Wednesday Mirth, Thursday Wrath.
Sep. 21st, 2006 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseHappy at school: We had student days this last week. Since the Barony has a student branch and we get most of our new members from the University stomping grounds, we tend to set up a table and show off stuff.
I was supposed to be at the table from 12:30 (right after Bio) until my 16th century literature class... but then there was a slightly empty gap afterwards. So I decided I'd just stay dressed up for the class and come back afterward.
The Italian Ren from our "dinner with the Borgias" event was still in good shape (Even prettified since it was first made),and it's barely past the 1500's mark -- as is the course material.
I stopped by at 10:30 during my break to hide my stuff udner the table so i wouldbn't ahve to break my back lugging it all, only to find we had a problem. Virtually none of the people who usually donate stuff to display on the table had done so. We had an arrow, an archer's glove, and two bowyer's books.
Out form the bag, then, comes the dress, and one sleeve, and my jewellery spread out on another bit of cloth (Except the pieces where close inspection would reveal their falseness), including a pair of earrings made by a member of the group. Then my sketchbook with the whole two pages of doodles of Raphael (and the Raphael book itself, why not?). I made a fast run to the art & architecture library, found the sections on painting styles, and came up with soem books I certainly wouldn't mind looking into further myself - a book of exceedingly vivid photographs of a basilica with some really gorgeous frescos and mosaic (since msotly destroyed by earthquake), a jewel-bright copy of a Book of Hours made the same size as the original, and paintings by Brueghel.
Someone else had brought a game board, it proved, and someone else ahd a couple of recorders.
I returned after Bio, got dressed and put my hair up properly, and stayed there for most of my two-hour break, before I had to run to the literature course. I beat the proessor, to my surprise, whcih gave me just enoguh time to be deep in conversation with another woman ont he strange Renaissance sleeves before he came (with another girl listening in). He looked at me funny, but didn't say anything until the end of the course. At the end, though, he did ask me why I was dressed like Katherine of Aragon, and that led to quite a conversation. he also said he hadn't asked because he didn't want to single me out. I still ahve a hard time processing how beign dressed entirely strangely didn't already single me out - but then, he's the one I impulsively apologized to for being one of the only ones speaking up in class -- though he said he'd much prefer more people did.
Much fun. And going back to the table afterward was even better, as it ate up some of the three and a half hour gap before math. I left my jewellery and dress adn the library books for the display today, and I'll pick them up tomorrow.
_______________________________________
Today was not so good. I was supposed to go to choir, or, if I should bypass that, go to archery at least. Neither. I was just not in the mood.
Today was work. Was is the operative word.
Let's recap:
When I felt my job was actually too little work for too few hours, I gave my immediate superior an assessment of the situation, and included not one but 6 alternate possibilities for ways to trim my hours without causing trouble for the other girls in the office on the really busy days. I checked the best of these with the other girls, got their opinions, and refined my suggestions or favoured ones based on that. We discussed it, and the accountant seemed willing to try and come up with some accommodation.
Result: Rather than implement one of my suggestions, they told me to take some of the workload off one of the people who was truly and honestly overworked, refused to change my schedule at all.
The reason for that was because, he said, they didn't want to cut my hours, make me unhappy and end up with me looking for another job. (Um, WHO suggested I cut my hours?)
The result of that decision, alas, wasn't much. I did take on some minor projects for her, and started one complicated job, only to run into the obvious problem, vis: if someone is already working ten hour days and/or six days a week plus on-call time, then any project she's working on that's large enough that someone else doing it would ease her burden... is a project that requires her to take extra hours or days she doesn't have to train her replacement to do. In other words, I typed up a few letters or made tables for her - twenty--minute jobs - and did some research and built one spreadsheet - a handful of hours over about a week. Not exactly what she needed. I'd ask her if she had more, and she'd say she hadn't had time to set anything else up,. or she did, but she needed to find a spare hour to show me...
And then she moved to the new plant for virtually every hour of every day she was working, so she couldn't even hand me the letters or spreadsheet data.
Yet shortly after this became clear, I once again got a verbal warning for spending work time and not break time on the internet. Um, clean desk? I can prove it? (Never mind that the girl whose desk isn't visible from the Managers' offices is buying beauty products on Amazon and checking up on the Brangelina. I'd like to think my internet time is more productive than that, but that's a perspective the managers may disagree with.)
NEXT: I tell them I'm going back to school. I tell them in early July. I come up with a schedule with the girl who'd been working one day a week where she, who was starving for more work-time, could work more and I could switch to part-time, and we'd ALL be happy. The accountant checks with her; she says she's happy with it. He pretty much tells her this is the plan.
Two days later he tells me that instead, they're hiring another girl to take my old job and switching me to a new project - one that would be part-time and long term, but would mean that I could choose my own schedule within reason (IE, at least two days a week), and not be tied to the other girls' schedules at all.
Cool. They actually, for the first time ever, hire someone in a timely fashion. I train her. She's good, which is almost as rare as prompt hiring, and likewise good, because I once again rediscover how many small niggling little jobs I d, and how many places the computer programs have non-intuitive workarounds, and all that stuff I tend to take for granted because I can do it in my sleep.
The new project starts almost two weeks late, meaning I miss about three days of work right at the time when my hours have dropped significantly in total as it is. And right when I have textbooks to buy, which, even with an English course happy to use Dover editions, and a class without one, is still significant moola.
I've done three days of work on the project. In that three days, I've done work that would have taken three of the four other people likely to be put on the same project at least five days, possibly as much as two full time weeks. (This isn't bragging. This is knowing my co-workers - the new girl, C.B., could probably have kept up if given a confidence boost. The others - have other areas of expertise I can't match, but computer-wise... I'm the one. The accountant is the only one who knows 'em better, and there are parts of my job he had to ask me about.)
I was just getting intrigued by the size of it, and pretty much found my way around the new program (Nicely intuitive. The worst it's taken me to find something is five minutes.) when I hit a point where the project could go one of two ways. One, it could get really heavy, keep me busy from now to Christmas, and involve a whole load of man-hours form one or two other people who have more of the information I'll need (It will involve knowing the new machinery almost inside and out, or at least the names and locations of all the essential parts. I got an idea how much this meant when I saw the new plant... nice. Gargantuan, and far more efficiently laid out. It's almost like someone designed it with a modern system in mind, instead or retrofitting and adding extensions to an over 70 year old building)
Alas, said person is not going to be free from his current over 40 hours of work a week for at least a month.
So Todd sent me home early, and said that, sicne it's indefinite, he could make me an ROE. I repeat: only three days of work before they decided this. And even if it would ahve taken someone else a bit longer; five days isn't exactly impressive either.
The office girls know they can call me on my non-school days, and Todd says it could be two weeks, and he'll call in a month even if it's not time yet, just to give me an idea where things stand.
In his office, I nodded and smiled and I was gracious (And unsurprised - there'd been a dance of the managers all day that was leading here). What's funny is, I meant it. I wasn't really upset then, or when I went back to the old plant and told the girls in the office and in the store.
I started to get mad on the way home. Because there's also this in the history of that place: if they say soemthing will be ready in a month, you're lucky if they mean a month and a half. Usually two months. Sometimes three. The GM has been on time to one thing in his life; his wedding (which was still late, and tr reception drastically so, as you may recall me reporting.) This is the place that hired me as a temp in october, offered me the job for real near Christmas, and actually hired me off from the temp agency in... MAY.
So you can understand why I'm not really believing I'll be working again before Christmas if I count on this job.
But you know what it did give me? Experience in four computer programs I hadn't used (and the proof that when I say I learn quickly, I MEAN it), experience training, a lot more digging through numbers and spreadsheets and interpreting different formats, and just where people paid us wrong for four months straight.
Granted, if I haven't found anything before theyc all back, of course I'll go. I'm not so pissed off I won't be opportunist about making money. But if I find something?
Bye bye bakery.
I was supposed to be at the table from 12:30 (right after Bio) until my 16th century literature class... but then there was a slightly empty gap afterwards. So I decided I'd just stay dressed up for the class and come back afterward.
The Italian Ren from our "dinner with the Borgias" event was still in good shape (Even prettified since it was first made),and it's barely past the 1500's mark -- as is the course material.
I stopped by at 10:30 during my break to hide my stuff udner the table so i wouldbn't ahve to break my back lugging it all, only to find we had a problem. Virtually none of the people who usually donate stuff to display on the table had done so. We had an arrow, an archer's glove, and two bowyer's books.
Out form the bag, then, comes the dress, and one sleeve, and my jewellery spread out on another bit of cloth (Except the pieces where close inspection would reveal their falseness), including a pair of earrings made by a member of the group. Then my sketchbook with the whole two pages of doodles of Raphael (and the Raphael book itself, why not?). I made a fast run to the art & architecture library, found the sections on painting styles, and came up with soem books I certainly wouldn't mind looking into further myself - a book of exceedingly vivid photographs of a basilica with some really gorgeous frescos and mosaic (since msotly destroyed by earthquake), a jewel-bright copy of a Book of Hours made the same size as the original, and paintings by Brueghel.
Someone else had brought a game board, it proved, and someone else ahd a couple of recorders.
I returned after Bio, got dressed and put my hair up properly, and stayed there for most of my two-hour break, before I had to run to the literature course. I beat the proessor, to my surprise, whcih gave me just enoguh time to be deep in conversation with another woman ont he strange Renaissance sleeves before he came (with another girl listening in). He looked at me funny, but didn't say anything until the end of the course. At the end, though, he did ask me why I was dressed like Katherine of Aragon, and that led to quite a conversation. he also said he hadn't asked because he didn't want to single me out. I still ahve a hard time processing how beign dressed entirely strangely didn't already single me out - but then, he's the one I impulsively apologized to for being one of the only ones speaking up in class -- though he said he'd much prefer more people did.
Much fun. And going back to the table afterward was even better, as it ate up some of the three and a half hour gap before math. I left my jewellery and dress adn the library books for the display today, and I'll pick them up tomorrow.
_______________________________________
Today was not so good. I was supposed to go to choir, or, if I should bypass that, go to archery at least. Neither. I was just not in the mood.
Today was work. Was is the operative word.
Let's recap:
When I felt my job was actually too little work for too few hours, I gave my immediate superior an assessment of the situation, and included not one but 6 alternate possibilities for ways to trim my hours without causing trouble for the other girls in the office on the really busy days. I checked the best of these with the other girls, got their opinions, and refined my suggestions or favoured ones based on that. We discussed it, and the accountant seemed willing to try and come up with some accommodation.
Result: Rather than implement one of my suggestions, they told me to take some of the workload off one of the people who was truly and honestly overworked, refused to change my schedule at all.
The reason for that was because, he said, they didn't want to cut my hours, make me unhappy and end up with me looking for another job. (Um, WHO suggested I cut my hours?)
The result of that decision, alas, wasn't much. I did take on some minor projects for her, and started one complicated job, only to run into the obvious problem, vis: if someone is already working ten hour days and/or six days a week plus on-call time, then any project she's working on that's large enough that someone else doing it would ease her burden... is a project that requires her to take extra hours or days she doesn't have to train her replacement to do. In other words, I typed up a few letters or made tables for her - twenty--minute jobs - and did some research and built one spreadsheet - a handful of hours over about a week. Not exactly what she needed. I'd ask her if she had more, and she'd say she hadn't had time to set anything else up,. or she did, but she needed to find a spare hour to show me...
And then she moved to the new plant for virtually every hour of every day she was working, so she couldn't even hand me the letters or spreadsheet data.
Yet shortly after this became clear, I once again got a verbal warning for spending work time and not break time on the internet. Um, clean desk? I can prove it? (Never mind that the girl whose desk isn't visible from the Managers' offices is buying beauty products on Amazon and checking up on the Brangelina. I'd like to think my internet time is more productive than that, but that's a perspective the managers may disagree with.)
NEXT: I tell them I'm going back to school. I tell them in early July. I come up with a schedule with the girl who'd been working one day a week where she, who was starving for more work-time, could work more and I could switch to part-time, and we'd ALL be happy. The accountant checks with her; she says she's happy with it. He pretty much tells her this is the plan.
Two days later he tells me that instead, they're hiring another girl to take my old job and switching me to a new project - one that would be part-time and long term, but would mean that I could choose my own schedule within reason (IE, at least two days a week), and not be tied to the other girls' schedules at all.
Cool. They actually, for the first time ever, hire someone in a timely fashion. I train her. She's good, which is almost as rare as prompt hiring, and likewise good, because I once again rediscover how many small niggling little jobs I d, and how many places the computer programs have non-intuitive workarounds, and all that stuff I tend to take for granted because I can do it in my sleep.
The new project starts almost two weeks late, meaning I miss about three days of work right at the time when my hours have dropped significantly in total as it is. And right when I have textbooks to buy, which, even with an English course happy to use Dover editions, and a class without one, is still significant moola.
I've done three days of work on the project. In that three days, I've done work that would have taken three of the four other people likely to be put on the same project at least five days, possibly as much as two full time weeks. (This isn't bragging. This is knowing my co-workers - the new girl, C.B., could probably have kept up if given a confidence boost. The others - have other areas of expertise I can't match, but computer-wise... I'm the one. The accountant is the only one who knows 'em better, and there are parts of my job he had to ask me about.)
I was just getting intrigued by the size of it, and pretty much found my way around the new program (Nicely intuitive. The worst it's taken me to find something is five minutes.) when I hit a point where the project could go one of two ways. One, it could get really heavy, keep me busy from now to Christmas, and involve a whole load of man-hours form one or two other people who have more of the information I'll need (It will involve knowing the new machinery almost inside and out, or at least the names and locations of all the essential parts. I got an idea how much this meant when I saw the new plant... nice. Gargantuan, and far more efficiently laid out. It's almost like someone designed it with a modern system in mind, instead or retrofitting and adding extensions to an over 70 year old building)
Alas, said person is not going to be free from his current over 40 hours of work a week for at least a month.
So Todd sent me home early, and said that, sicne it's indefinite, he could make me an ROE. I repeat: only three days of work before they decided this. And even if it would ahve taken someone else a bit longer; five days isn't exactly impressive either.
The office girls know they can call me on my non-school days, and Todd says it could be two weeks, and he'll call in a month even if it's not time yet, just to give me an idea where things stand.
In his office, I nodded and smiled and I was gracious (And unsurprised - there'd been a dance of the managers all day that was leading here). What's funny is, I meant it. I wasn't really upset then, or when I went back to the old plant and told the girls in the office and in the store.
I started to get mad on the way home. Because there's also this in the history of that place: if they say soemthing will be ready in a month, you're lucky if they mean a month and a half. Usually two months. Sometimes three. The GM has been on time to one thing in his life; his wedding (which was still late, and tr reception drastically so, as you may recall me reporting.) This is the place that hired me as a temp in october, offered me the job for real near Christmas, and actually hired me off from the temp agency in... MAY.
So you can understand why I'm not really believing I'll be working again before Christmas if I count on this job.
But you know what it did give me? Experience in four computer programs I hadn't used (and the proof that when I say I learn quickly, I MEAN it), experience training, a lot more digging through numbers and spreadsheets and interpreting different formats, and just where people paid us wrong for four months straight.
Granted, if I haven't found anything before theyc all back, of course I'll go. I'm not so pissed off I won't be opportunist about making money. But if I find something?
Bye bye bakery.
