Revolve Around Office

There are times, like now, when I wonder if I’ve ever been really competent at anything in my life. Not to say I’ve not been able to do some things well, and enjoy doing them; I’ve managed to win two NaNoWriMos in a row even if I’ve never been able to make it to the celebratory gatherings, and I still retain a little (very little) of my ability at the piano, and every now and then I even say something witty that I hadn’t just read somewhere and was waiting for an opportunity to use. But I never seem, come to think of it, to really have been good at whatever it was that I was being expected to do.

At least, I don’t think I was ever a good student. And now, even three months after starting work and having been confirmed as a passable worker, I don’t think I’m anything like my own definition of competent. It’s possibly personality; the way I think bleeds over into the way I work, and there’s very little I can do to stop it; the same goes for my co-workers, of course. My senior is the slow, methodical type, and given a blank slate the first thing she would do would be to get all the documents to prove that somebody had been authorised to give it to her and had got all the documents in place, signed and stamped and filed, and even then she would insist on getting emails to say what she was supposed to be doing with it and who was going to verify that she’d done with it what she was supposed to. Which is all very admirable, even if it sounds rather horrible (I’m always afraid that someday she’ll ask me what I think of her, and I’ll say she’s very slow and very careful and asks a lot of questions and she’ll take it as an insult). I’m not quite like that; I seem to be the kind of person who likes a sort of idea of how things work and why and what makes them tick and go and stop, which may mean I’m a rather weird fit for the position I occupy but does mean that when it comes to generating documentation and data I’m quite proficient. Which my boss said, when I asked for her opinion of my performance—that I’m terribly careless and I tend to just tell people what I’d like, very nicely so as not to stress them out, and then what I want doesn’t happen because people forget things when not reminded constantly; but I do generate wonderful documents.

I’m just being a little depressed today, maybe. It’s been a rough couple of days at work, what with things going wonky with various things that really shouldn’t be going wrong and all sorts of sudden changes and bits of news and things; just yesterday there were at least four different crises that came up over the course of the day, and today two of those crises just went on unsolved and another couple popped up and the upshot of the whole thing was that I was blamed for responding wrongly to a couple of crises (one from last week and one from three weeks ago), though the blame was probably at least slightly deserved since I ought to have noticed and told somebody. It’s just that one of the hardest lessons to learn is that one should never trust one’s own judgment, even when independence is supposedly a valuable trait, and one has to keep on telling other people when things are going wrong or else one gets flak for covering up stuff. It’s a lesson I’m still learning.

Not that work is entirely a vale of tears; I do enjoy it, which I thank God for. The co-workers are great people and I’d much rather they chew me out than just shrug their shoulder in silent resignation and deal with everything and slowly reduce me to the level of my abilities—at which point I’d never grow more; the work is challenging and fun, and every now and then there are assignments or situations that force me to be all creative or clever or something and those are fun too. And then every now and then one gets unexpected little compliments or things and that tends to brighten the day up a bit. But work does take something out of one: energy, at the very least. I don’t know how anybody manages to both work and manage a family; when they ask if I feel lonely at nights the natural first response is to wonder where I’d have the time or energy to do anything of the sort when I constantly leave the office after seven and sleep by eleven, with chores and computer games and videos and books to occupy me.

…posts like these are, I think, the main reason I will never ever add anybody from the office on Facebook. Google+, maybe, but not Facebook, just in case they get a curious streak and go reading through my posts; it would do weirdness to my reputation.

My self-consolation strategies are simple, though; I sit and eat and read and listen to music or play a game and eventually go to sleep. It’s probably not very healthy, but there’s something comforting about just sitting around and having somebody croon something soft and slow and sad over my laptop speakers while I munch on something sweet. Though I’ve stopped eating dinner more than twice a week, after reading somewhere that if one is an office worker then one can jolly well survive on two meals a day or less. It saves time and money at least. Tomorrow I’ll probably go swimming—get out to the pool around five and sit around in the pool soaking up water ‘til eight and drive back with cramps in both legs or something; I’ll need to buy goggles though, since I lost my old pair somewhere.

Sleep is a very valuable thing these days.