2002-05-13 - 2:31 p.m.
Quoting the Wicked Witch: "What a world, what a world ..."

*thwump* That was the sound of me hitting the (metaphorical) floor again. If I went to a "Conference for Assistants" to learn how to better serve, shouldn't my boss go to the "New Supervisor's Conference" to learn how to better motivate and supervise? She's very fond of negation.

"No, that's not what I want at all. I mean, that's the information I want on the form, but ..." *pause* "Meet with [HR person]. I know she does similar forms. I'll need to see one of hers before I know how I want ours to mesh."

It would have been nice to know that before I designed my own. I thought I was supposed to create the form, then check with my supervisor and [HR person] to make sure the right questions are on it. Now I feel as though I've failed and been slapped on the wrist for it. Worse, I know my supervisor didn't mean it that way; she has called me "overly sensitive" before for responding defensively to her negative statements.

Optimism? What's that? With another fifteen months of this stretching ahead ... *sigh* As they say in Galaxy Quest, "Never Give Up. Never Surrender."

... And now I have the phrase "girding up my loins" (roughly re: struggling forward) going through my head, which is horribly anachronistic and liable to misinterpretation. Sometimes it's a bad thing to have learned most of my vocabulary from the written page before I ever heard it in conversation; lots of odd phrases come to mind that would sound really strange if I said them out loud, and while I have no trouble knowing where and when to use them, I have trouble accurately defining them.

Speaking of anachronistic, never, ever, ever see the movie Black Knight. It's a Martin Lawrence flick that came out in November 2001. My family rented it yesterday because hey, medieval, and humor. *shudder* It was truly awful, enough to make me quip that it put the "ick" in "flick". My brother's comment: "Boy, you sure can pick 'em, Mom." Mom's comment, looking at Dad: "Well, at least it was better than Fire and Ice."

That last comment only makes sense if (1) you have seen said movie, which is a 1987 independent film whose plot seems to exist only to display the skiing prowess of the persons pretending to be actors and pretty views of the mountainside, and (2) you are not a ski buff, otherwise you might enjoy that sort of thing. Dad rented it once on a whim, and the rest of the family has never let him forget it. *grin*

... Two Hours Later ...

After I wrote the above sections, I tried to post. No dice. So I went to lunch and did some more touch-up on the form, then went to [HR person] with it as directed. I was still under the impression that this was a separate form that the newly hired individual was to fill out, asked [HR person] about the kinds of forms she has, and came back to my boss with the answers. Said boss looked at me as though I were speaking a foreign language.

"No, no, I know none of her forms are like this one. What I want is for these questions to be blended into one of her existing forms, I know she has one that tracks information. A status form? And then it would be routed to me when all of the pertinent information had been filled in by HR or whomever. And, oh, probably when they exit, too, so I'd know to take things back out of the system. And, hmm, maybe we should be tracking pagers too ..."

This went on for a good ten minutes, during which time I could feel my IQ measurably dropping as I tried unsuccessfully to wrap my mind around the nebulous idea she was trying to hand over to me. I kept thinking of the amount of extra work this was going to create for the HR department, how unlikely it was that I would be able to describe what we needed accurately to [HR person] out of all the theoretical debris I was trying to absorb, and how much more "No, no ..." I was going to collect before it was over.

Fortunately, my boss ground to a halt on the pager idea, and decided she needed to run this by HER boss before going any further, to get more information and ideas. Then, she would get back to me again about the form thing. *relieved sigh* Reprieved!

I don't belong in business. Especially not as a secretary, no sir. Fifteen months? It might as well be fifteen years. How will I last that long?

*whispering to self* Remember the optimism. Remember! It's half full! Full, I tell you!

*self whispering back* Half full? What do you mean? There is no glass!

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