. I have my suspicions about who is going to get the office, we'll see. We've lost two people this month and gained two. But we have one or two too many interns and not enough seats, thus the rush to get senior staff into offices and the interns into their old desks. Me? Oh, in all likelihood I'll be moved to the front desk. ::groans:: That sucks... it really sucks... You have to deal with the morons who wander in asking for directions. (Does my desk have a 'please ask me shit' sign on it?) People asking for charity. I'm a poor working girl, I live paycheck to paycheck and slide deeper into debt every day, f*ck off. People handing out fliers, cards and trying to bully their way into the office to talk to 'someone in charge'. In charge? I'm in charge of keeping people liek you from wasting the time of the senior staff, there's the door. Use it. Once. Don't come back unless we invite you.

Gah! Plus, everyone hangs out at the front desk talking. The closest office has a tiny little angry Bronx boy in it and his taste in music is questionable at best. I had to sit at the front desk for a week right before Easter. I kept having to get up and close his office door. Think he took the hint? No. Not once. Now I know why "Pepper" wears headphones a lot.

Aye!

This morning, I'm juggling an iced coffee, an orange juice, the paper (from the front door), my purse, and my lunch as I manage to finger open the door, hold it with my foot and elbow it open and get in. This done, I'm half way to my desk when an intern accosts me telling me that I'd 'better take a call from D in the NY office'. I look at the intern with death in my eyes and say "I just got in the front door. I need to put all this crap down and away. I need to see what is happening in the office today BEFORE I can handle the NY office's issues. Tell D that I will call her back."

The intern hovers, 'you sure?' I sigh, "yes, I'm sure." She wonders off shaking her head like I am making a huge mistake. I get everything taken care off, plus I spitefully do my morning routine before I bother to talk to D in the NY office. So I empty the dishwasher, start the iced tea, load the printers with paper, and make sure of who's in the office today and who's not and why they aren't.

D in NY? She wanted to know if I could let her hear the voicemail message people hear when they call in after hours. This is the urgent business that I was supposed to drop everything for? I handle it. Find the intern and tell her in no certain terms that I am NOT so low on the company's totem pole that I HAVE to take a call from anyone short of the Presidents. Honestly, I could beg off talking to them too if I was HONESTLY elbow-deep in something unless it was life-threatening. She paled, apologized and scampered back to her desk. I felt bad so I apologized later. We're good now.

She realized why I got so mad when I mentioned the load I was carrying and the nature of "D in NY's" emergency. D does that... every time she calls it's an emergency.

So... after a crappy morning... it's become a fairly nice one. Ordered good and cheap chinese for lunch, had my cooking complimented by two employees (I let them sample my cheesy-herb whipped redskin potatoes), had the Office Manage need my help on something trivially easy that he couldn't figure out, then he needed my help with some help wanted ads, etc. All in all... a good afternoon.

::knocks on her wooden desk:: Here's hoping my luck holds.