Making some progress…
For the past year I have wanted to buy a dSLR camera and move forward in my knowledge and skills with being a professional, or semi-professional photographer. Any time I had the money, something always came up and I ended back at square one, and wasn’t able to progress any further.
I can now check that off the list. Done.
The problem with this now is I’m finding everything that I knew about photography was nothing. I’m starting at square one and having to learn everything. Now, its all about lenses (which by the way, did I mention they’re an arm and a leg?) It’s about lighting and being able to focus correctly. Granted, I do have an auto focus and automatic setting for the “point and shoot” variety, but it’s not going to cut it this time.
I’m a big kid now.
I’ve come out of a pretty tough week. My job and my boss really has started to get to me and I’ve almost had it with the petty bullshit double standard that’s been taking place. Generally, there are always some double standards and there’s always some favoritism, but this is getting ridiculous.
Example one – we’re allowed to read when it’s a little slow, as long as we’re getting our work done. I see people reading catalogs, People, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, the bible – the slow time I take as a great time to do some homework so I had a book out open on my desk. I wasn’t really reading it at the time; I just had it open so I wouldn’t lose my place. My boss comes over, interrupts me mid phone call (you know, when I’m working) and tells me I can’t be doing my homework at work? Whoa, I can read trashy tabloids but I can’t read my Making Literature Matter textbook? Where is the sense in that? No only did she interrupts my call, but my customer could HEAR her talking to me and in that moment she undermined my ability to actually do my job. The customer now doubted my capability. Yes, way to go Roe!
And guess what, she wrote me up for it too.
My week continued to go like this, this incident happened Monday. And then Tuesday she yelled at me for putting on lip gloss at my desk, citing “You can’t put make up on at your desk, do it before you get to work.”
But she can. And everyone else I’ve ever seen do it in front of her can.
Wednesday is the day I received the write up. Fabulous, there isn’t anything I love better than being criticized. It really starts my day out well.
Thursday, seemingly okay, she (Roe) only yells at us a couple times.
And then Friday, she yells at me because I had solved a customers problem (They were billed 6 months) when they shouldn’t have been, because the authorization tape that was recorded didn’t really give them authorization and should have been canceled. It wasn’t, so I issued a full refund for the client. At the end, I said my line “Were you completely satisfied with my level of customer service today?” to which the customer replied “Yes, thank you.”
Problem solved.
No, no it wasn’t. Then here comes Lawrence (The Chosen One) tapping me on the shoulder ready to pass of work to me, usually in the form of a screaming customer to which he didn’t attempt to help. It was my previous customers husband, he had called to bitch us out for, well billing him when we shouldn’t have. Which to some degree I understand….had I NOT issued any credits or attempted to resolve the issue, but I had…. So this guy just wanted to bitch me out. And on top of it all, his phone kept dropping so it was like this drawn out 3 part call where he cursed at me using every word he could. I can handle this so I allowed him to bitch occasionally mentioning that I had canceled the account and that credit was issued. Of course, after 3 months I clearly do not know how to do my job, so mid call Roe starts lecturing me, all of us, on how to handle extreme customers. And then she has someone come stand next to me coaching me on a call they cannot hear.
It could be me, but is she paying entirely too much attention to me?
It’s Friday, the course of the week has made my nerves shot. I’m pissed off at work, pissed off at my professor because he continues to make us do completely asinine assignments that degrade our intelligence and are rather redundant. He makes us analyze a 2-paragraph essay in 5 pages. And did I mention he keeps calling me Jess/Jessica/Jessie in written papers? It’ not like its out loud, its written out on a paper that clearly has my name typed out at the top. It has me hating the language I have grown accustom to loving.
But still, I’m making progress.
After 5 months of procrastination, I have joined a gym. Of which I have not set out a goal, but it will probably be something along the lines of 3 times a week, most likely after work. So here’s to me loosing some fat kid status.
