This week has been absolute hell at work. And coming on top of the budgeting woes of Friday, the tax-paying woes of Saturday, and the friendship woes of Tuesday, this wasn't something I had a lot of emotional space for.
Monday, my Executive Director and I went seven rounds about the draft for an award application. We've made it through the first round of an award for excellent nonprofit management, and the second round of questions is due at 5pm on Tuesday. The questions are really, really hard; they include things like "how are you planning for the natural and inevitable change in leadership?" and "how do you intentionally incorporate diversity into the management of your organization?" We have good answers to some of them, and to some of them we appear to be making answers up out of whole cloth. Near the end of the day, he manages to give me the least helpful, most insulting feedback I've ever gotten. Instead of saying that the openings to our answers are vague and not stating our one-sentence answer directly enough (totally fair and true), he says the answers sound childish and like they're trying too hard to be cute. WTF? So I leave work on Monday very discouraged.
Tuesday, the application, another revision of which I sent him as I walked out the door on Monday, is due at 5pm. I hear nothing until 11am, when I get comments on half of it by email. I incorporate said comments. I send it back. He sends more comments. I incorporate those. He shows up in my office at 2:30, having talked to our Managing Director and now convinced that our answer to the last, badly worded question is taking the wrong tack. He runs upstairs to get his management books and see if we can figure out what the "right" answer is in preparation for trying to articulate our somewhat more real answer. We revise several more times. I bring him a revision while he's talking to the Managing Director, who jumps into the fray. At one point we're all gathered around my computer while I'm typing dictation from them both. We generate something usable and I paste it into the web browser. I hit submit at 4:56. I get home to find another email from E. I'm a basketcase all night long.
Wednesday, I hit work only to find out from my boss that 1) I've missed a report deadline to a funder and 2) a grant application I thought was due on the 15th was due on the 1st. I toss the report to my assistant and crank out the application. It claims you can submit it until midnight, but there's a piece you have to mail by snail mail and that requires the ID code that you only get when you submit. Ergo, I must submit in time to get the code and get the postmark by the time the post office closes. Meanwhile, my assistant can't get into the online report form. She goes about trying to collect data in the meantime. I get the application in at 3 and give my boss the heads-up. I apologize again and try to explain, again, how this happened. (I made two fatal errors during my first two weeks of work. Nine months later, they are biting me in the ass.) He tells me that I've been dropping details and we'll have to talk about a plan to fix that. He's not very nice about it. I'm shell-shocked and ashamed and anxious and worried about my job. After work we end up at R's, who puts everything in perspective, lets me vent, and reminds me that I should do some simple spells of cleansing and protection. Are we witches or aren't we? he asks me, quoting me back to myself. I go to bed feeling better.
Thursday, I spend my morning pages writing about the challenges of working in an extroverted environment when I'm an introvert and what I need to change around my workplace to make myself more productive and less prone to error. I'm able to finish and send off the grant report, and the prayer I was able to summon up when I got in (too many people already around to put salt in the corners or wave an athame around) seems to have worked. I've been centered, content, productive, and my boss has said nothing annoying or alarming.
The funniest moment, however, was from my Executive Director, who whipped into my office to hand me a contact to whom I need to send our new librarian job opening. He said, "Hey, how are you today, the day after [really awkward pause] yesterday?" It hasn't yet stopped amusing me.
And hey, I get to spend a little time being impressed with myself for not wallowing in the anxious misery and turning it into something productive. It's definitely not my usual style. So go me!
Comments