Yesterday we got the delightful news that we’re all being cut back to a four day week as of January 1. Which means 20% less money, which means Amanda? Is on the poverty diet starting in the new year. I hope to develop a love of peanut butter.
Fuck me.
After my last post, I kind of figured this was coming, but it’s a little different than I had expected. My boss did not quit. My boss was laid off. It’s a really weird situation because generally speaking, the less experienced member of the department (i.e., me) is the one that gets the axe.
Not that I’m sorry that they decided not to go that way.
I’ve got mixed feelings about it. Overall, this is a good thing: I’m not taking over management NOW, but will be in the future, which hopefully will include a nice raise. While we got along, our styles were completely different, our personalities were pretty different, and she tended to stress me out. I don’t regret not having to deal with that anymore.
At the same time, she was good at her job. She was a really good researcher, had a lot of years with the company, and I’m sorry she’s lost her job.
So yeah. Mixed feelings, definitely.
My boss/sort of boss/the other librarian (it’s…complicated) has just taken ANOTHER week of unpaid leave. She’s been gone an entire month now.
Why do I get the feeling that she’s quitting and that I’m going to be stuck doing all the admin shit that I hate doing? One of the reasons I really wanted this job (a minor one, but still) is that it was pure research and I didn’t have to, like, negotiate with vendors and do the accounting. I HATE that.
>.>
Tonight marks the first time in at least 2 weeks that I have been able to login to my blog. Ended up having to upgrade, and fix permissions (and before she says anything, yes, Mura was actually the one to fix permissions). The fact that I haven’t been able to post means that I was unable to say the following:
Today, my boss asked me if we have catalog shopping in the U.S.
I managed to not laugh out loud.
I went into the office “kitchen” (lacking a stove, but possessing a fridge, microwave, water cooler, coffee machine, and dishwasher) a couple minutes ago to dump my cold tea and replace it with some water, and noticed that my missing issue of SciTech News (a riveting publication produced by the SciTech, Physics, and Chemistry divisions of SLA) had a place of honor on the table, right next to the New York Times.
Good to see someone reads it, because I can’t be bothered to do more than skim.
In other news, my work appraisal was this morning and was certainly the most glowing work appraisal I’ve gotten in my life. If it weren’t for the facts that 1) the economy suck, and 2) I’ve been here for less than six months, I’d probably be getting a pretty decent raise next month when they’re approved. So all is awesome there.
Someone needs to explain to the “chefs” at Pret that porous sandwich bread is not the best medium for a hummus sandwich. Learn to love the tortilla, people.
I can’t. Really. Yes, I went to a Swedish Lutheran college in Minnesota (and as a result I can pull off Frances McDormand’s Minnesotan accent from Fargo with aplomb), but the only language I took there was a semester of Spanish. I had two years of French in high school. I do know a few random Swedish phrases thanks to hanging out in my college’s Swedish House for a lot of my last two years and from being a four year veteran of the Lucia Singers, who sang the same Sankta Lucia song every December on Lucia Day. I’m also pretty good at picking through websites in foreign languages to find whatever I need. It’s a holdover from my last job where, depending on the project or the day, I might have to pretend to be fluent in Romanian or Arabic or Korean without ever speaking any one of those languages.
Neither of these skills make me actually, truly fluent in Swedish. In the slightest.
And yet yesterday I got emails asking what a particular Swedish word meant in English, and today I spent half my morning “translating” a website to see if there’s any information we could use on it. That was an interesting experience. I’m getting really familiar with one of the Swedish-English dictionary sites.
It’s enough to make a girl consider taking the language or getting the Rosetta Stone software, just in self-defense.
I need to just accept that I will never, ever, make it to one of the NY Metro Librarians Meet-ups.
My excuse when I worked in the ‘burbs was that the meetings were in New York (at Chipotle!) and I really didn’t want to get on a train for forty minutes to eat a burrito and mingle with other librarians. In the middle of the week. It was a valid excuse, I always thought.
My excuse now is that I would rather get on a train for forty minutes and go home/go to the gym instead of mingling with librarians. (I might have gone, just for the sake of the burrito, except they moved it to some book/cafe) It’s not so much a valid excuse now, so obviously, no matter how fun it seems in the abstract, I simply have no burning desire to talk to complete strangers in a cramped restaurant.
When I put it that way, it almost makes perfect sense.