Here's a recap of general crap that was going on in January and February this year:

I don’t remember much about January that I haven't already covered. I had another job interview that went well and the people seemed nice, but I didn't make it to the second interview because I don't work enough with one of their populations. They will nitpick the shit out of everyone here. I managed to get two job interviews this year (February? I forget when but it was pretty soon after the first) and the second one was worse. Well, I think I did okay other than the usual "no, I don't make travel arrangements in my job so therefore you will disqualify me" that happens all the time now, but I did not want to work with those people. They all seemed pretty quietly miserable somehow. Only one of them talked when they weren't absolutely being forced to. I asked about the job climate and got a response like "Well, I'm not UNhappy, I guess... we do have Christmas parties." Oh, and when I found out that I'd have two managers (none of which were in these interviews), who I'd hardly ever see, and I was going to be 100% in charge of dealing with all angry clientele with no backup? No thanks. I didn't even want to write a thank-you note plugging myself for it after hearing that. I heard later they hired the temp they already had. Fine by me.

Pretty much everyone in my group at work except for my part-time assistant hated/still hates my guts in there. I’ll get to talking about this more in later months, but one of them was bullying me and the other two were her friends and pretty much didn’t talk to me at all unless they had to. My, had the cold shoulder developed since November. So that was a joy.

I eventually took the hint around Valentine’s Day and realized that I should shut the hell up and just not talk to my officemates At All unless I absolutely had to. Because apparently someone was always reporting to my boss that I was “so negative” and “always complaining.” I can’t argue with that because I always am negative and complaining, but I thought it was interesting that once I just stopped talking in there altogether--completely ignoring when the three of them were talking to each other instead of trying to join in (and then they’d ignore me)--yet SOMEHOW the complaints about me being “so negative” and “always complaining” were still coming in. Oh yeah, and “always complains she has too much work to do and then she’s slacking.” That’s a fun one. I have a part time assistant (note: the other three instigated for said assistant and then stopped using her very quickly into her getting the job, so she pretty much is only my assistant. I fear she caught my cooties) because I have so much petty workload crap that I need to farm it out, you wanna think about that one for a while? I definitely do not ask these people for help for anything. (So much for cross training.) Hell, I wouldn’t ask them to put me out if I was on fire and one of them was holding a fire extinguisher--they’d let me burn anyway, I’m sure.

Also, uh, if you make jokes like “what would improve this place? Matches” and “welcome to hell” and literally count down that you have 12,000+ days to go until retirement every day (seriously, that’s happening and that person is in their twenties), you are not exactly being Mr. or Ms. Mary Sunshine either. I do not comprehend why this group is so vicious. If we’re all in the same shitty boat, shouldn’t we support each other instead of tearing well, me down? I come from the public service side and while there’s a lot over there’s that’s draining and fucked up, at least we weren’t all attacking our coworkers--we understood the shit they were in. These folks are just so fucking privileged and they don’t get it. They don't have to, though.

Yes, there’s a lot that sucks about their jobs and I do not argue with their assessments that their jobs suck one bit. The people working for our vendor really don't seem to know what they are doing with us (I think we're just too "hard" for them, which I wish they'd realized before taking the money), all of them pretty much had to figure out how to do their jobs on their own (I'm not kidding when I say that two had to learn from watching YouTube), and they hear from 50 billion people having very weird problems using it. Oh yeah, and nobody will fix any of the many, many, many broken programming issues around here, which is especially galling to the one who COULD fix things if they were allowed to, except they are not. I totally concede they are right to be unhappy. But still, they aren’t having to answer questions from the general public all day long, they don’t have to answer phones or work the front counter, they don't get in trouble all the time when asked something they don't know about, they don’t have people Looking For Them all day, and you know what? IT COULD BE WORSE.

In other news about appeasing people at work, I also started taking voice lessons with Meg’s friend, which went on for 3-4 months or so off and on. I don’t know where the heck I put my notes from that so I can't really recap the experience here, but I learned techniques about trying to de-stress my voice’s sound, as well as some hippie-esque techniques. Whether or not it’s improved enough to please other people, hell if I know from my own POV, but others have said it’s gotten better.

I think in January is when we started getting things going at work with what eventually became Yarn Club, where any yarnies hanging out around noon can come to knit. At this point in time me and two other instructors were working together to start teaching Lunch and Learn: Knitting Version. We first did one hour classes alternating between “beginning” and “intermediate” (which ended up being pretty much “whoever signed up), and then over the summer tried holding a 4 week long class....which went from six people to 1 over 4 weeks. Over the summer we had Yarn Club, which was an opportunity for people to just hang out and knit during lunch. For a few weeks we had them on Mondays and Fridays, but I think we probably got four at the most (mostly my friends) at any one time, and sometimes it was just me. At this point we’re down to just having Yarn Club on Fridays and if anyone wants to drop in to learn something, we’ll teach it.

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