Put Up or Shut Up
You may have noticed that I’ve been bitching about my job lately. A LOT. And I see no end in sight.
This whole stupid episode will probably become one of those defining stories of my life, and I can totally see myself at age 76 sitting under a covered patio with a glass of Jim Beam in one hand and a fly swatter in the other as my granddaughters listen to me tell the great eBay war story of ’05, AGAIN.
As I haven’t got much patience for whining, I’m beginning to annoy even myself. So I have devised a cunning plan. Ok, so no, it has nothing to do with BlackAdder – but it feels like BlackAdder and I love BlackAdder, so I’ll digress with whatever I want.
Step 1
Don’t post or email updates for Idaho Beach for a good long while. Family and friends will forget about it, and then I can write really mean things about them.
Step 2
Register on Monster.com. Do the resume’ thing, the networking thing, and the career newsletter thing. Get nineteen hundred email job offers for ‘independent’ sales positions and pyramid schemes.
Step 3
Save every scrap of work I’ve ever done for eBay onto CD. Take it home to create a digital portfolio. Realize that the Paint program on my laptop is not gonna cut it. Save to buy $500 Adobe Illustrator software.
Step 4
Take a break and blow off some steam by creating another blog that pokes a little fun at eBay Support and last year’s decision-making mascot, RASCI. http://gypsymongoose.blogspot.com/. Note: the traveling RASCI idea was a discussion topic at an actual taskforce meeting last year. Someone brought up how much they hated the thing and derailed the meeting for 30 minutes.
Step 5
Get some decent design books, take online desktop publishing classes, produce free materials for local businesses, create yet another website – http://maaspublications.typepad.com/ – all in the hopes of building opportunities for a) possible freelance/permanent design jobs and b) telling my current bosses to step the freak OFF sometime really, really soon.
Feel free to check out my new website, but keep in mind I’ve had it all of two days. I’ve got a fairly particular idea of how I want it to look, and as I’m a newbie with TypePad, most of what’s posted is me trying to figure out how to put what where.
And so, off I go! With a bing and a bong and a buzz buzz buzz!
Lost at Sea
What the hell am I doing here?
I’ve been asking myself this question at least ten times a day for the past two months. Especially when any one of my THREE different bosses is stuck in a loop, detailing the steps of my next data entry task, over and over and over.
I swear to god, nowadays it feels like I live in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown“.
Boss: “I’m going to need you to do another audit today of the Vancouver folders. We need to see if the ‘read’ access is set correctly for every user.”
Me: “Yeah, I did that yesterday. I was entering two new teams anyway, so I checked them all.”
Boss: “Right. But we need to make sure all the folders have ‘read’ access set.”
Me: “That’s what I did. I checked every folder. Yesterday morning. There were a couple blank and one or two with a wrong name, so I fixed them. It’s done.”
Boss: “Troy checked them a few days ago and said there were some with wrong names. I want you to check every single folder by going to the evaluation screen, right clicking here, and selecting “Share Folder”.”
Me: Sigh.
Boss: “I spot checked four of the teams last night and didn’t see any errors. Let me know when you’re available and mwah waa waaah wah wah waaaaa.”
The. Hell.
