Holiday recuperation
Today is the third day in a row that I have spent on my living room couch. I got sick immediately after Thanksgiving, in fact, I felt the illness infiltrating my sinuses Thursday afternoon. I probably gave all my cousins and my aunt's elderly father a nice upper respiratory infection with their turkey and pie. But this day I feel well enough not to chug the Day-Quil, which makes me feel weird anyway, cause I don't really like taking meds that treat the symptoms and not the cause. Half of me feels like I wasted a wonderful opportunity to go do something awesome (four-day weekend!), but the other half of me knows that I was not willingly leaving the bed, let alone the apartment, and what would I be doing anyway? Coughing in an art gallery? Sneezing on passers-by? Certainly not moving fast anywhere. At least David was content to join me on the couch and play Mario for hours on end. I'll probably wake up tomorrow feeling completely rejuvenated, just in time for work...
Last week I had the (hopefully) unique experience of supervising my rocks-for-brains coworker while our boss was away on family emergency business. I only had to tell him what to do for two and a half days (he mysteriously disappeared before lunch on Wednesday) and it nearly killed me. I could feel my blood pressure rising by just thinking about him and his continued employment at the company. He was hired 5 months ago to help me and my boss on this huge project for the Bellagio in Vegas -8,000 yards of handmade wallcovering for their hotel tower hallways- and since he has no painting, screen-printing, or any kind of artistic skills whatsoever, he was hired to cut pieces of paper off the big rolls into the precise size needed for us to make our magic on, and to count the pieces of paper, and to put the finished panels into stacks for the shipping department. And he did these things, slowly but more or less effectively, and I thought that once the project was over he would be let go, since he was a temporary employee, but he has remained, and in the time that has transpired, he has:
*not shown up for work an average of 1.5 days a week, every week
*brought his chihuahua to work twice-exposing it to dangerous vapors and inhaled metal particles while bringing it with him into a room where people have to suit up and wear respirators
*consistently works one-third the speed of me, no matter the threat or encouragement
*not been able to figure out how many ounces are in a gallon, how many ounces are in a cup, or that there are measurements for both on a measuring cup
*shown up 10 to 30 minutes late every morning
I could talk all day and all night about how much of an idiot this guy is, and how many things he should have been fired for(not to mention that he acts like a caricature of a 15-year-old girl and has a dashboard full of stuffed animals), but I think it's a waste of effort. Anyway, we had a bunch of samples to finish to refill the inventory, using all different techniques-screenprinting water-based ink and heat-set ink, painting with your basic paint roller, etc. Everything he did by himself I had to watch him to make sure he was doing it right. Example A: Painting a 4-yard piece of paper one solid color with a roller. We have a technique for everything, to make sure that everything is done and looks consistent, and also so the process is streamlined and EASY TO REMEMBER. Well, this toerag couldn't even recall how much paint he put on the last panel he painted(it should be one cup), so every other panel either had too much paint and was covered in roller marks, or didn't have enough and the paper was showing through the back. There's no real way to fix mistakes at any step of production, except when the paint is still wet on a few steps, but since he's so slow, none of his panels could be fixed. Most of the panels we screened were ruined as well because of his sloth, despite my pleas for him to hurry up, match my speed, pay attention to what's going on-nothing made an impression for longer than five minutes, which is apparently the length of his attention span. He's not mentally disabled, although he did mention that he got hit in the head while being robbed while working at Starbucks. When I tell him that he's doing something wrong, he looks at me like I'm insulting his mother. He knows he's doing badly, our boss knows it, everyone at work knows it, and I want to know why he hasn't been fired after all the chances he's blown and all the talking-tos he's had, or why he doesn't quit and find a job that he likes. I'm seriously about to pull an Emmber on him; I bet my boss would love to watch that!
OK, no more complaining about work. Maybe I should complain about the lack of snow in the mountains. Meh.
Last week I had the (hopefully) unique experience of supervising my rocks-for-brains coworker while our boss was away on family emergency business. I only had to tell him what to do for two and a half days (he mysteriously disappeared before lunch on Wednesday) and it nearly killed me. I could feel my blood pressure rising by just thinking about him and his continued employment at the company. He was hired 5 months ago to help me and my boss on this huge project for the Bellagio in Vegas -8,000 yards of handmade wallcovering for their hotel tower hallways- and since he has no painting, screen-printing, or any kind of artistic skills whatsoever, he was hired to cut pieces of paper off the big rolls into the precise size needed for us to make our magic on, and to count the pieces of paper, and to put the finished panels into stacks for the shipping department. And he did these things, slowly but more or less effectively, and I thought that once the project was over he would be let go, since he was a temporary employee, but he has remained, and in the time that has transpired, he has:
*not shown up for work an average of 1.5 days a week, every week
*brought his chihuahua to work twice-exposing it to dangerous vapors and inhaled metal particles while bringing it with him into a room where people have to suit up and wear respirators
*consistently works one-third the speed of me, no matter the threat or encouragement
*not been able to figure out how many ounces are in a gallon, how many ounces are in a cup, or that there are measurements for both on a measuring cup
*shown up 10 to 30 minutes late every morning
I could talk all day and all night about how much of an idiot this guy is, and how many things he should have been fired for(not to mention that he acts like a caricature of a 15-year-old girl and has a dashboard full of stuffed animals), but I think it's a waste of effort. Anyway, we had a bunch of samples to finish to refill the inventory, using all different techniques-screenprinting water-based ink and heat-set ink, painting with your basic paint roller, etc. Everything he did by himself I had to watch him to make sure he was doing it right. Example A: Painting a 4-yard piece of paper one solid color with a roller. We have a technique for everything, to make sure that everything is done and looks consistent, and also so the process is streamlined and EASY TO REMEMBER. Well, this toerag couldn't even recall how much paint he put on the last panel he painted(it should be one cup), so every other panel either had too much paint and was covered in roller marks, or didn't have enough and the paper was showing through the back. There's no real way to fix mistakes at any step of production, except when the paint is still wet on a few steps, but since he's so slow, none of his panels could be fixed. Most of the panels we screened were ruined as well because of his sloth, despite my pleas for him to hurry up, match my speed, pay attention to what's going on-nothing made an impression for longer than five minutes, which is apparently the length of his attention span. He's not mentally disabled, although he did mention that he got hit in the head while being robbed while working at Starbucks. When I tell him that he's doing something wrong, he looks at me like I'm insulting his mother. He knows he's doing badly, our boss knows it, everyone at work knows it, and I want to know why he hasn't been fired after all the chances he's blown and all the talking-tos he's had, or why he doesn't quit and find a job that he likes. I'm seriously about to pull an Emmber on him; I bet my boss would love to watch that!
OK, no more complaining about work. Maybe I should complain about the lack of snow in the mountains. Meh.