Relative calm

Life can be very cruel sometimes. I woke up this morning and really wanted some more sleep. Then the news came on the radio and the newsreader said “It’s six o’clock”. “Six o’clock?” I thought “That’s an hour before I’m due to get up”. Only the newsreader was wrong and it was actually seven - although he never did correct himself, so there are probably loads of people running an hour later today.

Life can also be very nice at times. This morning when I got to work, I couldn’t find my work pass and one of the security guards came and spoke to me and asked if I was ok and then said he’d let me in anyway and I’d just have to get a temporary pass later if I didn’t find my proper one. I thought that was really nice of him because he could have been really jobsworth about it.

I think that things will be much calmer at work as of today. My head of unit said I should go home “early” at 5.15 yesterday afternoon but as it turned out I had various things to do until about 6.30 and then as soon as I got home I had to phone my head of unit to tell her something. I have learned that it is much better to tell her things in advance so that when she gets into work the next day she doesn’t immediately go into a total panic.

These are famous last words but the work actually went much better than I expected. It was a bit of a nightmare from the point of view of the number of hours I had to work, but my head of unit was on better form than normal - although I did think I hit a professional low when I seemed to end up in an argument with her about whether some printer paper was cream or white. Another person I was working with also took her to one side in the afternoon to say that she shouldn’t get so annoyed with people and that a lot of the problem came from her not communicating what she wanted properly. Apparently my head of unit now wants some feedback from me on her attitude and so on. I think I will carefully consider my response before I say anything. I have to do a whole load of work for her until at least the end of the week, so it’s probably best to keep her on side.

One of the problems with working for my head of unit is that if you do a bad job then she will tear you to shreds, but if you do a good job then she wants you to do lots of other bits of work for her as well. So you can’t win either way. Apparently she has been really pleased with my work, but to be honest I think I did my job but hardly did anything worthy of great praise. The last couple of days I have been operating on auto-pilot, so my ability has been somewhat impaired. Still I got the job done and managed to do this without going insane or any blood being shed, so I count that as a success.

Hopefully over the next few days I will think of more exciting things to write about than how tired I am and how irritating work is. Mind you, I’m not making any promises, but I’ll see if I can be more inspired.