Right Turn without Signaling

The week got off to a rough start. I won’t lie. It started with finding out something that resulted in my temper going off of the chart. I was angry. I was hurt. I was conflicted. I was not a happy camper.

I won’t go into the whole thing because the details are not important. And I have too much respect for the person despite what happened. We talked. We talked a lot. All is good. Took us some time to get there, I think – but communication is a good thing. Amazing how that works. Amazing when you realize how much good communication can slip. Live and learn, right?

And during my funk that chased away my muse to write or public pictures, I was in work hell. A two day training that we had been working for went off with the hitches that were unexpected. I had to print off a copy of the manual for everyone. 50 copies of a 140 page manual. I had an accounting temp under the guidance of an accounting manager finish printing them off for me. The next morning, I came in to a stack on the table in our war room. A stack of 30 manuals that was not as tall as the stack of 10 manuals I had printed off the day before. Fuck.

I discovered the temp had printed of the first 40 pages of each manual only. Knowing the manager like I do, I knew he missed the “one hundred” in front of the “one hundred and forty” I had stated. I printed off enough to get us started and started printing off more while running down to the training room to deliver what I had to the class of 25. I ran into the accounting manager on the way who asked why I was rushing around. I explained that they hadn’t printed off the entire manuals. “Oh,” he said, “it must have run out of paper.” Yeah, 30 times on the exact same page. Dumb ass.

Halfway through the day one of training, I got pulled into a payroll problem. I have two groups of people who refuse to work together. The issue got so bad that the employees being paid was at risk. So, I pulled them together to try to sort it out. Try is the key word in that sentence. At a particular point, I flipped out at them. The finger pointing, the whining, the focus on the issues that are not related to the fact people were about to not get paid were just too painful to try to sort through.

I spent the rest of the week escalating the issues – and running interference. And getting people in trouble. The perfect part of this – the fact that training was revealing exactly what I was seeing – people were not in synch nor were they communicating. Everything was a knee jerk reaction instead of thoughtful diligence. Taking 10 minutes to do it right was resulting in hours of fixing errors. Needless to say, the week has ended with people realizing it has to stop – the right people.

I should mention that there were high points in the week. Wednesday was a good point. It turned around after having a walk in the sun and lunch with a friend. I also heard from a few other friends it had been a while since I had chatted with. It’s funny because one in particular pinged me asking if there was something wrong before he even knew there was. I love TL. Have I mentioned that lately?

Thursday, I went to buy coffee three times – and had it bought for me each time. Can’t hate that. Then I left work, sat in the park, and read my book on Kindle as I drank my coffee. It was sunny with blue skies. I love working downtown.

My work week ends on a high note. A short day of work (thank goodness for being hourly at a place that hates overtime) and a date. Can’t beat a day that ends like that.

Unless it is Metallica as sung by drag queens.

We’ll see about that one though.

Happy Friday!