Kill Him With Kindness

After sleeping on it, I’ve decided the best way to handle the weekend injustice placed on me by my boss isn’t the old way. That would be how he would expect me to react. And the best way to deal with opposition is to do what they least expect.

Instead I’m going to go about my day feeling happy and blessed. I’ll give him a good morning greeting with a genuine smile. If I respond in this manner, my kindness will certainly kill the joy he expects to receive from the misery he wished to inflict.

I imagine he’ll also be upset with this response because it means his control over me has limits. I’ll show him he doesn’t have the power to ruin my day. Whether he makes me take 5 days or changes his mind and lets me take the already agreed upon 3, his dictation ends there.

Show Some Teeth

It might be Sunday, but that doesn’t mean my boss didn’t try to ruin my weekend. It came about through an email exchange. Unforeseen circumstances prompted the need for me to change my scheduled vacation time. Originally, I had off 3 days during the 3^rd week of October. Now I need to have it the 1^st week in October. In an attempt to give him plenty of notice I send him an email asking if I could move up the 3 days. Simple enough or, at least, it should have been.

My boss emailed back that he would prefer if I took my vacation in 5-day increments. My first problem with his response is that I was already granted 3 days off. I’m only asking to move them up sooner. And second, the 5-day rule isn’t an office policy because it doesn’t apply to how my co-workers take their vacation time.

What to do… What to do... I guess I could stand up to him. I would have every right to point out how making me use my vacation time differently than my co-workers sounds a lot like discrimination. But I don’t want to ruin things for my favorite co-worker (so rest assure, my friend, I will not be going that route). Plus saying the “d” word might be the first step down the road that leads to me being fired. And I can’t stress enough how much I still need my job.

So maybe I don’t have any other choice, but to comply. In the past, forced compliance would have me giving him the cold shoulder along with much pouting and dirty looks. It might not do a lot of good, but it would be a warning that I didn’t like what he did. And if circumstances were different, and they could be one day at the drop of the right lottery numbers, there would be no warning only a bite. However, that old way of dealing with the injustices placed on me by my boss doesn’t seem like the best way for me anymore.

I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel tomorrow. I’ll report back in the morning. Stay tuned!

8:01

8:01 am is the hour of corporate Armageddon if I’m not at my desk working. Since my boss doesn’t like to cut things close, he expects me to be there 10 minutes early. I can’t do it. I’m there by 8:00 am, but I can’t bring myself to commit an extra minute of time to that place.

Once he tried to approach me about it. He isn’t one for face-to-face confrontation unless it's consequence free. So instead he asked me if there was a problem with my commute. I wanted to say, “Yeah, the part where I decide whether I want to come into work.” But I still need my job.

So lately my boss has been coming in 5-10 minutes late. This works out for the both of us. I can show up on time and he can believe I turned over a new leaf, one that has me showing up for work 10 minutes early.

I'm sure his tardiness has nothing to do with me. Perhaps the fact that it would cross my mind just goes to show I'm more like my boss than I'd like to admit. It isn't all about me.

Ain't Got The Look

My boss likes to play this game where he sits alone in his office at his desk and just starts talking. And everyone in the office has to guess if he’s talking to them based on the content. He was mid-game when I interrupted him by entering his office to drop off an order request. The co-worker he was talking to wasn’t responding and I didn’t have time to play around. By the look he gave me, he either: a) was angry with the employee losing, or b) was giving me his your-testing-my-patience look.

It could go either way because it was the first good look he was getting of me today and I’m dressed like a complete slob. It’s true that we have a more relaxed dress code, which allows us to wear jeans and such, but I took it to a level that lands a lot of girls on “What Not To Wear.”

Maybe it was just my imagination. I’ve been a little self-conscious about my apparel lately. I’ve been trying to step it up and look more like a “grown-up,” but due to budget restraints and laundry setbacks... well, I showed up looking frumpy.

Now that I’ve done the first step and admitted I have a problem, shouldn’t the second step fund a shopping spree for a new wardrobe?

Recipe To Stop Evil???

After being away on vacation since the Labor Day weekend, today's challenge was to reacclimate myself to working in the presence of evil. To my surprise, my boss only exposed us to a low level of wicked. He rocked about a 2 on the villain meter (scaled at 1-10, with 10 being uber evil). For this I am thankful. I'm able to leave today with only a mild headache instead of the head-exploding migraine I was anticipating.

Perhaps credit is due to my favorite co-worker who picked up a McDonald's coffee for him this morning. Maybe they have a secret recipe radio of 1 coffee bean to every 2 Prozac. Hmm... I'll have to keep that in mind the next time I need to request a vacation day.

O Construction, Where Aren't Thou?

I’m certain anyone in a fifty mile radius of me is suffering the same road construction woes. But the construction giving me the most stress is the internal transformation I’m working on. And since I don’t foresee it being halted by the upcoming winter season, I need to find a better way through it.

I don’t want all the hard work I’ve done to rebuild myself to come crashing down at the first inevitable upset. So I think a good first step is to root myself to something that will keep me steady. There are plenty of mantras to pick from. And I could repeat them until they are so seared in my brain, I think I came up with them. But this is probably a job for more than words.

A strong support system would be a better choice. The encouragement from family and friends is far greater than any of the hundred encouraging thoughts I tell myself. Thankfully I’m blessed with a great group so I think I’m off to a good start.

Lesson of the Day

Every day that I take away something more from my work day than just clocking hours on my paycheck, I hope that it was the lesson I needed to release me from this hell. But so far I haven’t found an end to the lessons my job has to teach me. Sometimes the ones I’ve passed come back around to see if I’ve retained them, and usually I haven’t. So I reacquaint myself and hope I do better in the next round of testing.

There is no singular teacher in the real world to grade and guide me on what I have to do. So I wander through my day trying to pick up on everything and fail to focus on any one thing properly. I might be in the now, but how much in the now can I be when I’m wondering if this is the now that holds the key. So maybe I’m not really in the now, but more in the future of what the now is creating. Maybe it’s this type of thinking that keeps the fire going.