Bitterness in My Lunchbox

I don't like to complain about my job here, but there are some days that the stress and the stupidity gets to be too much and I just have to vent.

This is one of those days.

Last night, Zappagirl and I were making sketchy plans to go to New York in June to see Richard Cheese on his farewell tour. I was also kicking around a sidetrip to visit Roger Mexico while I was in the general vicinity. I mentioned it to my supervisor when I came in this morning; I figured two month's notice would be more than adequate.

As it turns out, I probably won't be able to go. My supervisor will be in Trinidad that week.

This is not the first time this has happened. It seems whenever I plan to take a day off, I am either told I cannot do so or it is a huge inconvenience to everyone in the office. (One would have thought the world was ending when I was out of the office for an hour to go to the doctor.) I cannot take any vacation time from mid-August through October or from March through May, since those are the busy seasons in our office. For the most part, I cannot take any time during Christmas and New Years, since everyone else is taking time off. (They have seniority and out-of-town guests, which takes a priority over my single-with-cats-family-in-town life.) To take any time over the summer requires a ton of extra work for me, since I will probably have to find and train someone to cover my summer camp position (the director of my department decided that I should handle the pickups in the parking lot since "I'm not all that busy" in the summer) as well as finding and training someone to cover my desk. Everyone else in this department can just pick up and go whenever they feel like it. Most of them don't even change their voice mail message or put on their out-of-office assistant in Outlook.

I am currently sitting on almost five weeks of PTO time that I am not allowed to take. It seems the only time I am allowed to be out of the office is for major surgery or for bereavement leave. As I type this, all of the other women in the office are having a bridal shower luncheon at Uno's, which I was not able to attend because of the amount of work on my desk. (I very rarely get to have lunch here, and when I do it's at my desk, eaten in between phone calls and directing visitors to our building. I still have to claim my daily lunch break on my time sheet, though.)

In addition to the vacation issue, my status was switched from salaried to hourly last year when the overtime laws changed. I was told that this would not make that much of a difference, and really, it hasn't. I still work the same number of hours (at this point, 45 - 50 hours a week). I still get paid the same amount of money. Unfortunately, this amount reflects on my paycheck as 37.5 hours of work. I am only allowed to claim overtime when it has been previously authorized by the director of my department, which of course it never is. I may be in the office until 7:30 every night and take work home with me, but my time sheet still reads 9:00 - 5:00, with a half hour deducted for lunch. And due to the extra hours put in at the office, I essentially cannot make any social plans until after 9:00 pm, when it's too late to do much of anything. I've had to cancel plans, doctor's appointments, and classes because I would still be sitting at my desk when the sun went down.

I am not able to leave work on my desk for the next day, as my duties are time sensitive. Confirmations have to go out in a timely manner, room reservations get sent in at the last minute. Sometimes I am expected to produce new reports with little or no forewarning. I was given 45 minutes notice to pull together a report for a meeting yesterday. A meeting that had been on the books for two weeks. A meeting that went on for 2 1/2 hours - that's 1/3 of my day, or at least what I get paid for - and served no purpose whatsoever. A meeting where the office manger loudly announced to the entire staff that she didn't have year-end totals for one of my programs, despite the fact that I had sent in my year-end summary in January in addition to my monthly reports and a six-year summary. A meeting where they brought in yet another consultant from an outside company that unveiled a strategic planning model that doesn't really work with determining anything in our department, but is still due on Friday morning. (I managed to complete the requested report, and tried to give it to the office manager at the start of the meeting. She told me she didn't need it. Gee, thanks for letting me rush around for no reason whatsoever! I dumped it on her desk anyway, along with three highlighted spreadsheets relating to the report and an additional copy of the year-end summary from January.)

Of course, it's probably for the best that I am not able to take any time off. When I am away from my desk, whether it be for an hour or a few days, things have a tendency to not get done or (even worse) get done wrong. For example, one of the volunteers in my office set up a botanical tour for a school group while I was out of the office for my grandmother's funeral. She pencilled in the group on the tour schedule, but left it off the school's paperwork and didn't call the horticulture department to arrange for guides. I discovered the tour by mistake and dropped everything to make sure that things got covered. (I asked the volunteer about it. her response? "I must have forgotten it. Oh well." Oh well? Oh well won't cut it when 35 third graders show up expecting a tour on plant adaptations, which no one in this office is able to give!) I spend my time covering for other people, fixing their mistakes, and still managing to be the one who takes the blame for their errors. I cover for housekeeping when they don't have time to come in and set up our rooms. I cover for co-workers that don't feel the need to show up for work until 9:45 or 10:00 and leave almost every day at 4:30. (This particular employee is also the first person to say how incredibly busy she is, although most of the time she's goofing off at her desk. She has actually told me that she receives so many emails that she doesn't have time to read them - even the ones that pertain to her job, but she forwards more junk email to her friends than anyone I know. She tells me that I shouldn't worry about the things that go wrong in the department, despite the fact that some of them are due to her laissez-faire attitude towards her position. I don't know. I guess my priorities are misdirected.)

I went to another office building the other day to run copies, and asked a co-worker to watch my phone. Apparently he watched it ring while he browsed online personal ads, because I returned to three voice mails and no proof of anything that had he had actually done anything enough to fulfil his promise to man the office. (I suppose he figures that having a Y chromosome was what I meant by "manning the office.")

And when things don't get done correctly in this office, it is always my fault, even if I had nothing to do with the situation. In the eyes of the powers that be, I am essentially incompetent, poorly organized, and a whiner. (Never mind the fact that I can and do often answer questions about other people's programs because the operator misdirected the call, can pull up information about class visits that occured before I started working here, and have made several suggestions to make things run more efficiently and improve communication in both my department and the entire zoo. These suggestions prove that I'm a troublemaker and not a team player.)

I'm not asking for a memorial to be built in honor of the crap I put up with here. All I want is to be fairly compensated for the amount of work that I do, to be able to claim the time that I put in here. It's rather frustrating when I am usually one of the first ones here in the morning and almost always the last one to leave at night. (Most of the time, I'm the only "day" employee on grounds; the only other staff is the Nocturnal Adventures staff and the Nightwatch guys.)

And I want a vacation. One that doesn't involve me going under the knife or losing a family member.