Plan to Fail

[failedtoplan]

Panopticon

Or, Things I Cannot Possibly Know Because I am Uneducated Swine

I’m shackled to a front desk during the day.  Our building also has a side entrance, but there are several rooms, hallways, and a big climate-controlled storage area between it and me.  Clients, many of whom have been with the business for years, are allowed to come in and get things out of their storage units during business hours.  Most of them are decent people, but some of them are a little absentminded when it comes to shutting the door-- which isn’t great for the climate control, or the wine within.  A couple of people had left the side door open, and of course the reasonable course of action on the part of Rude Boss was to scold me, saying, “People leave the side door open; it’s happened a couple times recently. You need to be careful about it.”  Because it’s not like there’s a whole building between me and the access point, oh no, I’m just a complete jackass.

[pleasefireme]

please fire me: a poem.

no, you are not an animal because you don’t know what the charcuterie plate even is.

no, you are not a monster when you order five courses, but can’t finish a single one.

and no, you are especially not a savage when you order our best steak extra well done, or even when you cover it with ketchup.

what makes you despicable is that you leave no tip because you felt you spent too much already.  THAT is what makes you inhuman.

[failedtoplan]

What’s in a name

You may be wondering about the title of the blog.  Probably not, but now you are...and now you’re thinking of elephants.  But.  Anyway.  I was raised by scientists, both the medical and the Bachelor of, in several kinds of engineering.  So I grew up hearing such gems as “Plan the work, work the plan,” and, “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”  To say that we fail to plan, and that we therefore have no structure to our days or work, would be a colossal understatement (The sun is kind of bright, absolute zero is kind of chilly, baby animals are only sort of adorable).  We fail to plan.  That constitutes a plan to fail.  That’s what I have been trying to change, and that’s why people send me abusive emails and curse at me on the phone.

[failedtoplan]

One more thing about age/shoe size

They were using a three-hole punch when the proper two-hole punch was right. freaking. there.  I had to make a label.  I had to leave hidden Post-Its in their favorite files.  I had to find a key in a box of them so I could lock up boring vendor files like they’re dragon treasure.  I took pictures!

[failedtoplan]

The eternal age vs. shoe size conundrum

I am having to redo a bunch of perfectly fine filing because drunk people old enough to be my parents come into the office on the weekends and a) really seriously misfile things I have left for the design assistants to file, and now also b) remove orderly, properly-punched things from random files for fuck knows what reason.  Then, as an added bonus, some of these people come into the office and insult me to my face (I honestly just feel bad for her; her life is a mess of repellent boyfriends who bring side pieces into the office even though none of them work here, and way too many pills), or complain that “there’s no control here” because I don’t lock Rude Boss, the guy who owns the company, out of the petty cash (This from his own wife, who seems nice at first but who is actually kind of hypercritical and lacking a moral compass).  No, I have no idea why they are doing this, though the prevailing theory is that they are playing office, like most people did.  WHEN THEY WERE FIVE.

[failedtoplan]

Do not make a joke about French fries

The first real interaction between me and my rude boss involved him making a math error, and me finding it.  Turns out he was buying the company, which is why they wanted additional help.  That involves a lot of paperwork, unsurprisingly.  I burned hours on Excel, which is something of a forte of mine, from the time I spent working in environmental protection.  The old owner gave us a formula that was supposed to calculate average profits, but when we put it in, it was all fucky.  The new boss had inadvertently doubled the number of months in the formula.  I thought this is the kind of thing that would normally make a good impression, since I wasn’t a dick about it or anything.  I thought it would show that I am diligent and competent, and detail-oriented.  I thought a whole lot of things when I started here.

[failedtoplan]

This is not my beautiful house

Or, How I Got Here.

Like everyone else, I moved in the general direction of Hollywood to make movies (I don’t want the sexy jobs, though, I like fixing shit and resetting food plates a gazillion times during eating scenes), all the while braced to take anything I could get to pay the bills.  I’d been in temp hell for three years prior to the move, and I stuck to the game I knew best once I was here.  My old agency was not crushing it in terms of assignments, though, so I signed on with another one, which entailed a bizarrely hostile interview in which a total stranger told me I was lying about having interviewed recently for a position at a new Target...not that she doubted the interview, I don’t think?  But she doubted the existence of the Target, which could be seen in construction from the freeway, and also WHO THE HELL LIES ABOUT A TARGET WHAT THE SWEET FUCK.  Anyway, the next day, I get the call that they need someone for a one-week thing at a ritzy construction business, so I get up and go.  The place seems nice, and any work is good work.

In retrospect, I think I should have taken it a little more seriously when, on my second day, one of the company owners told me she’d been self-medicating with booze to cope with some former employees’ shenanigans.  But, hey, it’s only going to be a week.

The thing I just found out is that it was never intended to be a week.  They had told the World’s Sketchiest Temp Agency that they needed someone they could hire, who knew Quickbooks (I didn’t, as stated during my registration, but I learned), because the old desk manager was building up death piles of paperwork, in addition to ending up in the hospital from stress.  So every week, I’d say I didn’t know if I’d be back, and every week, the other employees would think I was really eccentric or nervous.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I also came to find out that in the previous three years, fully six people had burned out in my position and just left.  In retrospect, there’s a trail of VERY EVIL BREADCRUMBS leading me to the quasi-functional hell from which I blog.

[elspethrose]

[failedtoplan]

The basic premise of the blog.  Yes, I know and understand I am talking about real people.  They don’t seem to understand the same thing.  The worst I will say about anyone here is the truth.

[failedtoplan]

Here we go...

The story of my life at work, or, Tales from the Hive of Dysfunction.

I work in a specialty construction field.  I manage a desk and a department.  I stare into the abyss daily.  Most of my coworkers are exceptionally sane, but the bad news is the place isn’t calibrated to us.  They’re the ones who encouraged me to make a memoir out of this, though being a filthy netizen above all else, I turned it into more-or-less-liveblogging.  Names are changed to protect the innocent-- and our employees-- but everything else is real.  I promise, I don’t have the imagination to make this up, or the stomach to exaggerate.