Can’t We All Just Get Along?

In one of my work situations, I’m in an awkward position — my immediate supervisor, with whom I usually work alone (meaning no other employees around) absolutely hates the “big boss”.  My supervisor, who I’ll call D, spends most of her time complaining harshly about the big boss, who I’ll call B.  D regularly and frequently doesn’t follow the rules and procedures that B has established, and therefore I generally don’t/can’t either, or I will appear to my supervisor to be 1) in defiance to her, and 2) allied with the hated B.  For similar reasons, I can’t directly tell B (with whom I don’t always agree, but generally have a healthy and pleasant relationship) about all the places where D isn’t following the rules — because D and I work in isolation from other employees, there would be no doubt of the source (me) if any tales of disobedience were to reach B.  This much I have explained to B and she understands.  Sometimes B or another employee joins us for a shift, but on those occasions, D’s behavior changes dramatically, so there is much less for B to notice (though the physical condition of the office, as well as the progress or lack thereof on assignments, would seem to be pretty blatant).

I’m sure this is really confusing to read — it’s confusing enough to experience, and although I’m quite sure neither of them would ever read this, I’m not going to be more explicit here anyway.  Too much at risk.

The bottom line is that, while I’m in a good spot in that they both think *I’m* doing well (and the big boss understands that she can’t ask me to elaborate on conditions in our office, she needs to interact with D separately), it’s mildly stressful to me for several reasons.  First of all, the potential hatred of D that would be aimed at me if she were to ever suspect that I don’t hate B with all the passion she does.  Actually, I’m exaggerating, she does know that I’m “cordial” with B, which makes me, in her mind, already suspect.  But D sees the world in terms of alliances, and if she ever thought that I actually was *more* on B’s side than on her own, I’m sure I’d never hear the end of it, and might even experience bad job juju as a result (bad review, misplaced blame for problems, etc.).  At the very minimim I’d experience the silent treatment and be on the receiving end of direct hostility at work.

The second (and primary, at this point) reason it’s unpleasant to me, is because D experiences her job as overwhelmingly stressful, almost to the breaking point, and that’s all she can talk about, and I’m the only one there to listen.

Ironically, D’s stress gets in the way of her doing a good job — the job is not so complicated, and D is fully smart enough, that she should be able to do it without much stress at all, even if she doesn’t like B’s rules or management style.  But D is one of those people for whom complaining is apparently her primary mode of being.  I’ve directly seen her choose complaining over fixing a problem — even a simple problem.  If she was the source of the problem, she’ll deny it and instead blame the boss or complain about the boss’ overbearing style (as if that negates her mistake?  hello?)  But if D wasn’t the source of the original problem, then watch out!  Especially if the problem came from B or anyone she thinks is allied with B.  D would NEVER dream of fixing a problem that someone else created, not when there’s the opportunity to complain about it instead!  Again, it puts me in a bind — each time that I move to solve a problem that she hasn’t solved, I’m at risk of “showing her up.”  As if my solving a problem in thirty seconds might make her huge blowup about it seem out of proportion?  Or as if my willingness to act instead of complain makes me appear to be on B’s side?  (these are MY thoughts, not hers — this is what I worry about that D might think when I step in to fix in thirty seconds what she has just spent an hour whining is an insurmountable hassle…)

The sad part is that this is in a work situation that involves dealing with the public, and wouldn’t you think that serving the public would be of primary importance here?  Certainly more important than pointing fingers or whining about the boss.  But no, not for D.

Ironically, as unpleasant a work environment as this creates, this job is my favorite of all my part-time jobs…  Go figure…  I think partly that’s because I truly enjoy the work, and partly because I’m in a favorable position in the sense that I personally am managing to get along with everyone, and I am productive and getting a lot done.  I think (biased though I might be, lol) that I do several *times* the amount of work that D does per shift.  She spends so much of her time complaining about the boss (and then complaining about how stressed she is) that it’s a wonder she gets any work done at all!

This situation has built to a head in the last few months, since a new computer system (and its attendant need for training) has caused the boss to join us frequently.  And during the boss’s visits, she has noticed some of the OTHER backlogs that had piled up in the office, and is now asking for those things to be taken care of.  While I think this is perfectly reasonable (the backlogs had bothered me too, see above for my view that D spends her time complaining instead of working), B’s interactional and management style have many people irked, D most of all.  B comes across as condescending, it’s true.  She talks to us all as if we were kindergartners.  For some reason I don’t understand, this doesn’t bother me, although I’ve certainly taken offense to being talked to like a child in other situations.  And for some other reasons that I also don’t understand, D is way beyond bothered by B’s style, all the way to hatred, hostility, and the edge of explosion.  She takes such great offense that she’s nearly reduced to tears each time B talks to her.  Each conversation revs the hatred up higher.  And yet D would never be able to consider actually expressing her feelings to B.  Because D doesn’t see the problem as herself being offended, so she’d never consider attempting to solve it from that angle.  Instead, D is so certain that B is “wrong” in every way shape and form, that all she can do is seethe and vent, before and after (and lately, even DURING) each interaction with B.

Seems to me that honest communication could eliminate this problem.  Or at least 90% of it – D might not ever like B’s style of interaction.  And B might not be able to change her style much (though I’m sure she would try if she realized how people perceive her).  But at least B could factor that in to her management style and actions, and D could learn to not take it personally.  I might have an opportunity to talk generically about this with B, and if I can, I will.

Another thing that’s so ironic about it is that, while D is offended by being spoken to like a child, she is, in fact, BEHAVING like a child, both in her pouty whining, and in her refusal to do her job in favor of finger-pointing and complaining.

Sheesh, you’d never know we are all adults here!

Anyway, as I said, things are coming to a head, and I personally think it’s possible that D might either tell B to “take this job and shove it”, or have a breakdown, or actually get fired, if B decides to pay more attention to the actual work that is or isn’t getting done.

Gonna be an interesting winter at “Dog’s Little Office”…

Who Knew? The Lemon Balm Was Listening…

The day after I posted a “come in” call for the Lemon Balm, it sprouted!  Two little dabs of green rose up overnight.  No such luck with the Ground Cherry — maybe it needs a second pleading here?  Come on,  baby, you can do it!  And let’s hear from some of the other plants that have only sprouted ONE sprout…

Thursday’s Independence Days Challenge actions:

* Growing Food:  I dug *part* of a garden bed, pruned *part* of an apple tree, and *started* to set up a compost pile.  I don’t really want to count things that I only partway do, especially since I have a history of starting what I don’t finish.  But I do want to report the progress.

* Food planning/Eating from storage:  Soaking some *really old* red beans that I’m finally using up.  They’ll go in the crockpot Friday and be dinner, with some rice.

* Eating from storage:  Thursday’s dinner, along with a salad, was baked potatoes and roasted beets, both grown in last year’s garden and root cellared ’til now.  (Hey, if they’re both in the same oven, how can one be baked and the other be roasted?  I guess they’re baked beets then…)

In other news, I’ve taken the next step towards a new part-time summer job that looks like it will see me once again earning more than I’m spending, at least for a few months.  It also has the potential to turn into a full-time job with benefits, etc after the summer, but I’m not sure I want that, so I’m not focusing on that for now — first, I’ll just see how the summer goes and see how I feel about any other opportunities later.  More details once it’s official.

At home, I’ve unpacked a few more boxes, moved around a little more furniture.   A little at a time, pressing myself to keep making small progresses, seems to work best for me, rather than planning an all-out long slog of a day, which I usually end up slothing and not doing.  You could say it’s the same kind of mentality needed for the Independence Days Challenge, which is why I’m hoping that challenge will be a good one for me to participate in.

Catching Up…

It’s been a busy several days and before I knew it it’d been nearly a week since I made a post.  I’ll try to recreate what’s been happening here.

MOVING — Last Monday was my first night in the new house.  I spent that day shuttling more things from the schoolhouse, with the last item, as always – the cat.  With a nearly loaded truck, just enough room left for him and his stuff, I put him in his carrier on the porch (finally, he gets to go outside!) for an hour or so while I loaded up his food, litter box, etc., and then swept out the schoolhouse and wiped down the bathroom and kitchen.

I got to the new house and drove into the garage using the handy-dandy electric garage door openers.  Sheesh, talk about non-Riotlike!  I need to ask the landlords if the doors can be opened manually!   But I have found a benefit to the garage — once the door is closed behind me, the garage becomes part of the house, where the animals have free reign.  I carried the cat/carrier into the mud room and opened the carrier door so Bear could start to explore.  The animals wandered around as I unloaded the truck and brought things inside the house.

DOG-FENCE — Although the house includes 40 acres with all sorts of fencing and cross-fencing, it was all fenced for horses or other large animals and would not have held back the dog.  So for several days, the dog was permitted outside only on a leash.  Poor Luna!  She doesn’t like to go potty on a leash, plus she just loves to run around, and she couldn’t!

Some local friends have a fence-building business, and they came out starting on Monday to build me a dog yard.  They had some complications at their house (plumbing emergencies) so it took a little longer than expected, but by Friday afternoon, we had this:

There’s the gate (the gap near the top of the gate will be covered with chicken wire, just in case she thinks she could jump through there), and in the background you can see the fence going up the hill.  That’s a shed on the right, and the fence goes around it and up the hill and across and back down to the house, which is off the photo on the left.  It’s a nice backyard for her, and I can only hope that she stays in it!  I’m a bit worried about when she sees deer, which are abundant here — she goes a bit crazy, and might just make it over (or under, by digging) the fence.  I may add an electric wire for just such circumstances.  Especially since I want to feel secure about leaving her there when I’m away working for eight or nine hours at a time.

WORK — I’ve taken in one freelance proofreading job at the moment, in addition to my usual local work.  It’s been a few weeks since I sent out some outreach letters for (mostly) nonlocal proofreading work, so I’m hoping I might hear back from some of them soon.  I’ve calculated that I need twelve hours per week of proofreading, at my lowest hourly rate, to cover my new expenses.

GARDEN — My garden this year will have two components — first, the orchard.  There are about a dozen trees in the yard here — mostly apple, a few apricot, and rumors of peach and maybe a pear.  I will just have to wait to see what they are!  My role now is to prune them (long overdue) and to see what grows.  Here’s the orchard with the huge house in the background:

And here’s the area that will be my garden (the lower terrace plus however much I want on the upper terrace):

First step there:  deer fence!  And, while it’s still far too early for outdoor planting (the soil was frozen and snow covered most of the yard as recently as last week), I do have room now for indoor starts.  And, I’ve decided to join Melinda’s Growing Challenge (see button over on the right), which involves growing from seed at least one new thing you’ve never grown before.  I haven’t decided what thing or things I will grow, but I have lots of seeds to choose from!

Also, another part of my garden project this year is my friend KH’s efforts in the other fields surrounding the house.  She’s planning on growing a huge garden using the hot well water (stay tuned for descriptions of how she’ll do that, and how well it works).  She’s considering establishing a small CSA, with clients getting a box of whatever’s ripe each week.  She’ll be providing the local restaurants with produce.  And, she’ll be bringing her produce to the local farmer’s market — in fact, she’s working with the manager of the local cafe to set up a second farmer’s market for the valley, one that will be right by the cafe, and not during the workweek.  (The current farmer’s market is 3:30-4:00pm on Fridays, in the hospital lawn which is not right downtown where the visitors usually pass by.)  While this is all KH’s project, I’m very interested in seeing how it works, and maybe working with her, and definitely adopting some of her ideas!

Okay, that’s enough for now — time for dinner and to get started on that proofreading…

What’s That Saying about Good Fences and Neighbors?

Yesterday I went to the rental house with a friend who is the wife-half of a fence-building business (they also happen to be the daughter and son-in-law of the couple whose herbal business I work for).  We walked around the yard and assessed dog-constraint options.  I hate the idea of having to fence the dog in when there is plenty of room between us and the neighbors, with only forest behind the house.  But Luna (my 6-year-old lab/chow/misc mix) has shown me plenty of times that she can’t be trusted to stay home when she’s in a wandering mood.  Case in point: today, for the second time, she and Ellie (caretaker’s dog at my current abode) showed up near my work, over ten miles from home.  A friend saw them at about 9:30 am, stopped, and got Ellie into his car, but Luna wouldn’t let herself be caught (even by someone she knows).  He came to my work and told me, I drove out to where he said he’d seen her, stopped the car and called for her, and she came bounding up from behind a dune and jumped happily in the truck,  all out of breath.  She had to wait in the truck all day until I got home at 6pm.  I took her out of the truck on a leash a few times to offer potty breaks, and gave her just a tiny bit of water to drink, but otherwise shunned her all day, with several stern “Bad Dog” refrains said to her in the first few minutes after I picked her up.  No way to know if she got the message or not.

Friends keep warning me that ranchers shoot free-roaming dogs out in these parts, and it makes me even more grateful that she has, so far, managed to be found by friends.  But once we are in the new house we will be in unfamiliar territory, with only one of the neighbors being known to me at this point.

So, it looks like I’ll be shelling out some fairly hefty bucks for a fence to be built.  (Actually, more than half the fence posts are already in place, but strung with barbed wire which won’t contain a dog — so they’ll be doing a fair amount of merely adding field fence to an existing fence.  Even with that ’shortcut’ this will still be a chunk of change.

Financially, I’m both worried and not worried at the same time.  I’m not worried about running out of money in the short term — I’m extremely fortunate to have enough savings to tide me through these transition costs.  On the other hand, my feeling of financial security stems from having that savings cushion, and that comfort zone recedes as that money is spent.  On the THIRD hand, given what’s happening with the plunging value of the dollar, I might as well turn as much as I need to into useful stuff like rolls of fencing and fenceposts, which will at least hold its value, as opposed to dollars, which don’t seem likely to.

Also today, two things happened which hold potential for increasing my financial situation.  One is that I was informed of an upcoming vacancy at the local Post Office, by a postal employee who thinks I’d be good there.  I would indeed enjoy working there, I think, and in this locale there is hardly a more stable employer than the US Postal Service.  I informed the right person that I’m interested.  She is still waiting to hear what kind of position she’s permitted to hire, and once that is known, I’ll analyze the facets of the job (how many hours, which days, pay scale, etc) and see if it still seems to work for me.  I don’t want to quit any of the jobs I already have, but if they REALLY don’t compare I might think about it (the library, for example — while I totally love working there, my shifts add up to a grand total of five (5) hours per week, unless the other employee is sick or out of town.  The library is only open twelve hours per week, so that plus about an hour of administrative time is the maximum I’d ever get there.  Plus, the pay is not very high.  Frankly it might not take much for any other job to out-compete the library, but I do really love working there.  So we’ll see.

The other financial plus thing that happened today is this:  I’m pursuing the possibility of buying a Geo Metro from a friend.  He still has to get it up and running and pass the smog test, but I’ve told him that if he can get it that far I’ll buy it.  He had offered it to me together with a refurbished 50,000-mile engine, plus two “parts cars” (other Geo Metros with dead engines but with most other parts working, that could be used for parts to repair the working one) for a set price.  Today he said he’d like to keep one parts car plus the “new to him” engine, and would reduce my purchase price accordingly.  This works fine for me, since I’m not a mechanic and only half interested in having the parts cars anyway (dead cars plus rental house do not happy neighbors make). 

So, I have a job possibility to pursue, and I’ve just saved $500 on a car purchase which, itself, will halve (roughly) the amount of gasoline I’ve been using.  All in all, not too bad an equation.