Career Development

It's been a while since I've written about work, and an update is overdue.  Mind you, nothing has changed much except my outlook. But, having finally adjusted my expectations, I'm able to enjoy the humor a bit more than I did before.

In the first week I was back from vacation, I essentially had to relearn my job, not once but twice.  The overall objective didn't change at all...just the specific steps and details to get it done.  On my first day back, I was handed new instructions and a new flow chart (the boss loves her flow charts). I spent a few days learning exactly what to put in subject fields of emails and in what order, when to forward vs. when to reply, and how to get things back on track when the attorneys didn't follow the precise instructions.

Meanwhile, I was starting to see signs the boss's recent calm streak was coming to an end as her lucidity began to deteriorate. She chewed out one of my coworkers about a box I put on the floor in my cubicle, asserting that someone could trip over it and get hurt, that she had asked her to put it in some other cubicle (which she didn't specify), and that when she asks someone to do something she expects it to be done.

Then one morning she arrived at my desk, breathless, her hair (which she recently chopped off close to her scalp) sticking up wildly, and told me to hold off doing anything until she took another look at her new instructions and then sent them to me.  Next we went from doing everything by email to eliminating the need for emails (but not really) altogether.

As I was learning the newest new process, she stopped by and informed me that her new way of doing things was going to save me so much time that she was going to be able to utilize me more, adding that she wanted me to help edit and update some training material.

"You're the obvious choice for it," she declared.

I didn't get excited, because by now I've learned that even if I was allowed to use any creativity or individual thought, she'd immediately squash it and I'd eventually go insane trying to do every little detail her way even though I could probably do it better on my own.  And I wasn't about to drag my beloved writing skills into this morbid cycle.

Fortunately, it turned out there was no writing or real editing involved at all.  Instead, I am going through her precious manifesto, editing the background colors and font sizes.  Some pages have blue backgrounds, some white.  Some have frighteningly huge fonts, and others look fairly normal.  All of them are wildly indented, capitalized and underlined in random places.  None of them remain coherent from beginning to end.

Apparently this project is going to open a whole new world for me.