...Bring May Glowers (Monthly Mini-Rants)

The BBQ Pit
41

I’ve posted elsewhere about the clusterfuck of trying to fund nonprofit programs in light of all of Trump’s executive orders (this is not a Trump rant, just necessary context.) The Office on Violence Against Women, which funded our Transitional Housing program, has stopped posting new funding opportunities even though we were due for renewal in March. So, that funding stream is gone. What to do? We wept and gnashed our teeth about it.

Well it turns out there’s a state grant option for transitional housing that we haven’t applied to before. And it’s due at the end of May. We had an interest from a potential partner, so during our last meeting, I said,

“Hey, I’m going on vacation next week. We will not have time to do all this planning after I return. This is very tight turnaround. Person Whose Job is on the Line, please schedule a meeting and meet with this potential partner during the week that I am gone, and then meet with the team and decide what you are going to do, so that I can start on the application as soon as I return.”

Person Whose Job is on the Line: Got it. Oh, yes, okay, I will do that. I will take very good notes for you.

I returned today. Nothing in my email. So I sent an email. “Hey, please tell me what’s going on with this grant, I need to start immediately.”

Always Late, who is in charge of all programming shit: Oh, weren’t we supposed to meet with someone?

Person Whose Job is On The Line: Yeah, I totally forgot to schedule that meeting, so sorry!

sends email to potential partner

Potential Partner: Yeah, nobody responded so we assumed you weren’t interested.

(Endless email chain is created to start the conversation that should have happened last week.)

What the ACTUAL fuck? This is how we behave during a funding crisis?

I’m mad enough about this to go to the CEO. It’s been years of seeing grant priorities blown off, but this really takes the cake. HOW DO YOU DROP THE BALL FOR SAVING YOUR OWN FUCKING JOB? The CEO will do nothing, so then maybe I go to HR, I dunno. But I can’t bite my tongue on this one.

42

Maybe they don’t want it that badly.

43

That wasn’t the impression I had, but I’m beginning to wonder.

44

You might not recognize this, but small non-profits are often hotbeds of absolute incompetence. If the CEO will “do nothing” about the impending demise of the organization, that says a lot about how competent they are not. Both as to their own direct tasks, and as to the central task of any leader: organizing and staffing an org with people who can do whatever the heck it is the org needs them to do. Which has the collective result of enabling the org to deliver whatever it’s supposed to be delivering to the outside world. Doesn’t matter if that’s pizza or homeless shelters or …

You might be highly competent. You might be highly committed. If nobody else around you is, your org is incompetent and belongs on the ashheap of history; it’s just a make-work charade.

Now it’s stupid that the criminal regime in the whitehouse is the one catalyzing this realization for you. It’s a damned shame they are destroying orgs like yours all over the country.

45

It’s tricky because they are highly competent in some ways and really not in other ways and I don’t know how to make them care. They say words like they care about grants, their words indicate that grants are super important, but their actions do not reflect that understanding. I try to make it so fucking easy for them, too. I organize everything. That is my job. I tell them what to do by what date, I send emails reminding them of what I need, I create calendar reminders, I organize everything into a SharePoint spreadsheet for their convenient reference, they don’t have to think about anything too deeply, all they have to fucking do is what I ask them to do.

And this is too much for some reason.

There are literal lives on the line. What more motivation do you need?

46

Tell them that you’re Pete Hegseth in a Star Wars costume… and that since it’s Cinco de Mayo you’re drunk off your ass.

47

Do they actually realize the cause and effect here though? That would be super obvious to most people, but others need it directly spelled out before the lightbulb goes off.

But some never are able to get to that point… I once had an employee where we had several meetings about his performance, with increasingly urgent phrasing about his poor performance and what needed to change for him to keep his job. He seemed to understand but made no changes. So put him on a 4 week PIP that literally said “if you don’t do these things you will be terminated on date XX.” He made no changes. When I sat him down to terminate him, he literally said to me “but I didn’t realize it was that serious and I could actually be fired.” :face_without_mouth:

48

Aaaand hard on the heels of that rant, I decided to relax and do some writing critiques for writers group tonight, and my friend has included a child incest storyline that is the most self-serving perpetrator-ass narrative of child rape that is SO over the top that I think maybe he wants me, as a reader, to find the rapist sympathetic. This is not the first time I’ve had to take these fuckers to task for this shit. They seem to think ‘‘sexually manipulative thirteen year old preying on adult men’’ is an actual thing rather than a convenient invention of adult men who prey on thirteen-year-olds. Not two months ago I got into it about his complaint about ''the overreach of the me-too movement." I didn’t overreact, but I guess I appeared upset, because he apologized later.

I’m just tired of explaining this shit. It’s the definition of emotional labor. Remaining calm and collected when I am the one most affected by the issue at hand, because there are no other ambassadors, just me. And yes, they do know my history, they are my friends. And I don’t know how to explain to my friend that he is proliferating rape culture by using this awful fucking stereotype - without getting so upset that I become ‘‘overly sensitive woman’’ because women aren’t allowed to be upset about things that affect them if we want to be taken seriously.

I just wanted to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with some friends, man.

49

Ick.

But also, that particular shit should be self-explanatory.

50

What I find ironic is that this fantasy idea of a young girl who seduces adult men is frequently called “Lolita” after the infamous novel. Yet, in that novel, the eponymous girl was clearly a victim in the story. It just shows the ignorance and delusion of these disgusting people.

51

Glad we are agreed on that point. Doesn’t help that he has back-up. We’ve got a Boomer who spent years as a social worker so he is very confident in his opinions about this kind of bullshit. I wrote a story about domestic violence and he tried to explain domestic violence to me… HELLO I have been employed for ten years at a domestic violence agency and my Mom was a perpetrator. And he wouldn’t shut up about how the abuser was right to be pissed off. If I had a nickel for every time a man in that group tried to explain the psychology of women to me. Jesus fucking Christ.

It’s a miracle I haven’t killed them all.

You know, I’ve been honest with them in every other way, I really should just be honest that I’m tired of this shit. Maybe that’s the me they’re getting tonight. Maybe my opening salvo should be, “Friends, it’s a miracle I haven’t killed you all by now.”

When I did my state-mandated service provider training they recorded actual perpetrators explaining very innocently how everything was consensual and then they’d report the facts of the case and it would be like, he bashed her head in and raped her with a tire iron, or something. And they aren’t just trying to save face, this is how these fuckers think. When presented with a mountain of evidence that their crime was not consensual, they still really honest to god believe she wanted it. It’s universally understood Perpetrator 101 for anyone who works in this field.

I want to believe this perpetrator narrative in my friend’s book is meant to be horrifying in its self-serving victimhood but it’s impossible to tell from context and previous conversations on this subject do not make me lean toward a charitable interpretation.

52

I work in a similar agency so can see what you’re saying. A director has sent an email thread that needs a somewhat energetic response like yours. I have far more on my plate than some coworkers; my manager laughed hard since I was apparently the only one with follow-thru. I wish I worked with eleven year olds so it would be less astounding.

53

Thank you for letting me know this is a thing. A relative (with whom I have cut off all contact) is this way; I thought it was just him. He doesn’t seem to understand how we went from being friends to my cutting him off (which I hear from his sibling, who believes his innocence). As for me, I think it should be obvious that the sex crimes he went to prison for, on more than one occasion, are why he is out of the family.

54

Yeah, my husband has a convicted gang rapist in the family. Well, he participated in the rape of a teen girl, but he was convicted of a lesser crime (accessory) because he had very wealthy grandparents. I’ve heard versions of his self-serving story filter through but not even his own brother believes it. He’s not allowed to drop his kid off at school. He’s at every family event, but we pretty much don’t acknowledge he exists. This crime happened a long time ago so sometimes I wonder if someone should be allowed to move on, but I’m sure his victim still feels the effect of his crime and I’ve never seen anything coming out of him that remotely resembles accountability. So fuck that guy.

55

Well this was a nothingburger. He meant the perpetrator’s depiction to be revolting. He just failed to show the narrator responding to it with disgust. It’s hard because his genre is hard-boiled PI. They don’t emote much. He said he didn’t plan to write about this, and I get it, I’m a total pantser, what you write just happens. But I explained the difficulties inherent in tackling sexual violence. I have no problem with him writing about it, I actually think it makes a lot of sense from a storytelling perspective. I just want him to consider his messaging. And I was hardly the only person in the group who had issues so it was a good conversation overall. He recommended some books to me. I’m going to read Hammett.

However, I am fucking FULL of rants this week, and here’s a big one:

Got a text from CEO today asking me to call her. Of course it took forever to connect, and when you get a request from your CEO you know it could be literally anything, piddling or monumental, and that’s stressful.

They just fired my boss. In the 18 months or so we’ve worked together she has become one of my best friends. This is totally undeserved and even though I saw it coming, I don’t understand it. They did it in a really cruel way, too.

I just don’t understand. She was really good at her job. We have the revenue reports to prove it. But over the last several months, they’ve been tightening the leash on her more and more, making it harder and harder for her to do her job (and by extension, for me to do mine.)

My biggest fear is that they’re going to restructure development. I know they want to. They don’t think I belong in the development department. They are incorrect, but they don’t have any nonprofit experience so they’ve convinced themselves this is how things work at nonprofits (they don’t. I’ve worked at maybe six nonprofits of various sizes over the last 15 years. Ten at this one. There is no universe where the Grants Manager doesn’t belong in development.)

Leash is getting tighter on me, too. They want me back in the office three days a week. I’m not even fighting that one, just trying to score my own office in the negotiation.

I guess best not to borrow trouble. But this sucks.

56

Does admin have anyone who could analyze your tight deadlines and think they ought to have you in Development? I’m guessing ‘no’ but am in your corner; as an outsider, even I share your perspective here.

57

Have you tried contacting the manufacturer?

My own: I restarted our Max subscription for a month. Had to sign in on the Roku.

Which required me to enter the whole strong password using the TV remote.

Pretty much every similar service has a way to log in using your phone, and enter a very short alphabetic code. WTF, HBO???

58

I hate that. If you put the Roku app on your phone, you can use the phone as the Roku remote and type in the responses.

59

I talked extensively to my CEO tonight. She was terrified I was going to walk because she knows I was good friends with my boss. So she told me everything. It was an hour of her telling me things.

Things that I believe are true because I saw the hints here and there but didn’t know the extent of it. There was one thing she told me that, if it were the only thing she had told me, would have been grounds for immediate dismissal. So now I think she needed to be fired sooner and I still want to be her friend. Which kind of blows.

The good news is there’s no restructuring happening at this time, and the other good news is CEO doesn’t give two shits whether I come into the office as long as I get my work done. She doesn’t want to interfere with my process because it’s working so well.

The thing I’m really hoping for is for all this micromanaging that’s been happening because CEO didn’t trust my boss to go away. I was caught in the middle of it for a long time and it was annoying having to constantly cover my ass. Vibe was totally different when I talked to CEO tonight. I told her about a grants meeting we had and she was like, “Sounds great. I know you’ve got this.”

I guess I could have taken the time to bitch about the grants situation but it was a long conversation. It’s been a really long day. I feel slightly crazy because my perception of things has shifted so much. I believe both parties involved in this are 100% sincere but their stories are wildly disparate. Unfortunately I’ve gotta go with the one that jibes with what I’ve actually witnessed. Sucks.

60

I saw an online ad for a kitschy sign to hang in one’s kitschy house. It seemed a good fit for this thread

Life is like the
BATHROOM
sometimes everything
comes out ok and
sometimes you have to
push through it