The Wanted Nail

It's raining again. I think that's appropriate, even if it's not terribly comfortable; I like rain more than I like the sun, but I'd rather have a little of each than a whole lot of just one. As it is, it's constantly cooling and sleep comes easy, but the laundry will probably never quite dry out and certainly will never have that particular smell that comes from having been in the sun all day. I actually don't know how that smell comes about; I think it'd be an easy experiment to conduct, but a quick Google search says that apparently the smell is ambient pollution. I'm not too sure on that.

I'm a little... higgledy-piggledy inside, at the moment. There's not really a terrible lot of stuff to be done at work before the long Christmas weekend kicks in, but it'll be a welcome break; work's not proceeding terribly smoothly for me at the moment. I suppose one part of it is that I'm more trusting of people than I ought to be--which is to say that since I put a fair bit of importance on trying to do what I promise, I tend to assume people will actually carry out the things they say they will... which, of course, is a bad assumption. (I remain staunch in my conviction that anybody who tries the "makes an ass of" line will feel my best attempt to hand their ass to them.) So today was like that, somewhat... stuff happened that I needed somebody to do, and pointed them at it and let them wander off to find somebody to do it with (because apparently it was a two-person task) and when they couldn't find anybody else they didn't tell me, and the long and short of it was that three hours later it still wasn't done and it was my fault that something originally minor blew up into a massive horror, because I hadn't been there every step of the way to make sure they did what I wanted them to do. It got me a long lecture on how I ought to have learnt from the last time and been more frantic about the urgency of the stuff I wanted done.

It's probably a good lesson to learn; that I do need sometimes to not assume whatever other people are doing is more important or urgent than what I want them to do for me, and to just make them do it--more important to get the job done than to always be the nice mild-mannered man, I suppose.

Other things I'm learning? I'm learning the temperaments of the people I work with--not that they're complete strangers to me, not any more (although I still never recognise the voice of the GM on the intercom and keep mistaking him for other people, which if I'm lucky he'll just shrug off as a running in-joke), but there's nothing like stress and pressure to show up people's colours. So far it looks like the second-youngest guy in the office (I hold the strange position of being the youngest) tends to catastrophise, while my senior tends to micromanage and worry; the manager apparently goes for comfort food, since the last two times I saw her really angry she also ended up going out of the way for nicer-than-usual food. Personally I just withdraw, which isn't difficult since I live mostly in my own head all the time, but isn't a good thing since distancing myself from the problem doesn't help me solve and avoid the next iteration. It's probably a needful pain, this whole business. And then, of course, I vent here, which is about as safe as it gets since none of my colleagues are friends with me on Facebook or MSN, and nobody I know on either of those is likely to know my colleagues well enough to tell 'em.

But then my life is full of needful pains, I think. Even now my shoulders and thighs ache from the swim I had on Saturday--the first I've had in three months, and I've lost my goggles somewhere and so all Sunday my eyes were sore from chlorine--and my wallet's hurting from my expenses because I never expected fillings and new pants to be quite so costly--and of course there was all that trouble I went to to get to this point at all, and I'll be unmentionable if I let it go now that I've got it.

The GM asked me what I liked about the job, and I said the people and its stability. And then he asked me to define those... "The people" was easy enough. I get along relatively well, I think, with the others--although of course it's entirely possible that they're just hiding their intense dislike of me deep enough, and I'm oblivious enough to not notice--but "stability"? For come to think of it, there really isn't very much of that in the job... every week is a new game of "fix the bugs", of rushing to get things done before the schedule steamrollers over everything, of trying to get business done as usual in the middle of all the little weirdnesses that pop up. No, it's not a stable place. Rhythmic, perhaps. Or predictable? for every time things seem to be going well, something comes along to upset the apple cart, and so every week is a sinusoid of up and down and smooth and rough.

He Whose heart is kind beyond all measure

Gives unto each day what He deems best

Lovingly, its part of pain and pleasure

Mingling toil with peace and rest.

It's one of the lines I like best. You just can't find writing like that these days.

...in other news, I went to the local church this Sunday with the boss and her (fiance? boyfriend?) and made a number of new friends. It was very enjoyable, especially because one of them speaks good English (and horrible Chinese, just like me!) and another is a fan of manga and Final Fantasy and we bonded in mutual hate for every arc since Soul Society of Bleach. And fanboyed over Hunter x Hunter and Fullmetal Alchemist and One Piece. And another thing I learned was that apparently the tune of "Frosty the Snowman" was put to a Christian Christmas song in Mandarin, which made me snicker a bit. But it was a good time, and I think I'll quite like it there. I'll only be there regularly next year onwards, though--Christmastime I'll be in Singapore, and I'll spend New Year's with the ancestral folks since I've got some administrative car-related matters to take care of down there.