Finally Gave Up At Work

Maybe it was the forms that came in Wednesday night that did me in.  There have been a lot of changes going on with the company, and that has rejiggered when I can expect the work to come in from the lab.  Wednesday night, for some odd reason, new work came in at the end of the workday.  Now, it wasn't really the end of my workday, since I once again was saddled with so much stuff to do.  But that new stuff was the final straw.  I couldn't get to that stuff if I wanted to leave at a not-insane hour.  In fact, I was told that new work wasn't going to come in that late into the afternoon.

So, partly to vent and partly to cover my ass, I forwarded the new work to both my supervisor and my boss.  I basically said to them, "What the hell is this?  I can't do this shit this late in the day, are you kidding me?"  And I don't know if they agreed with me, or even thought through my argument.  The cynic in me believes that both of them just noted when I sent that e-mail, which was an hour after I should have left for the day.  And that goes back to my boss' incessant haranguing (though not recently, to be fair) about me racking up overtime in The Fourth Department.

That may have been behind my supervisor telling me when I got in to work yesterday/Thursday morning that she was going to look over my shoulder and ask me questions about how I lay out my day.  This was the "meddling" I feared and hated when my boss started asking me questions about why am I racking up so much OT.  But this week has been a damn bear, with all this work coming in at all part of the day, plus these calls I have to field and work from previous days that had also piled up.  All these changes (which may be the result of the volume of work coming into the building but also may stem from personnel shortage issues) have made this week more of a torture chamber to fight through than any week before.  I did my self-imposed maximum of ten hours Monday and Wednesday.  And the ripple effects of needing to stay late to get work done on Monday, which meant that I had to come back on Tuesday to clean up that stuff, which pushes me tackling the new stuff to later on Tuesday and maybe even Wednesday ... you get what I mean ... all of that made me afraid that this is The New Normal.  And I am such a prideful, or pig-headed, man that I continued to say, "That's fine!  I can do it all by myself -- so long as you leave me alone and pay me for all the work I have to do!"

Till now.  The surge in workload has become a pain in the ass.  And the shifting down of an hour meant that, if I have to stay my self-imposed maximum of ten hours, I need to stay till 7:30.  I did that Monday and I missed the First Half of Monday Night Football.  I did that yesterday/Wednesday, went to Taco Bell to grab dinner, and was lucky to come home in time to see all of the season premiere of The Amazing Race.  I'm not exercising after work as I did, and could do, if I were working The Main Department (which, truth be told, I haven't worked in weeks, if not months).  And I'm tired as hell.  Is this The New Normal?  As much as I need the damn money, I don't know if I can take OT, at least this much OT, anymore.  And besides, my boss's bosses are telling him to tell me to stop staying late.  I hate dictates from on high, but it looks as though they've finally decided to put an end to accruing this much overtime and fattening up my paychecks.

My supervisor remains an angel in my times of strife.  I fully believe she empathizes with me and understands the stress and anxiety of The Fourth Department, especially when you're getting hit from all directions at once.  But she has gotten orders from my boss to get me out of work in eight hours, so, after asking me questions about what I do when and verifying that I'm not slacking off or anything, she's going to step in and do the new work for me early in the afternoon.  If I weren't so frazzled as I am, I would consider this a threat to my ego.  Frankly, though, right now I feel kind of relieved.  The workload of new forms yesterday/Thursday was in no way ridiculous.  I could have handled it all by myself.  But like the other days all week, I had old stuff to resolve and a bunch of phone calls I needed to handle.  I wasn't going to get to the new stuff until well into the afternoon.  It was so bad yesterday that, truthfully, I don't think I could have gotten to all the new forms by ten hours.  But thankfully, my supervisor did the bulk of it.

With that being said, I did nine hours.  It's not ten, like it was Monday or Wednesday, but it ain't eight, which I presume is my boss' goal.  There was a trickle of new stuff that came in late in the afternoon, after my supervisor left, and I believe I had to do them, so I have a ready-made excuse for staying over.  Combine that with all the other correspondence I needed to tie up and the usual end-of-day work to make sure there were no loose ends, and it was 6:30.  I don't know if my boss is going to be OK with that.  What I do know is that the old me would have gone ballistic that somebody was budding in to my territory, but right now, as I type this, I realize that I surrendered and volunteered for more help.  And I am not worrying about my pride or my manhood or even my wallet that I'll do it again.