working on moving

Spending most of the weekend packing, plastering and painting but did take a break to go to the one-night-only event for underground artist Skip Williamson at the Inner Sanctum. I think it was a very successful event for Inner Sanctum. I was surprised how cheaply art and prints were being sold by a person who is very well-known in underground comics. Very approachable man - I was taking a photo of him next to a large painting and asked if I could touch him to position him liked I wanted and he just smiled and said "please".

Why does my coworker seem to be a psycho?

Even with Boss1 back last week he has resumed the annoying behavior of hanging over me at work, leaning on the desk beside me or on the back of my chair and breathing on my neck or in my ears, inches away from me. No one seems to think this is objectionable at work. Friends say I have a good case for harassment in the workplace. I need to talk to someone who works in HR to see what qualifies or what lines he has to cross over in order for me to seek legal action if I need to.

The odd thing that does not compute is that I can see no advantage for someone to drive me out of where I work. No one else there can do exactly what I do and previous employees were incompetent or had personality conflicts with Boss1 and Boss2. So why give me a hard time? This should be a work relationship where we should be working together go keep the flow of jobs as quick and flawless as possible.

On the up end, one beloved former employer looking for someone to take over my former position and has wanted to know if I was available on weekends. I would love to work for them on the weekend, but I can't afford to work for them full time. If I didn't actually "need" a job. *sigh*

There is a sales job at a graphics company near the new house, but I am not a salesperson or rep and suspect they are a company that can't hold onto people. Would love to work close to home. Mostly, I love drawing a regular check with the taxes withheld already and medical benefits - that's the most important thing for me at this time.

So far it's been a lousy week at work.

I am trying to maintain a good attitide but petty annoyances coupled with possibly psychotic behaviour from my esteemed coworker have made me less than happy at the office.

Friday

8:00 a.m. - 8:45 a.m. Spent the morning looking for a job jacket that was never written for an addition to a multi-part job when someone could have just written it up and printed it out in five minutes for the press room.

9:30 p.m. Boss1 comes in and tell me I worked 1.2 hours overtime last week and wants to know just what I was doing. I am surprised I could have actually been busy enough for the extra time. I told him I can't remember what I was working on and he could delete that time from my paycheck.

10:00 a.m. CSR gives me a rush job with no information in the jacket or ticket. I have to go to his office and get him to fish for the client's fax on his desk.

10:50 a.m. I could not send email to a client because my machine couldn't find the server. Checked the preferences and quit and restarted the mail app. Nothing worked until I rebooted the machines.

12:45 p.m. Had a moral-adjustment lunch with Boss2 at the reopened-under-new-ownership Asian buffet (including sushi b bar). Came back and annoying co-worker stayed out of my up close personal space the rest of the day.

Monday

8:00 a.m. My preferences have been changed in QuarkXPress when I open it and every palette window is open. Closed windows and changed preferences back.

I could smell cologne from across the building as I walk in. Just annoying. Better than smoke and sweat.

On the up side, the CSR tells me hot hot job I was supposed to get out in the morning is now not going to happen after all so I have one less thing to worry about today. There is a new hot job for a different client with files coming from two sources but none of the files will be in until Tuesday.

Tuesday

8:15 a.m. I came in to find the older computer that I turned off with everything else last night already on. Nothing else is running.

The new hot job only has files from one source in today and only half of that is approved to print. Spend most of the morning with nothing much to do so I went to lunch early in the hope that more work would come in later.

Got back from work and the job that had been killed is alive again and the other vendor has left a message for me wondering where it is. CSR does not remember telling me twice that Boss2 told him the job was dead. I made a series of phone calls to Boss 1 & 2 and the client and vendor, get the files uploaded by the outside party providing the layouts, and send them onto the other vendor through their FTP site - another reason I love the internet. All is well and proofs & prints are lined up to happen.

The other thing my coworker did today was to resume invading my personal space by just hanging out in my office for a weird pause and start talking about how many leftovers from his father's day dinner he was still eating on. Then another pause. This was neither work related nor something I can relate to, other than food. I suggested some leftovers can be easily frozen, like baked beans and meats, while others would have to be eaten because they don't freeze well. Then another odd pause. I don't know what was going through his mind. I felt kinda sorry for him and creeped out too.

Just trying to do my job

Why is that the new CSR at work is seeing me as the enemy?
He has issues. He started this job badmouthing his last employer. I never speak ill of former employers when I'm at work. Wouldn't that be like speaking ill of the opposite sex when you're out on a first date?

If it's not that, it's the physical intimation and the snooping. At first I thought it was unintentional but today I realize it is deliberate when he insists on hanging over me when I'm at my desk or standing just inches away from me. He insists on standing so close to me that I can feel his breath on me.

I told Chaz and Sandy about how he was snooping in my car on a day that I went to lunch with my boss- I've locked my doors ever since that incident - and asked for the passwords for the computers. Sandy says that just snooping inside my car without my permission is reason for prosecution. I'm not sure of this since, as far as I know, he took nothing. She also came up with the simply brilliant and obvious response that I should have had waiting when he asked for computer passwords. I should have answered the question with another question "why do you need to know?". That didn't occur to me. Momma never said I was smart. Then she said I should carry a large pokey stick with me for when he got too close physically. hehe.

My tactic/stategy: I shall outlast him. He's already not doing his job as well as he was the first week he started, which I think is part of his problem with me - I ask too many questions.

If anyone reads this blog, wish me luck and great tenacity.

... or that he'll leave or get over whatever is eating at him soon and that they'll hire a nice lady to take his place who loves their job.

My thoughts too

I found this post in RozK's live journal and agree.
I might add that, with thousands of children without families in this country who have to grow up in our horrible foster care system, why do so many people still refuse to adopt what they can't grow themselves?

Saturday, June 4th, 2005
9:34 am
More idiocy

One could, in a sense and purely to make the argument below, to respect the consistency of anti-abortion Christians who want to adopt spare embryos, bring them to term and bring them up as more Christian children rather than letting them be harvested for research etc. They have an ethical position which identifies the human potential of embryos with full essential human status - I don't agree, and I radically disagree with the other positions they derive from that, but their preparedness to inconvenience themselves in the name of belief shows them putting their money where their mouths are. Or does it?

I do find myself noting that most of the advocates of this are husbands, whose wives presumably get a say in the matter but are, presumably, content to let their husbands make decisions in this as in everything else. (In this as in so much else, they are aspiring to a model which has little to do even with the Old Testament, let alone with anything that went on in the early church, except sometimes in Paul's head. There are too many confident stroppy women in the Old Testament for any of this to be described as 'Biblical' - but I digress.)

What does strike me as remarkable, though, and in this sentence remarkable is Roz weaselspeak for fucking incredibly stupid, mean and illogical is that according to the Guardian story the agency fixing this for them is determined not to let lesbians adopt embryos. Now, if they are really concerned about the survival of these embryos - and they talk about doing business with the in vitro people as a necessary evil - why on earth would they care about the sexuality, or indeed the religion, of adopting parents? Or do they believe that to be brought up by lesbians is to guarantee the child a seat in Hell?

What this actually exposes is that they don't really believe in the absolute sacredness of embryos' lives, because if they did, they would not care who adopts them. Which means that as usual they are lying about their motives and engaged in cheap point-scoring. I pity those children, who are going to be brought up to be obsessively grateful and hopefully will resent the hell out of it.

I had a lovely time with Kim and Harris at Piedmont Park tonight, where the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra gave a free concert followed by an excellent fireworks show. I sincerely want to thank whoever is responsible for such a nice evening in the city.