I Need a Resolution

Somebody in Cube City recently told me that she has two resolutions for the New Year. They are to:

1. Work out more
2. Get along with her nemesis at work, even if it kills her

I really like her resolutions, as she seems to have one that is focused on her personal life and one that is focused on her work life. I think that the first one might help her achieve the second one. I haven't really thought about any resolutions for myself. I'm willing to work out more. However, I have more than one nemesis at work, and I guess I'm just not ambitious enough to get along with any of them. Somehow, I think that's okay.

I need a resolution of my own, but I'm at a loss right now. Burnout can do that to a person.

I wish you all a happy and healthy 2009, no matter how you choose to resolve it.

There's An Echo (Echo...Echo...) In Here

Hello? Is anybody here?

There's a lonely feel in the office when it's quiet and a high volume of people are out of the office. I don't miss the people or their demands, of course, but I find it hard to get motivated to do the work. Mostly, I don't understand why there's so much work to do when nobody is here. This is crazy.

I'm just going through the motions of showing up to Cube City until next year, when everybody will return from their holiday vacations. I could be off work right now, I suppose, as I have the vacation time. However, I'm maximizing my PTO. You really can't blame me. It's a long haul until our next paid holiday off, so I'll save my time for a desperate need.

In the meantime, please share the secret of how to make a long, lonely day go faster in Cube City. The secret isn't codka. It's too cold for that. I know, I know, I really thought I had the answer.

I'm Afraid of My Inbox

I used to work with a guy in Cube City who refused to take time off because everything blew up while he was away. People would change the rules, and he'd have a huge mess to clean up. It wasn't worth his time to go on vacation.

I have been away from Cube City for five days. It took three of those days to come down from the chaos. I spent quality time with my loved ones, scored ridiculous holiday deals at the mall, and refused to check my work email...though it was always in the back of my mind, looming there with an appropriate amount of dread. I definitely didn't drink enough.

It's time to log in. It's time to see what blew up while I was out of the office, despite everybody supposedly being off work. I'm afraid of my inbox. I really don't want to log in. Do I have to?

Oh, Fudge. It's Come Un-done.

Okay, who brought the undercooked fudge to Cube City last Friday? SHOW YOURSELF.

More importantly, who is desperate enough to eat mushy and potentially health-hazardous fudge that was obviously a sorry baker's botched batch?

It's interesting to me that people will bring their cooking mistakes to work because they know Cube City is where all food will go into somebody's belly instead of the trash. Can't you just hear the baker's thought process upon realizing that the fudge didn't turn out right? It probably went something like this:

Oh, FUDGE! My first batch of fudge didn't harden! I followed the recipe from Wikipedia and everything! Waaahhhh! But now that I read it again, I don't think I used corn syrup. Hmmm.

Well, it was an experiment. Not bad for my first batch EVER. The next batch will be better. But...oh, dear...what do I do with the first batch? I can't give this to somebody I care about, and I definitely can't eat it. It looks scary, and it definitely isn't done.

Wait, I know!!! I'll just sneak it into the office and leave it on the kitchen counter. Nobody will know that I totally suck at baking, and my experiment will not go to complete waste. SOMEBODY will eat it.

And the baker would be right. The fudge was almost gone by the time I left work on Friday. I never saw anybody take a piece of that fudge. I think its consumers were as sneaky as its baker. That's just fudged up.

Not-So-Happy Holidaze

There are only two days in this holiday work week for most of us in Cube City. I think there are only two of us here to do everybody else's work too.

Showing up to work during a holiday week is what stupidity looks like in Cube City. I'm sure the next two days will be frantic and furious. It's basically what every day looks like here, except for the ghost-town atmosphere. It's so quiet that you can hear me sweating the work out of my pores.

I hope to be smarter in evaluating my holiday time off next year. But since I'm what stupid looks like this week, could somebody please write a reminder on their calendar to reach out to me next year, say on November 1st, to let me know that it's time to get smart and plan for massive holiday time off?

Happy Holidaze!

It's All About Scrambling

It seems to be a similar scene in Cube City each week:

• Mondays are manageable.
• Tuesdays are trying.
• Wednesdays are whacked.
• Thursdays are when people really start working.
• Fridays are frantic because of Thursdays.
• Weekends suck because you're making up for manageable Mondays.

I asked a cube dweller, why? Why this vicious cycle? He broke it down for me:

• Mondays are quiet until 2:00 PM, when the client starts to feel like working and sends us some feedback.
• Tuesdays and Wednesdays are for scrambling as we try to determine how to react and respond to the client's feedback.
• Thursdays and Fridays are for the hard work we do based on our scrambling earlier in the week.
• Weekends are for tying up any loose ends based on two days of scrambling through our reactions and two days of scrambling through the work.

Then it's time for Monday, when we get to rest for a few hours before the vicious cycle begins again.

Anybody got any pain meds to make it stop?

The Unpleasantries of Staffing Meetings

I'm not sure how I got roped into staffing meetings in Cube City, but something's gotta give.

I go to these weekly staffing meetings to address the tasks assigned to each person on my team and check on their scheduled hours for the week.

It's always the same story:

• We don't have enough people.
• We have too much work.
• We don't have enough people to handle too much work.

So the game begins. We sit around for an hour and postulate about who we can shove the work onto if their original work schedule happens to shift unexpectedly. It's mind numbing.

For the past several weeks, I've handled a ridiculous amount of scheduled hours due to total lack of resolve in the weekly staffing meeting. I think my work hours last week totalled 102. But does anybody care about my hours? Of course not. What do you do about that extra 62 hours that should be split among two people that you don't have? Hiring more people is out of the question right now, so I'm sucking it up.

I have to go to the staffing meeting today. I'd rather stab forks in my eyes, but we don't even have real forks in Cube City. So I guess I'll be taking a stab at the work instead. It's what I do.