Monday 21 January 2008

It’s Always Good to Be Missed……..

……or not as the case may be. The only person to notice my absence for the majority of last week was the new, temporary, HR woman*. Whilst she’s a big improvement over the permanent woman she’s got the eye of a hawk, which somewhat scares me! I was at least expecting the boss to ask where I was last week as I hadn’t bothered phoning in. Unusually, for a woman, I couldn’t even be bothered to pick up the phone so I turned it off completely for the duration of my time off.

Following from my radio whoring a couple of weeks ago, in which I attempted, and failed miserably, to win a branded toaster, I was feeling quite perky – even for me. I’ve always tried to put a positive spin on feeling like death warmed up most days, but now I’m failing miserably. At the beginning of August 2007 I found myself unable to eat or drink without it exiting in a hurried fashion so I gave up trying, narrowly missing a trip to the hospital for a top up on the fluids. In that two weeks I managed to shift a whopping 2 stone in weight. Since then it’s continued to come off, and this weekend I hit the 3 and a half stone lost mark. Cheaper than any diet I’ve ever tried before! So now I’m back to not being able to eat, and whilst I haven’t been sick, I feel constantly so.

So you might think that the arthritis is easing up now I’m not such a Heifer. Wrong, so very wrong. But at least now I have collar bones!

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A total of ninety four emails awaited me when I came in this morning. Luckily most of them were just a case of noting that they were there, allowing me to move onto the more important ones, the ones that work email is meant for…..the joke emails. But one caught my eye in particular from another company, which I had been copied in on. A colleague had sent out some drawings via email (a practice which is frowned upon by anal document controllers such as myself) so they could be commented on – and commented on they were. One excerpt from this email reads,

“I'm afraid there are still quite a lot of technical errors with I'm
disappointed that you have not appreciated. Typical is the trench configuration
and switchgear support to the indoor switchgear and the transformer base size
given the cable configuration from the transformer. Between you, Powermann and
the packages of information already issued and used for Peacock Farm etc., we
should not be in this position.
Some how you need to gain more
knowledge/understanding to enable you to built it correctly. As drawn it won't
work.
I suggest that you, the architects, Powermann and SSE will have to get
round the table, not for another progress meeting but to work through the
technical requirements to enable you to comprehend the issues, together with a
site visit to a substation to turn theory into practical understanding..

Phil, Kevin, Nigel - please pick up this suggestion and arrange. -
If you need my help to be able to thoroughly discuss construction detailed
requirements then I'm happy to get involved.”

I’ve been subjected to this public slating by someone in the past, so I took exception to it happening to someone that I have a lot of time for. If you feel the need to be so vile to someone at least have the decency to grammar check it first. Although I’m glad he didn’t, it just proves what a complete moron he is.


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Meanwhile, the boss has vanished with previously said new HR woman. I can only assume this is to further discuss his bullying tactics. A wet dishrag – sorry - a colleague has accused him of bullying. Whilst I agree with some of what’s been said is bullying I also think a lot is down to the boss being a bit of a twat. He’s one of these people who has to constantly be “in” with everyone and appear to be “one of the lads”. Exactly the kind of person I love to hate. I have been on the receiving end of his comments (“you wallow in self pity”, “any cameras been shoved in you lately?”) but you have to take them with the intelligence they were spoken with….in his case, none. The saga is on going. The kid has been off now for a good 12 weeks, maybe longer, and the situation shows no sign of ending. He even had his mum in here last week to hold his hand, and even then he couldn’t last more than 3 hours. I cannot see them letting the boss go as they won’t be able to replace him, but on the other hand given the situation they can’t exactly tell the kid to leave. Only time will tell I suppose.

Eeek, negative post. Bah, where are my concrete boots?




* I’m hoping the permanent one is going through a long and painful labour. She’s not the nicest person I’ve encountered.

1 comment:

OddThomas said...

Have you tried again for the toaster? If you win that, then you'll want to use it, so you might be able to eat something!!

Its good that you're losing the weight, just be careful cos its disappearing rather quickly. One thing you did leave out ... I seem to recall you saying that you quite like the size of your behind now :-)