Once again, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I considered writing a bit on Friday about the tornados in Florida, the UN report on global climate change, and the administration’s efforts to make sure that no one can draw any connections between the two, but I was busy fomenting a coup d’etat in the office and didn’t get around to it.
Seriously.
While I was off in the wilds of Victoria, a small crisis (in my boss’ words – he’s such a drama queen. They come in straight nowadays) started brewing in the office. I knew about the preamble – one of my coworkers has been having health problems and was hired on the condition that the job wasn’t supposed to exacerbate them or get in the way of her rehabilitation, which is has. So, on Wednesday before I left for Vicky-town, she basically resigned — she actually said she wanted to only resign half of her position, but we were all pretty sure they weren’t going to let her do that.
Cut to Friday morning. As Beverly and I are driving in, she begins filling me in on what happened while I was enlightening people down on the Crab Coast. My boss, who is a typical alpha male, has been solving the problems around the office like a typical alpha male. My coworker presented a list of problems she’s having, and he was going through them all one by one to get rid of them — and causing more problems — rather than addressing the root issue behind them all.
So, after talking with several other people in the office, at around 11 am, I walked into his office, shut the door, and said, “I think ___so entire department needs to be reporting to me. I can support her better than the people she’s currently reporting to, and I think it will help solve a lot of the issues that have come up. I’m not sure that we can keep her here and happy, but we can definitely make it easier on her replacement.”
Long pause.
Him. “OK, I’ll consider that.”
Typical response. I figured that it would eventually get worked out with some bizarre compromise (he’s good at those), and that in another week or so we’d be given a series of band-aid fixes that would make him happy but in reality solve very little.
Imagine my surprise when I found myself chairing my first staff meeting at 3 o’clock that afternoon.
My head was spinning. It still is. I’m not sure this isn’t all going to turn out to be some colossal mistake on my part (part of the success of this plan is going to involve a hands-off approach from certain other people that I work with who aren’t very good at being hands-off), but the meeting went well and everyone seems happy so far. And I’ve gone from having no people working for me to having three people working for me.
On the other hand, I did spend most of yesterday with a stomach ache. I thought that it might have been the result of the ultra-meat pizza Ray brought home on Friday night, but now that I write this I’m wondering if there might have been a little more to it than that.
Ray’s reaction has been funny – “does it come with a pay raise?” Silly boyfriend. He works for corporate America and has no idea how state agencies work. It’s like this: There is no reason that anyone, ever, will ever earn more money. As long as we all get that basic rule, no one will ever be disappointed. We’re there because we love our jobs … almost wrote that without laughing …
Any who.
I have more mundane travel planned. This week, I’m off to the wilds of Pearland, Texas (it’s a suburb of Houston. I expect to fight for survival in the parking lot of a Bed, Bath and Beyond as I choose between a vanilla latte and a caramel machiatto), and next week I get to go to Fort Worth. And then I’m home for a little while, which I’m looking forward to. Too much bouncing around the state of Texas makes Chris go a little bonkers, and I’m already a little bonkers as it is.
I hope your weekend is going well and that it’s bright and sunny wherever you are.
