Where I'd Rather Be...
I think it’s time to take a vacation. Or at least a day or two off. Or a few hours (which is what I did today). I think that all of us in my department could use a little time away from the office to try and relax – maybe actually release the tension in my shoulders.
Summers at my job are characterized by frantic, cranky customers, stressed out, cranky coworkers, and a stuffy, oppressive office (because the air conditioner is perpetually broken). On top of all that, I’m dealing with a new boss (again), new employees (who, thankfully are catching on quick but it’s still always a lot of work), new(ish) products, and a larger and more complex workload than ever before. My employees are all busting their butts and burnt out and I feel like I’m forever waiting for the next problem to arise. Things that seem slightly annoying during other times of the year are suddenly life or death situations. People that usually get along become short with each other and conflicts are a more common occurrence. There’s no time to get away from your desk, no time to take a break… no time to breathe. The stress and tension combined with the ceaseless heat makes for a pressure cooker like environment. Needless to say, I can’t wait for the fall!
Fifteen hellish workdays left ’till Labor Day!
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Filed under work | Comment (0)I haven’t posted in a while, and that’s because I’ve been super hella freaking busy. At work, I’ve been trying to bring on 3, now 4 new people. So there have been tons of hours spent reading resumes, scheduling interviews, and performing interviews. I’ve hired 2 people so far and have an interview today that I hope works out well… but even if it does, I’ll still need to keep looking to find a 4th person. These are all Software Trainers that I’m bringing aboard for my department, since I lost 2 people at the beginning of January and since our projected sales for this year are through the roof. LOTS to do there – working on revamping the way that we train and implement and trying to bring some order to the chaos. Oh, and bringing new staff on is great, but it’s also super hella exhausting and so far I’ve been pawning off a lot of the training of the first new person who started to other people on my team, but next week I’ll go real hands on so I’m expecting to be exhausted every day.
The other thing that I’ve been up to outside of work is house hunting! This part is fun, but it’s also really stressful. We’re first time home buyers so everything about this process is new to us and buying a house, with the financial commitment and all of the unknowns is scary. I’ll have to write an entire series of posts dedicated to all that, but for now here’s a widget from my Evernote notebook with the houses that we’ve decided deserve a second look:
Exciting. Scary. Stressful. All of that.
Upcoming events: next Saturday, March 7th, we’ll be going to see Enter the Haggis at Revolution Hall in Troy. I’m really excited for that show because I’ve had us on “going out and spending money lockdown” for the past couple of months and this will be our first “big night out” in a while. The weekend after that is St Patrick’s Parade weekend, but Alex is on call for that weekend so we may not be going out (which suits me fine because I’m old and would rather not spend the money). The weekend after that, we’ll be in Dubai! Yep, we’re going to visit the family in 3 weeks – we leave the evening of the 19th and get back the afternoon of the 29th. Very exciting!! I just got my passport back in the mail after sending it out (very late) to get my name changed. It only took 2 weeks to get it back (thank God)!
I must end this post NOW because what I SHOULD be up to right now is taking a shower and getting ready for work because it’s Friday!
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Filed under house, work | Comment (0)I woke up this morning wishing it was Saturday. All I want to do today is geek out at home. I want to create a database of all of my movies and books that I can access from my iPhone so that I know what we already own when I’m at Barnes and Noble. I want to finish transferring all my home movies to digital copies and back them up/make them accessible online. I want to finish creating our Wedding Album (finally, over a year later). I want to organize my iTunes and iPhoto libraries.
But, alas. I’m at work.
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Filed under work | Comment (0)I’m soooooo feeling whiney right now. I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. This was a 3 day weekend and it still wasn’t enough time off. The summer is always our busiest time at work and I’ve been so crazy lately that I can’t imagine what the summer is going to be like!!!!
It was easier when I was a Project Manager and I just had my own clients to worry about and I had complete control over how busy my schedule was going to be and I could actually get on top of my schedule. Now I’m constantly in demand by the people in my department as well as by my boss and the other managers. One of my peeps said to me earlier this week, “It seems like you have a hand in a little bit of everything across the company…” It was pretty depressing to hear it. The girl who was the manager of my department before me got burnt out after almost a year in this position and I swore to myself that I’d learn from her. Now I feel like things are a little out of my control and I’m headed in the same direction. I frequently tell other people “No” and I am realistic with people about what can and can’t be done… But somehow a ton of shit always ends up on my plate. I guess it’s because there are a lot of changes that have to happen within the company since we’ve grown so fast over the last few years and my department happens to be in the middle of everything.
I keep thinking that if I could just figure out a way to organize myself I’d feel better. It was easier with projects because we have CRM software that client info is tracked in and I perfected my method of tracking projects with it. Now that my tasks aren’t client specific, I need to find another way of organizing myself. I have a copy of MS Project, but I haven’t taken any time to try and learn it and I think that it will be too complex for my needs. I used Outlook, but I think that just using the tasks in Outlook might be too simplistic. I’m like the freaking Goldilocks of organizational software. For now, I’m using Remember the Milk because I have a dashboard widget for home, a yahoo widget for my work computer, and access to it from my iPhone so I can always access my tasks… Oh, and it’s free. 
I’m not in love with it yet… but it might grow on me. I’m also reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done and I’m liking it and think that it might help.
I just kind of wish I had an office at work. There are so many ideas that I have to improve the department and processes that I’d like to flesh out and I’d like to take some time to get organized but having a cube in the middle of the room makes me too accessible by everyone and I never get things done. So an office with a door and air conditioning that works. That would make me happy.
Ok, enough whining. Must try and relax and not think about work so that i can unwind and actually get to sleep tonight before I go and get all amped up again at work tomorrow.
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Filed under work | Comment (0)Screw that.
I feel like I’ve already done enough this week so that tomorrow should definitely be Friday… This week has been pretty busy at work. Not crazy busy, but pretty busy. We moved the room around and I now have a freaking huge, though not really private, cube. My cube is in the back corner of the room with a wall and windows behind me on two sides, so I asked them to not put the little cube walls up on those sides to close it in. I now have enough room to put a little table and chairs or perhaps a large plant that I’ll just kill. I’m so happy to have a desk again – the few days in the office when my team was spread out between three rooms and I had no permanent desk was a killer. Apparently not having a home base really stresses me out and makes me unable to get anything done.
The end of today was a little frustrating at work. We purchased a knowledge base program last fall and we still don’t have it implemented. This is really frustrating since I just had 2 new people start in the past month and am looking to hire one more and having a working kbase would be a big help for my new peeps. Apparently the software that we purchased isn’t able to be secured in the way that my boss would like, so we’re all kind of stuck right now trying to figure out if that’s a deal breaker for him or not. I’m not willing to wait anymore and so am now trying to figure out different ways to make sure that information get disseminated to everyone on my team, at least. I started to play around with Google Apps this afternoon. I think that it would at least help us to collaborate in a more organized way on training documentation. We’ll see if we actually use it or if we fall back into doing things the old way. I think we’ll probably use it… Most of my team is like me, we’re Internet “Omnivores”. Well, at least probably a 3rd of us are. We get excited about shiny new things… The thing that might prevent full adoption is how busy everyone is. We shall see…
Wow. It’s pretty much midnight and I’m awake again. We didn’t get to the gym this morning because I pulled the “give me 2 more minutes” thing and Alex went right along with it and we didn’t wake up until the second round of alarms (which are the “OK, you missed the gym but now you HAVE to get up to go to work alarms). I told Alex this morning, “If I say give me 2 more minutes tomorrow morning, please punch me in the head.” So I better get to sleep…
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Filed under work | Comment (0)I’ve got about a ton of projects that I can work on around the house, but I don’t want to do any of those… I want a geeky techy project to work on this weekend and I’m fresh out of ideas right at the moment. I’m sure I’ll think of something when it comes down to doing real chores or doing x.
Today was a bit of a scene at work. We’re redoing our office layout and so had to move all of our crap out of our cubes. I had the most stuff (because I’ve been there the longest) and my crap is now in 3 boxes and 2 bags in my boss’s office. The tear down of our current cubes and construction of the new setup won’t happen until Monday and Tuesday, which is unfortunate because that means two days of uncertainty. I’ve got my peeps set up with temporary cubes and seating, so they should be pretty much OK those days. I don’t have a temporary workstation, but I’ve got a laptop and I had one of my peeps set up wireless in the office today so I’ll be able to pretty much just “float around”. That will be obnoxious for getting any work done, but there’s no choice. I think that the new setup of the room will be something like this:
That picture is not to scale – all of the cubes will be the same size. I think that I will probably sit in the cube with the pink arrow pointing to it. I currently sit in the cube on the opposite side. That back row of cubes is in front of the windows, so I’ll remain by the windows, but I think I’ll switch sides so that when people come back to my cubes – which they do a lot – I won’t be disturbing peeps right across from me.
(yawn… I should go to bed…)
Maybe I’ll wipe my old laptop and reinstall windows on it this weekend…
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Filed under work | Comment (0)Oh yeah… And now you have that gay song in your head.
I'm a happy girl today because of some work news. I no longer have to
deal with Mike, who was my boss and a complete tool and I got a
promotion! Yeah! I'm now officially the manager of my department and
I'm super excited! I know that it's going to be a lot of hard work
and pressure… But I'm excited and I have a lot of ideas and I've
been putting in a lot of hours anyway – so it's awesome that it's
official now. Yeah!!! 
Ali
Sent from my iPhone
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Filed under work | Comments (2)My horoscope for today said,
“Prepare for many distractions to crowd your brain all day. The good news is that these distractions won’t necessarily be bad. In fact, they will probably help you get your mind off some recent problems in your family or home life. You are slowly but surely coming to terms with the fact that other people need to make their own choices — and their own mistakes. This is a tough — but very important — lesson to learn.”
I knew that today wasn’t going to be so great when I read that… I actually can’t figure out how the first part of the horoscope connects to the second. It seems like two totally different things: you’ll be distracted and stop worrying about what other people do.
Oh. Wait. Actually… that’s sort of like, “Stop being so distracted by what other people do.” I get it now…
Well, I kind of wish that I’d figured that one out earlier in the day.
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Filed under work | Comment (0)“Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with.†– John Dos Passos
After reading last night’s post again, I realized that I’m feeling pretty apathetic about things lately. Here at work I’ve got WAY too many clients assigned to me – about 110. It’s just too much. My cube situation is a little crazy right now too, so I’ve got nowhere to go with all of my paperwork. The result is a cube that’s overflowing with crap, to-do lists that constantly grow, and me running around putting out fires all day. I feel like I’m constantly running on a treadmill that keeps increasing the speed and incline. I really like my job – not thinking of going anywhere or anything like that – but I just want the situation to improve. It’s exhausting and overwhelming and I don’t want to get apathetic about it, but it’s hard not to.
I’ve become apathetic in my personal life too. Last night we just sat and watched TV instead of finished the unpacking. We’re so close to being finished, but there are so many details to take care of yet: which room do I want to use as the office? Where do we want to put the liquor? Which bookcase should the Harry Potter books go on? Where do we want to keep the tools? Which closet should the AC get stored in? Etc, etc, etc… Then there’s all the details of Christmas that need to be taken care of… And then the Wedding planning. Oh, and all that weight that I want to lose. It’s much too overwhelming to think about any of it. I’ll just be Scarlett O’Hara – “I can’t think of that today. I’ll just think of that another day.”
I’ve got to get past this. I’ve got to work out a plan to deal with things one thing at a time. I’m not sure what to do about work – much of that is really outside of my control. I’ll continue to express to management how unrealistic the workload is. In my personal life, I do have more control… It should be easier to get things off my plate. One thing at a time. That should be my mantra…
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Filed under work | Comment (0)So…
Coming back to work after you’ve been off for 10 days on vacation is very tough. It’s even tougher when you’ve got a shiny new ring on your finger.
But… My coworkers rock. They are so cute. They decorated my cube with Cinderella Wedding wrapping paper and gave me a very sweet engagement card signed by the entire office. I was so excited! There are curly ribbons all over my cube and cut out hearts and Cinderellas with her Prince Charming all over my monitor, my cube walls – everywhere I look. It’s all very exciting. Here are some pics:
My cube is so cute! I’m kind of upset, though, that we’ll be moving around in the office soon and I’ll have a new cube… I’m going to feel weird putting the decorations back up in my cube, but I want to! They’re so cute and I love the little “wedding celebration” theme…
Monday and Tuesday were pretty tough at work… It was so hard to concentrate when all I could think about was how I needed to start working on Wedding Planning. Alex IM’d me on Monday and said that his coworker, Christina, who just got engaged last week to his friend, Joe, was going nuts calling places. I asked him when they were planning on getting married and he said next Sept or Oct. I freaked out.
First of all, ew, how dare she get married around the same time as us? (Just kidding on that one, in case anyone out there really believes I’m that psycho.) Secondly, ohmigod, I felt inadequate. I hadn’t even seriously considered calling anywhere yet and apparently this girl was calling a ton of places and being told they didn’t have openings. Crap!! And what if she scoops a place that I totally wanted?! I spent the rest of Monday trying to tell myself to calm down and not start freaking out yet. Geez.
I started calling places on Tuesday. So far, I’m visiting The Appel Inn tonight with Amy and the Wham. I’ve been in Carrie’s wedding there and to Amy K’s wedding there and I really like it. It’s a big, octogonal red building and the inside is white washed wood with a lot of windows, a high ceiling, and a huge rustic looking chandelier over the dance floor. It’s really kind of unique and simple and pretty. And the woman who runs the place is awesome. We’d need to get a caterer if we went there, but that’s not really a bad thing – I want to have great food and not necessarily be stuck with whatever package a site has.
Tomorrow, Alex and I are visiting Franklin Plaza. That place looks gorgeous and the packages were pretty reasonable, but I don’t think they’ll have any dates available. Beck went to a wedding there last year and she really seemed impressed by the venue, so I’m kind of excited for going to see it and I hope that there are dates available if we like it…
Saturday, I’ll be meeting with the woman at The Glen Sanders Mansion at 1pm. I’ve heard that they do a great job there and I know that they also handle the weddings at The Hall of Springs in Saratoga – so it’s like a twofer meeting. I don’t know what dates they’ll have available, though… They’re very popular and I bet they’re all booked up.
Saturday afternoon I’m going to check out The State Room as it’s all gussied up for a wedding that night. The ballroom looks absolutely beautiful and we’ve been there before for a Comedy Works night… I remember thinking that I loved the space, but I don’t remember the food being all that fabulous. Maybe the food is better for weddings… We’ll see…
I’m going to try and call some venues in Saratoga today, I think. Alex and I really love the Saratoga area – it’s just so pretty. It’d be nice to have our out of town guests be able to see it…
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