I have to go back to work tomorrow
It's been so nice to be off work. Not that this was that restful of a vacation, but just to be at home and getting stuff done has been nice. I cleaned my bathroom and washed all my bathroom linens yesterday. This included my shower liner, which was pretty gross. It was pretty echoey in there for a few hours while the stuff was down, but it's nicer now.
I've been feeling kind of anxious for some reason, and I'm not entirely sure why. Was it all my dealings with Dr. K? Hanging out with him always kind of gets to me, since I never know what's going to happen or what he's going to say, but I got through that just fine. Was it my concerts? I know the Fancy Band one was mildly nerve-wracking what with the solo, but it's not like it was something I've never played before; literally, I've played Stars & Stripes Forever for 30 years. I've done it from memory multiple times. I've done it completely alone, standing on the edge of a stage. It was fine. I got through it. And Regular Band, there wasn't really anything to worry about there. The music wasn't excessively hard; the only real unknown was if people were going to show up, and they did so in droves. All was well.
Of course, every so often work, particularly my boss, will pop into my head. That's probably it. When I realize it's happening, I try to take my mind off things. It's just been hard to deal with my job this year. My boss has hardly been around, and he hired two new people. One was needed; the other was not. That second person, he hired her to do a particular task, which was to help revamp our room renter situation, but without him there, that's hard to do. That's meant that I've had to take over with a few things. Part of it has been to help her write up these changes, and play devil's advocate, and point out things that would come up for me as a room renter--things my boss would never consider. And at one point, we had a potential new room renter come in for an interview, and he wasn't there, so I had to sit in on that interview, which was kind of awkward. Meanwhile, the new girl, whom I've nicknamed Fleur, she'd specifically asked him to be there and tried to schedule the interview when he said he'd be there, and he bailed. That was also the second time that interview had been scheduled, so she didn't want to reschedule it again. Just frustrating. She later admitted that she'd never conducted an interview before. Neither had I. I thought she did fine.
Up until recently, I hadn't been all that keen on Fleur. She's extraneous at the moment. She was also hired in part to help BBC with all of his projects, except she's untrained and not super helpful. She spends much of her time holed up in the break room that got turned into her office, where she keeps the door shut to keep out the smell of the back building, which the rest of us don't even notice. Granted, she had this perfume-y plug-in that was causing a different smell that irritated the rest of us, so the door being closed wasn't always that terrible, but when you're someone who's been around for roughly two months and you have no supervision essentially, it's nice to be able to see into your "office" to make sure you're not just screwing around in there.
(Back to the smell...recently a different smell had been permeating the front door area of the back building. Nobody knows what it was, only that we never noticed it before Fleur arrived and it started up soon after. My best guess at first was that perhaps it was related to one of the radiators in the break room being turned on for the first time in over 12 years, since I literally didn't even know it existed before the room got rearranged. And then I realized the smell coincided with us getting in the holiday gifts my boss ordered, and those items had a smell, and we had boxes of them. The smell finally started to dissipate once the items started getting delivered to clients. Coincidence? Hmm.)
Anyway, I'd read through the first set of paperwork that Fleur had come up with, and I had a bunch of misgivings about the situation and wrote a bunch of notes on the copy I'd been given. Then my boss had me reach out to the room renters to gather more information, basically on what they've been charging their clients. Yeah...part of what my boss wants to do is take over money collection, charging more for the usage of the rooms and the renters would get a portion of what the business would charge. Except...many of them are making in a half-hour what the business would give them in an hour's time under the new regulations. That is not going to fly. Who wants to do more work for less money? My boss was all, oh, they'd keep their current clients at their current rates; only new clients would fall under the new rates. But what incentive is that for the renters to take on new clients in that case? And our renters have a lot of experience in their fields, which is part of the draw. I can't see them sticking around should this happen, in which case we'll be left with a bunch of people who have little to no experience. Like, this is just such a terrible idea and my boss has no idea. And, after seeing some of the data I'd collected from the renters, Fleur agreed with me. I'd emailed her more thoughts that I'd had and basically, everything that I was saying, those were thoughts she'd also had. With my boss being absent, he's not around to discuss these things, which makes it more difficult. Plus, I've known him a long time. He doesn't want to hear things when they don't agree with him, so it's not like I've wanted to bring them up. Fleur is so new that she's unaware of this side of him. She'd planned on discussing a lot of this at last week's meeting, so I'm curious how that went.
As far as her trying to move forward with this, even though it may be a wasted effort, she was working on creating a website related to the room renters and their clients, and she was showing me the progress she'd made with that. It actually looked pretty good and had helpful, useful information on it. Now, this part of the situation actually needed to be done, so I'm not upset about that. I would love to see her move into an IT sort of role, like taking over our business' website, which is terrible. Even if the site she's working with gave her templates and such, she's still built a usable page filled with information. That is what our website needs, and it would be nice to have an in-house person to be able to do that. My boss has a guy who isn't even in the state as our web guy, and I'd been asking him for the guy's info for weeks with no luck. The guy happened to email me out of the blue for some random thing, a message that got posted to the mirror website he'd created, so at least I do finally have his email, but I only was able to ask my boss for confirmation that yes, that's the guy, right before I went on vacation, so I didn't have a chance to reach out. At least now I can talk to the web guy about changes my boss had wanted to make pre-pandemic. Like, this is how long our website has been bad. This is how non-productive my boss is. It's why I'm having to make decisions on certain things, because otherwise they just won't get done. It would be nice if I had a boss that gave a crap and showed up and simply acted like a boss and not a clueless adolescent. It sucks when you like everything about your job except for the person leading it.
I've been feeling kind of anxious for some reason, and I'm not entirely sure why. Was it all my dealings with Dr. K? Hanging out with him always kind of gets to me, since I never know what's going to happen or what he's going to say, but I got through that just fine. Was it my concerts? I know the Fancy Band one was mildly nerve-wracking what with the solo, but it's not like it was something I've never played before; literally, I've played Stars & Stripes Forever for 30 years. I've done it from memory multiple times. I've done it completely alone, standing on the edge of a stage. It was fine. I got through it. And Regular Band, there wasn't really anything to worry about there. The music wasn't excessively hard; the only real unknown was if people were going to show up, and they did so in droves. All was well.
Of course, every so often work, particularly my boss, will pop into my head. That's probably it. When I realize it's happening, I try to take my mind off things. It's just been hard to deal with my job this year. My boss has hardly been around, and he hired two new people. One was needed; the other was not. That second person, he hired her to do a particular task, which was to help revamp our room renter situation, but without him there, that's hard to do. That's meant that I've had to take over with a few things. Part of it has been to help her write up these changes, and play devil's advocate, and point out things that would come up for me as a room renter--things my boss would never consider. And at one point, we had a potential new room renter come in for an interview, and he wasn't there, so I had to sit in on that interview, which was kind of awkward. Meanwhile, the new girl, whom I've nicknamed Fleur, she'd specifically asked him to be there and tried to schedule the interview when he said he'd be there, and he bailed. That was also the second time that interview had been scheduled, so she didn't want to reschedule it again. Just frustrating. She later admitted that she'd never conducted an interview before. Neither had I. I thought she did fine.
Up until recently, I hadn't been all that keen on Fleur. She's extraneous at the moment. She was also hired in part to help BBC with all of his projects, except she's untrained and not super helpful. She spends much of her time holed up in the break room that got turned into her office, where she keeps the door shut to keep out the smell of the back building, which the rest of us don't even notice. Granted, she had this perfume-y plug-in that was causing a different smell that irritated the rest of us, so the door being closed wasn't always that terrible, but when you're someone who's been around for roughly two months and you have no supervision essentially, it's nice to be able to see into your "office" to make sure you're not just screwing around in there.
(Back to the smell...recently a different smell had been permeating the front door area of the back building. Nobody knows what it was, only that we never noticed it before Fleur arrived and it started up soon after. My best guess at first was that perhaps it was related to one of the radiators in the break room being turned on for the first time in over 12 years, since I literally didn't even know it existed before the room got rearranged. And then I realized the smell coincided with us getting in the holiday gifts my boss ordered, and those items had a smell, and we had boxes of them. The smell finally started to dissipate once the items started getting delivered to clients. Coincidence? Hmm.)
Anyway, I'd read through the first set of paperwork that Fleur had come up with, and I had a bunch of misgivings about the situation and wrote a bunch of notes on the copy I'd been given. Then my boss had me reach out to the room renters to gather more information, basically on what they've been charging their clients. Yeah...part of what my boss wants to do is take over money collection, charging more for the usage of the rooms and the renters would get a portion of what the business would charge. Except...many of them are making in a half-hour what the business would give them in an hour's time under the new regulations. That is not going to fly. Who wants to do more work for less money? My boss was all, oh, they'd keep their current clients at their current rates; only new clients would fall under the new rates. But what incentive is that for the renters to take on new clients in that case? And our renters have a lot of experience in their fields, which is part of the draw. I can't see them sticking around should this happen, in which case we'll be left with a bunch of people who have little to no experience. Like, this is just such a terrible idea and my boss has no idea. And, after seeing some of the data I'd collected from the renters, Fleur agreed with me. I'd emailed her more thoughts that I'd had and basically, everything that I was saying, those were thoughts she'd also had. With my boss being absent, he's not around to discuss these things, which makes it more difficult. Plus, I've known him a long time. He doesn't want to hear things when they don't agree with him, so it's not like I've wanted to bring them up. Fleur is so new that she's unaware of this side of him. She'd planned on discussing a lot of this at last week's meeting, so I'm curious how that went.
As far as her trying to move forward with this, even though it may be a wasted effort, she was working on creating a website related to the room renters and their clients, and she was showing me the progress she'd made with that. It actually looked pretty good and had helpful, useful information on it. Now, this part of the situation actually needed to be done, so I'm not upset about that. I would love to see her move into an IT sort of role, like taking over our business' website, which is terrible. Even if the site she's working with gave her templates and such, she's still built a usable page filled with information. That is what our website needs, and it would be nice to have an in-house person to be able to do that. My boss has a guy who isn't even in the state as our web guy, and I'd been asking him for the guy's info for weeks with no luck. The guy happened to email me out of the blue for some random thing, a message that got posted to the mirror website he'd created, so at least I do finally have his email, but I only was able to ask my boss for confirmation that yes, that's the guy, right before I went on vacation, so I didn't have a chance to reach out. At least now I can talk to the web guy about changes my boss had wanted to make pre-pandemic. Like, this is how long our website has been bad. This is how non-productive my boss is. It's why I'm having to make decisions on certain things, because otherwise they just won't get done. It would be nice if I had a boss that gave a crap and showed up and simply acted like a boss and not a clueless adolescent. It sucks when you like everything about your job except for the person leading it.