Misread Attitude

It’s been a rather terrible week; or at least, last week was. I’ve been tired all weekend just thinking about it, and having to go to work tomorrow and face it doesn’t help. I can only hope this coming week will be better, but I don’t expect it to be.

Last week was the preliminary audit week (for lack of any better descriptor); our main customer sent an auditor to wander the place for three days asking questions and so I spent all of the previous week frantically trying to get everything in place. My boss had, quite nicely, set out a number of requirements and I just ticked them off as they were accomplished or at least set in place to the best of my ability. All the same it was quite frustrating seeing things happen so slowly, partly due to the strange placement of the work breaks and partly due to my subordinates not being terribly enthusiastic to finish all their tasks on time because getting to work overtime gets them paid time and a half, so assigning any task within half an hour of a break means that they’ll dilly about doing something and then only start on it after the break. And on Monday one of them simply didn’t turn up for work, despite me having said repeatedly that this was a very important audit and we wanted to be as prepared for it as possible, which led to me rather overworking the other subordinate and me.

And then on Tuesday the lab was audited (now you know why I was so fixated on the Monday absence) and we found a huge bunch of things that I hadn’t double-checked beforehand or had put aside to resolve when I had time—in passing, I probably shouldn’t do that anymore; I never do seem to find this magical period of time when I can sit down to resolve non-urgent-but-important issues and then they tend to fester and blow up on me—or that I had simply never yet got around to doing. It was all quite uncomfortable and embarrassing, especially when I was supposed to be answering all the questions but got tongue-tied and quiet and my boss had to fill in everything for me. And on Wednesday the results came out and the lab got the lowest passing score even though the auditor made special emphasis on me being new and the lab having been a significant improvement since last year and having been an absolute disaster the last time she saw it. Which makes me wonder why the lab didn’t get a negative score during the last audit, but that’s water under the bridge.

It’s not like I have no action plan, of course. Most of the observations she had are easily sorted out—I already set them all into a task list on a time line and expect them all to be prepared and/or in place by the end of June, barring surprises—but I hadn’t expected the bosses to be so emotionally invested in it. That may be my biggest failing yet: I care about the lab and that it didn’t do well rankles with me, but I wouldn’t explode with rage or disappointment about it: I’m detached, as always. It did poorly or at least not as well as we thought it would do; we made mistakes; these are the mistakes, here’s what we’ll do about it, let’s set out a plan of action that seems reasonable, we’ll move on and improve. Not so the bosses: one gave my subordinates a half-hour speech about the importance of sticking to rules and regulations and the SOPs and the other gave me a half-hour tirade about the importance of being obedient and having a good attitude and having common sense. (I think that comparison highlights quite nicely that one of them is primarily Melancholic and the other is Choleric. And I, of course, am Phlegmatic, which may be the primary reason I get along well with people until they start expecting me to do lots of work in very little time.)

It’s not like they don’t have their points, of course, though I could probably argue that none of the auditor’s observations regarded an SOP not being followed, more like a guiding principle being laid aside. But that would just show my poor attitude. I don’t know, sometimes, what to say to make things better. Actually, I never ever, in any case, know what to say to make things better. My default reaction to sad, frustrated, irritated, or otherwise non-happy people is to go “poor ickle INSERTPERSONNAME” and maybe pat them on the back. I don’t think it ever makes them feel better but that’s why I’m not a professional therapist. And it wouldn’t do to go up against the boss and go “no, my attitude’s fine! LOOK AT IT” because that would just prove their point, though I haven’t the foggiest how to go about remodelling my attitude. That’s why, when people say I’ve changed somehow, I can only accept their opinion because I can never tell if I have, except after a long time. But I could never tell you the difference between me, now, and me, two months ago, unless you asked me two years from now and even then I would probably not know. Probably two months ago I was more cheerful.

I should probably go to visit the boss’s office tomorrow for a long talk; we haven’t had one of those in a long time and maybe that’s what’s contributing to the current tension. And I still need to prepare a presentation for some paperwork that’s long overdue, and set up a couple of reports, and reformat some forms to make them easier to use, and in the middle of all that find enough work for my subordinates to do so that they don’t get bored.

I went to the bookstore today, to get some things for the lab that made up a major observation during the audit. Apparently being an auditor makes you distrustful of everything that everybody does. I should cultivate that habit, except I would go insane from the effort.