My life sucks (longish, but not, alas, pitworthy)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Not my whole life, just my job, but that’s enough, most days, isn’t it?

As some of you know, I work at the puzzle factory. I am, in fact, senior editor at the largest word-puzzle publisher in the country. I’ve been there 11 years (as of this week) and in general consider puzzle editor to be the coolest job in the universe.

At this point, I’m more or less middle management, so I spend a fair amount of time making sure other people are doing things, rather than doing them myself. It’s been very, very busy at the puzzle factory, since back around the first of the year the powers that be decreed that we were going to go head to head with our competitors on variety titles. (“Variety” is the catchall phrase for everything that isn’t a crossword or a word-find – logic problems, cryptograms, acrostics, etc., etc., etc.) The variety titles are my particular bailiwick, so going from about 12 titles to about 20, with a new title due to printer (our main deadline) roughly once a week for two and a half months… argh. A lot of work. I do layouts, figure out the answer pages, write editing templates, come up with budgets, work with the typesetter on page layouts, etc. – before we even start on the usual job of getting the book produced. I’ve been working my ass off, my underlings have been working their asses off – it’s all been very intense.

Around mid-March, I said to the kids (my underlings), you know, if we can make it through the next two weeks, this will all become doable.

April 1st, my #1 underling put in two months’ notice. (Not totally unexpected – she’s getting married, to a guy who not only comes from money but makes money, and wants to start a family ASAP.) This was a major blow, but okay. We found someone we wanted to hire (the first, and only, person I interviewed, which is so not the usual course of things because we don’t pay s***). She’s starting two weeks before #1 underling quits, so we can start training her. This is going to be rough for a while, but (I’m thinking), if I can move x, y, and z over to #3 underling (damn, if only #2 underling weren’t so busy doing crosswords, since this particular title went way up on puzzle count…)…

#3 underling came to me at 5:05 yesterday to tell me that she’s thisclose to accepting another job and that she’ll probably be putting in her two weeks’ (maybe three weeks’) notice on Monday. “This isn’t about you, twicks, you are absolutely the greatest boss, but…”

And, shit, I understand. She’d be crazy not to quit.

I’m not even getting into the BS my boss has been throwing at me for the last week or so, some of which is just effin’ ridiculous. (Her boss wants us to cut back on our UPS bills – so my boss decrees, starting immediately [4:00 last Friday afternoon], no more overnight UPS – which is the main way I get things done. You want shit in on time? Let me do my effin’ job.)

So I get off the computer last night and find a voicemail message from my bf (yeah, I’ve got dial-up, bite me) – but he’s not there when I call back. So I can’t even dump all this on him.

I went to read in bed for a while – “The Lovely Bones.” There’s a scene about the father mourning the girl’s death and I started crying.

I never cry. Honest to god, maybe once a year.

I’m thinking extremely seriously of looking for a new job.

2

So much for, Everything’s better today (meaning “the day after”), right? … It IS the day after. Sigh.

Chin up. Grab a kitty cat, a cup of tea, the gardening tool of your choice, and the cordless phone, and venture into your little patch of Zone 6. You’ll be a new girl by noon.

3

Gardening, certainly. But what you really need is an “a” thread style breakfast. Where the heck is Watcher of the Skies?

Hang in there, Twicks.

4

Thanks, ladies. Right now I’m munching Keebler Grasshopper cookies (the commercial equivalent of Girl Scout Thin Mints). Chocolate always helps – and chocolate eaten when stressing has negative calories, right?

5

Gee twicks I wish you were close enough that I could pop over and bring you some of my Victoria Secret bubble bath. Then you could draw a big steaming one with good good good smelly all around you. Add a book and your cookies and voila! A refreshed twickster.

BTW I left a stressful job a year and a half ago and people still come up to me and say "you look so great ! ". It was making me a crabby old lady. :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Thanks for the bubble bath suggestion, NinetyWt – tonight’s ablutions will be dedicated to you. (I’ve got a bottle of “Tropical Essence” going right now that smells pretty doggone good. Since I take two or three baths a week, the “store brand” I buy is more apt to be Target than Victoria’s Secret. :wink: )

Yeah, I’m definitely thinking it’s time to move on. The bf and I were discussing this last night, and he was asking, “well, why don’t they just give these people raises and keep them? After all, it is the coolest job in the universe” (a claim I’ve made that he takes great delight in quoting to me when I’m bitiching about work). And I had an epiphany – from the owner’s pt. of view, it doesn’t make sense to give people in these positions raises – we hire 'em, pay 'em low salaries, and exploit them for two or three years – then they quit in disgust and move on and the owner can go down a bit on that position’s salary, because it’s once again “entry-level.”

They don’t take into account (or, more likely, don’t give a shoot about) the wear and tear on me to have to train these people – it takes a month to 6 weeks before they have any idea at all what’s going on, and probably six months before they’re fully operational.

I don’t think I can do it again, esp. training two people at once, when the current staff available to me is a) a friend of mine who’s been there four years, and is fairly actively looking elsewhere and b) a new hire who I was planning to leave on less demanding jobs as much as possible, because I’m not sure she has what it takes to do the more demanding variety editing. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t.

So I’ve got to a) train two new people (after I lose two weeks interviewing); b) do the editing, etc., for the two people who are leaving, and c) continue doing my own job.

WHERE’S MY BUBBLE BATH? WHERE ARE THE COOKIES? I’m headed for the garden – I bought a flat of dianthus on my way home from the bf’s this morning.

7

twick, this Friday at Fado, I prescripe a black and tan brownie with Guiness Ice Cream. You sound like you need it!

It sounds incredibly stressful. I’ve never understood companies that feel a high turnover rate is a GOOD thing. Production goes down due to training, other people (such as yourself) get stressed because the extra work falls on their already heavy load, and then they end up losing THOSE good people. The lack of forward thinking from them just astounds me.

8

Ugh Twickster… Whenever I pick up those puzzling magazines I think how much I wish I worked for the companies that make them. Now I’m not so sure.

Companies (especially in this crappy economy) think they can treat everyone like garbage because jobs are harder to come by. I hope your boss gets a clue or maybe you can take all that experience and start your own magazine :wink: (maybe the complete SDMB Puzzleopedia or something!)

Seriously though… good luck! When work sucks it tends to spill over into the rest of your day… Have the bf give you a nice massage after that bath!

9

[hijack] Hey Twicks, I’m an out of work Quark guru. I’d send you a resume but it would be tough to sell you on my editing skills, huh? Not to mention the cross-continental commute.[/hijack]

Now then. Trailing petunias for your window boxes, mixed with baby’s breath and some blue lobelia might lower your blood pressure. Maybe a hoagie?

10

Don’t get me started on petunias. :mad: I went to Produce Junction (mecca for bargain-minded gardeners – $8/flat for annuals, not $10) – and they didn’t have petunias yet, which is what I went for. Hence the dianthus. (Plus a nice hanging ivy geranium [$7] and a heather plant [$4] that will probably turn out to be an annual, given the suckiness of my life.) They had impatiens, but no petunias. I want my freakin’ petunias!

The hoagie was yesterday’s comfort food – I just started a nice huge pot of bean soup, thanks to a hambone from the bf.

(Nobody has puzzle-editing skills coming in, which is one of the things that makes hiring such a nightmare. If you can work out the commute – or want to rent my spare bedroom – we can probably work something out. :wink: )

11

Sending some sympathy your way via PATCO, twickster. This sucks big time…both the work crunch and the lack of understanding from your higher-ups.

12

Hey Twicks, sorry I wasn’t around at the time of the OP to offer you some a-style breakfast (good suggestion koeeoaddi). It seems so short-sighted of companies to act this way (so many do) and not keep good people with good wages, benefits, and so forth. My mental health prescription beats Prozac and Paxil and all the other anti-depressant drugs of choice, and that is to consume a large cup of chocolate water ice from John’s at 7th & Christian. As of Friday, they had yet to open for the season but it could happen any day. [hijack] I had my own need for this never-fail bs-antidote on Friday when after a long grueling day at work, I gave someone a lift home as it looked like it was about to rain, circled back across center city and got on the Vine St. Expwy and simultaneously heard on traffic report and saw in front of me, the 95 north traffic backed up from Woodhaven all the way back to center city, backing up onto 676. It was a giant parking lot, and even though I needed to go north to get home, I had no choice but to get on 95 south, quickly realizing that the only logical course of action would be to jump off at Oregon Ave. (hijacking my own hijack I must mention that some college friends who live in Oregon came to Philadelphia recently and were really amused to find that we have an Oregon Avenue), the destination being Pop’s water ice between 13th & Broad (next best thing if John’s isn’t open yet), and the cup of chocolate water ice served its express purpose quite well, thank you (saved what was left of the day) [/hijack].

Please avoid Rita’s water ice (ain’t nothin’ like the real thing).

13

Go grab a Maeve Binchy. Light reading that totally cheers a body up. “The Lovely Bones” was an amazing read but it made me bawl and depressed me mightily.

I found some really cool calibrachoa that looks like petunias but is smaller. I bought some purple ones and put them in with some orange (!!) osteospermum. Orange and purple sounds ghastly, but I saw this combo in a hanging basket at the farmer’s market and it looked marvelous. It helps that the osteospermum has a violet center.

14

Twickster, sorry you’re so stressed. Have you started looking at the available jobs, yet? Anything out there look appealing? Best of luck in whatever you decide.

15

How do you know you’re no longer a newbie? When you start a thread like this in a blatant play for sympathy – and all your pals come by and sympathize.

Thanks, all!

(So – Watcher – you going to dinner Friday? Don’t make me be the only person who remembers the Nixon administration!) (Geez louise, it’s more like "the only person alive during the Nixon administration. sigh.)

16

I’ll be out of town this week, unfortunately. I’ll get to one of these dinners sooner or later. The Nixon administration indeed - seems like just yesterday, eh? Sometimes it seems like it’s still here… sheesh.

At least this time we can talk Philly dinner without having to worry about the OP getting mad. :slight_smile: