You've been forewarned. This is not going to be a well-organized or concise piece of prose here.

Tonight I completely tweaked. It was a long time coming, let me tell ya.

Tonight was just another night that has followed a disturbing and seemingly more frequent trend: I walked in the door from work after 7:30 p.m.

UNACCEPTABLE!!!!

I think I need to take up boxing, karate, or some other sport that encourages me to hit and/or break things on a regular basis, because in the past two weeks, my job has finally crossed the line from barely-managed chaos into absolute insanity. Folks, the business that my office does is currently held together with bubblegum and safety pins, and things are getting worse, not better. It just took me being out of the office in Arizona for five days for things to completely implode.

As a general rule, I hesitate to put anything too personal out here in cyberland most of the time. My normal M.O. is never to write anything that I wouldn't want my family, friends, or employer to see.

But guess what? I've had enough and the gloves are coming off now.

MY BOSS IS BATSHIT CRAZY. OK, maybe not crazy, but she is deluded, no doubt about it. She's also a bad manager with not very well-developed people skills. She's unprofessional. Unorganized to the extreme. And I also think she's a liar with questionable ethics. That last one I can't really get into here, but just take my word for it.

On a personal level, I suppose she's nice enough. She's also very bright and is a good resource for our industry.

But she has no place being a manager. She has no idea about, or appreciation of, how busy I am every single day. I am ONE person doing the work of at least two, and perhaps even three, people. My coworker was fired at the end of September 2007 and I was promised that the firm would be hiring another person to replace him within a month of that.

I sucked it up and took on a much heavier workload, thinking that if I could only keep it together for a little while, surely the position would be filled soon enough.

Haaaaa.

I've finally come to accept that I've taken over SO well that the company has just let me run with it.

Really, the thing that just kills me is the fact that she (the boss) is NEVER there. She wants to be a full-time stay-at-home mother and a full-time director of retirement plan services. Well guess what? You can't frickin' have it both ways. The management team at every other job I've ever worked at was in the office at least forty hours a week, minimum.

Conversely, she is more often absent than not, on mysterious "meetings" that we later learn are hair appointments, her kids' sporting events, and who the hell knows what else. She also coaches an intramural basketball team which means she leaves the office for long periods in the middle of the day. In January, we moved our office from one building to another, an undertaking that required a huge amount of preparation and work for us all. On moving day, she left us in the new office with the movers at 2 p.m. to go coach one of her damn games. Don't you think that the boss should be present during an event as major as an office relocation?

And it's beyond me how she's managed to retain any of her clients after all these years. She hardly ever returns phone calls. I've taken repeat messages for her in which the caller even asks me if she still works for the company! It's a disgrace and I am embarrassed.

I love what I do, but if someone I knew wanted to bring their business to us, I couldn't in good conscience recommend the services of this firm. There is no organization, no leadership, and morale is so low that it can't even be measured. Everyone I work with is constantly pissed off at the boss and yet NO ONE says anything to change the situation.

Welp, I finally spoke up today at our staff meeting. Finally.

She was explaining something to one of my coworkers and she looked over at me and referred to ME as the "daily val people."

I laughed out loud, which caused everyone to look over at me.

"'People'?" I repeated. "What 'daily val people'? As far as I knew, it's just me doing the work. Are there any plans to hire someone to help me?"

Hoo boy. If looks could kill, I wouldn't be laying in bed, typing this right now.

So we'll see what happens. Thank dog tomorrow's Friday.

Labels: bitching, sheer insanity, work