Blogocentric Formulations

Monday Whining

So I normally try not to do this, but it's a particularly unpleasant Monday (and it's only noon!), and I feel the need to gripe and whine for a little while. So feel free to skim, skip or otherwise ignore this post if you wish.

There's been a change in management at our apartment building. The on-site manager has "renegotiated" his arrangement with the owner, which - to make a long story short - essentially means that he now only does some repairs and maintenance work. What that translates into for me is that now, instead of calling the on-site manager and having him come over and fix my backed up garbage disposal the same day (any day), it now takes four days of e-mailing and calling the owner's office in order to schedule a maintenance visit by the on-site manager for business hours only.

So I take the earliest available appointment this morning... 10 AM. That's okay, my job is usually pretty flexible and I'll just stay a little late today. At 10:30 AM the on-site manager comes in, looks at the garbage disposal for a couple seconds and says, "Oh, I don't do those repairs anymore. We outsource that now. I can have the guy out here between 2 PM and 5 PM."

Great. My commute to work is roughly an hour and a half each way, so by the time I got there, I'd pretty much have to turn around and go back. So I e-mail my boss and say that I'll be working from home today, I have my laptop and all my files, I'm just waiting for maintenance men, etc. Basically, I may not be in the office, but I'm still going to be working. Nine times out of ten, this isn't a problem. But today, I get that rare ten percent e-mail that says if I'm out of the office, I have to use a vacation day. Not the news I really wanted to hear, but that's okay... I've got plenty of vacation days saved up, so I take one.

Then I get another work e-mail thirty minutes later about a problem with the phones. They want me to help walk them through fixing it from home. I kindly explained that they forced me to take a vacation day rather than allowing me to work from home, so since I have to use my own personal time, I shouldn't have to be on-call for work issues and I would be happy to resolve it when I'm back in the office tomorrow. Apparently, that's not how it works... I need to take the personal day and deduct it from my paid time off... but I also need to be working from home to fix this problem.

So what am I doing today? I'm sitting at home, waiting for the maintenance guy to come and fix my broken garbage disposal and backed up sink, so I can do the nasty dishes that have been sitting out for four days. While I wait to do that, I'm working just as hard as I usually do (even harder actually, since I'm trying to walk my technologically illiterate colleagues through the steps to fix the problem)... and for all of that, I get the privilege of being docked one vacation day in return.

Happy Monday, everyone. Who's ready for the weekend?