A lot of people on this board are optimists. I like to read how they look forward to the future, how things are changing, slowly but surely and how the future will look back on the past and wonder how we could have been such idiots in how we treated people.
I very much enjoy reading their posts, because I tend to lose heart during my days when I am surrounded by people who send me things like:
"Obama can go F H SELF. He is a racist. He is a bigot. He is for the repression of women. And he is a sophmoric ignorant fool. IMAO." When I point out to the sender of this message that he just described his golden boy George Dubya, he recoils in a cloud of cognitive dissonance.
What ever can I mean, they wonder?
Dubya's bigoted comments are just ignorance.
Cutting funding to family planning clinics, passing laws to withhold information to women about choices involving abortion, passing laws banning partial birth abortions isn't "oppressing women"! So what if it's legal for a woman to have an abortion in this country and these laws make it harder for them to do so? That's not oppressive!
As for George being a 'sophomoric ignorant fool', he went to Yale, he flew a fighter jet, he made millions investing in a sports team, he became governor twice and president of the US twice. All this "proves" Dubya is smart as a whip!
When I point out the all too obvious flaws in their arguments...I get a nasty surprise. It's always shocking to run into a stereotype - the blinders-wearing, redneck, Republican, Dubya supporter, conservative, patronizing, thinks he's not sexist, thinks he's not racist stereotype is alive and well. And though I lay out my counterpoints so that a child could connect the dots and see the blatant double-standard held by them, they just look away and
will never admit they hold a double standard - namely, that the flaws they find reprehensible in a Democratic candidate are OK if they're in a Republican president.
These are not uneducated backwoods yokels. These are college-educated men, who are quite capable of analytical thinking.
I used to think that in our world, one could talk to people, make reasonable, rational arguments, that sooner or later, reason would win out and people would see logical conclusions.
Some people not only can't, they refuse to see something as reasonable and logical if it doesn't fit into how they believe the world is supposed to be. Even if it smacks them in the face that their POV is wrong, they will go to their graves denying the truth of it.
I lose hope for humanity whenever I experience such things. Our civilization as it is now will be the 13th in our world's history to fall. We will not go into some glorious future
a la Star Trek where we all grow up as human beings and build a wonderful world together. Instead we will all fall into yet another savage, Dark Age and have to start things all over again, just as we've done in the past because as humans, some of us will
never want to learn.
Ok, onto less world-angst. My higher up boss is a fucking idiot who also wears blinders.
She is the worst manager I've ever had. She is a workaholic and thinks nothing of working 10 am to 10 pm on a regular basis. And as such, she assigns out work accordingly, expecting of course, that you will have no problems working similar hours.
I was so hoping she'd get promoted or moved out from our area so I could have a more reasonable boss who understands most of us would like to work 40 hours a week and have a personal life. Oh, she got promoted all right. She got promoted to Chief Operating Officer of the company and now is over all of us.
For someone in my position, to properly and accurately service client portfolios, I need a file count of about 150-200 files.
I currently have nearly 2000 files in my name.
I get on average, 10-30 phone calls per day, 20-40 e-mails per day, 5-10 other communications per day, that all require a response or some action. And those are in addition to my regular daily workload.
Twice a month, two projects come my way that
have to be done because we're being graded by our clients. If we fall down on the number of their expectations, we could lose the client. So successfully completing a project in the ridiiculous timeframes allotted is taken for granted. There is no failure, no matter how many hours YOU have to work to get it done.
e.g. We get the mid-month report and have until two days before the end of the month to get it done. Do we get the report on the 15th? Nope. It usually comes about the 18th or 19th. Does the client or my bosses care that they've now shoved on us nearly 19 days worth of work into 10?
Nope. You'll just have to work longer hours and oh, come in this weekend if you have to.
Mind you, I'm still doing my regular work, too. That hasn't stopped.
To properly service a file in my line of work, it takes me about 15-45 minutes per file. But that's average. It can take as little as 15 minutes or a file may keep me busy for six hours or more.
Do my higher up bosses understand the staggering volume they've given us? Do they understand the time it takes to do the minutiae of detail the client wants us to update?
Yes.
Do they care?
No, because reality cuts into the pie-in-the-sky promises of service they have given the clients to get their business. Not a single boss has the backbone to tell any prospective clients that
our company is a decades long Diamond Award winning company so as to give prospective clients the impression that
we're an exclusive company and
they should be lucky we deign to do business with them - fu'd unorganized company that
they are - so that we will be on equal footing with the client as a partner. Instead my bosses grovel, promise we can do an outlandish amount of work in impossible time frames.
Remember, on average, I can work 10-12 files per day. Usually, on a project, I get called into a meeting at lunchtime, am given a new client/project and told I have to work up to 10 files per day to keep this new cllient happy
on top of my other work that already takes me all day to do.
Today was just another stupid fucking day.
I'm working on a project, doing a certain number of files per day. Takes me 3-4 hours per day.
Am I failling waaaaaaaay behind in my other work? You betcha.
I used to work the files after lunch and sent my immediate boss and the COO my accomplished list at the end of the day.
The COO complained to my immediate boss - are they working these? I don't get reports during the day.
My immediate boss passed along the message and said, Just work your project when you first come in, that way she'll get your report
during the day and know you're working it.
That lasted 3 days.
Today, the COO complained to my immediate boss - how come I'm getting this report at lunch? Why don't they work on this all day? Can't they increase their numbers?
Meaning, I must have no other work to do but this project and so must be sitting at my desk with my thumb up my ass doing nothing.
My immediate boss passes this message along to me.
I reply, OK, so A- wants me to stop doing everything else and just work this?
He says, no.
I reply, She
does know this is already taking half my day and now she wants me to increase my numbers but not ignore the rest of my 10 hours worth of work?
He says, She doesn't really want to know. You know how she is. Just send your report at the end of the day.
I reply, Then she'll complain that if I'm working on this all day, how come I'm not getting any more done, right?
He says, That's right.
Fucktards, I work for fucktards!!!!!!!!!