Listening

As predicted, my head of unit summoned me over several times yesterday. One time I was trying to explain something to her and she suddenly said to me in a really fierce tone “you’re not listening to me”. Only I was listening to her and she was the one who wasn’t doing the listening, but, as ever, you will never win on these things, so I just backed down.

One of the people in my team came and spoke to me yesterday morning and told me that he was sick of having his views ignored by our boss, as though he has nothing to contribute. I spoke to him for a bit and then arranged a section meeting to try and calm things a bit, but it does always feel like an uphill struggle (a meeting that my head of unit then interrupted incidentally). I don’t know why people put up with it really, but I suppose I do, so why not others too?

Last year, we had a different boss (we are on our third in a year) and when we worked for him, our head of unit, to our faces (and behind our backs) on many an occasion described us as dysfunctional. The reality is that we are much more ‘dysfunctional’ now than we ever were then and people in the team feel somewhat aggrieved by it all. It’s the structures that are dysfunctional rather than the people though and keeping morale up and trying to encourage them in that in the end it will be ok, isn’t actually all that easy.

The chap I sit next to at work returned from sick leave yesterday. He was off because he’d had an emergency operation to deal with a torn retina. I was really pleased to see him but when he said things like “I think they must have removed my eyeball because I have stitching behind my eye”, I maybe wasn’t quite so pleased…

I was eating my lunch at my desk yesterday and he said that he needed to put his eye drops in but wasn’t very good at doing it himself. So I dutifully put down my sandwich and went over and put the drops in his eye, which given how odd his eye looks at the moment was very brave of me. Almost as brave as me skulking past the very large spider that is in a vase in the utility room at home. I haven’t resorted to getting the hoover out yet, we are just keeping a polite distance from each other in the hope that one of us will go away. So far it has always been me that has gone, but on some ways if I went in there one day and the spider had gone that would then start a whole new issue of where exactly it had gone… Anyway, I’ll try not to dwell on it too much but the cat did give me a very evil look yesterday morning so I don’t think she is too thrilled by this either. I don’t know what it is about where I live but the spiders just seem to be massive. I’m hoping this is a very localised thing and that when I move I will be in a spider free zone. I know that this is unlikely but a girl has to have something to hope for, but I think it’s about as likely as my benefactor turning up. I haven’t given up hope yet though – on either count.