I'm sitting in what is becoming my favorite indie coffee shop, waiting for my colleague to arrive. Months ago we were tasked to research some best practices for the school, and our collective inability to do any research in the environments of our offices led us to make a coffee-shop date: an entire day of hanging out and researching. And talking. I expect there will be lots of talking. Since I like her quite a lot, the promise of this day is all that has gotten me through this week.
This week was bad. Really bad. Crying at work kind of bad, which I hate doing and try to avoid because hello, it's kind of embarrassing. But cry at work I did, although it was reasonably discreet and not sobby, thanks to my own stubbornness. The short version is that we threw out a mailing my staff had spent two days doing, spent three days pulling off a 3,500-person mailing that no one else on staff could see (and thus I spent two hours on Tuesday standing by the printer and making small talk so no one would accidentally or otherwise look at the pages printing out), coordinated Mr. Burns' announcements individually and collectively, and otherwise made possible the transition plan that is happening.
Monday night I had it out with Mr. Burns. I hadn't planned on it, but one of my colleagues let him know I was heading quickly for the end of my rope, so he wanted to talk, and talk we did. I had nothing to lose, so I laid it on the line for him. I told him I was angry for the lack of planning, for the way that lack of planning affected me and my staff, for all of the time and energy we've wasted lately because he can't be bothered to show up to meetings he's agreed to. He says he hears that I'm frustrated, but the only thing he really wants to fix is my targets, which are easy and, although important, not exactly the point. It's our day to day experience I want to fix, the wasted time, the holding pattern we stay in for weeks until he gets off his ass to do what he needs to do to let us move forward, the almost finishing something and having to scrap it and redo it because he's thought of something different. And that's not going to happen. He's scattered by nature, but this transition has him even more scattered than ever before, and it's only going to get worse.
On Monday I was ready to leave, to send out applications and get the hell out of dodge. By Tuesday night, however, that plan was less exciting to me, not because I foresaw work getting any better but because of the other things in our life that will be put on hold. If I switch jobs, it'll be months before we can put in an application; if I switch jobs, I won't be eligible for FMLA for a year. And we're tired of waiting.
Despite some very good jobs having application deadlines of today, we decided not to decide in the middle of a week when we are exhausted, emotional, and otherwise overwrought. This decision has too many moving parts, too many consequences to just jump. So we're holding off until this weekend, until we can breathe a little bit, until we can spend significant amount of time together talking about it.
By now I feel kind of resigned. At the end of the day, I like my team, I like my colleagues (okay, most of them), and I think we can do some great work. I don't know if I can make it to the end of Mr. Burns' reign, but it might be the best for me and Ms. P in the big picture. Stupid grown-up life.