Nothing really bad happened today. I’m just really sick of being asked the same questions over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I am tired of experts in other offices (especially if they have been doing it for years!) going around telling everyone that I can do X, which I am not permitted to do. THEY, as in THEIR OFFICE, does the X process, NOT ME. Please stop telling everyone you talk to to go ask me first to do X. They should know this. I am deeply concerned when people from those offices are calling me to ask questions that their office is in charge of and mine is not. Also, apparently one of the main contacts in one of those offices has just... disappeared? Like she has some automated “please e-mail other people” response with no explanation, and when I asked the other competent contact there if she quit, I just got “take her off the mailing lists.” Did she have a meltdown? What is going on?

I am tired of having the same conversations multiple times over with my most difficult clientele. Like “okay, so you read the e-mail and why did you literally just write me back asking the same questions again?” Why do I have to say it three times apiece to some of you? The one today, I was all, “okay, so you DID get what I told you,” (he was actually pretty clear on at least some of the process even before he started repeatedly asking me) “but then you proceeded to ask me the same things all over again?”

I am tired of hearing the same old excuses as to why they didn’t do what they were supposed to do and they “didn’t get the email” (we send three reminder e-mails, which are going out, I checked) and they “didn’t realize that X deadline (ours) and Y deadline (not ours) are not the same” (which is spelled out both on the X website and the Y website, in bold text) and “oops I forgot,” again. How the fuck can we communicate this any clearer? I was discussing it with the youth of today and of course they were all “Facebook and Twitter” and I said, “our web guy disabled those a few years ago because literally nobody read those, and who the hell would want to subscribe to our office’s pages?” I am in legit one of the few rare businesses in the world where that is not something we have to do.

I don’t enjoy sending a minimum of 3 e-mails per person for 20+ people apiece a day for the next two months (until the filing period opens again, basically) and going back and forth with all the people who oops, missed the deadline. Seriously, why can’t we just give up on the fucking deadline? People do not comprehend that X and Y are different. No matter how many times we say it. It is not working. We need to just have a rolling neverending process of letting them do it whenever they want to because they can’t comprehend otherwise, which other comparable orgs actually do because they are sensible. But once again, that would require the cooperation of other offices, so not gonna happen.

(On a related note, my favorite author is having a similar issue with asking people not to tell their ideas for her story worlds: ”What I am worried about is that it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I ask people nicely not to do this; they keep doing it, through every channel they have available. My PA filters out email that tries to give me ideas, but no one filters my Ask box.... If it even looks like I’m stealing your ideas, the hit to my reputation could be something I wasn’t able to recover from-and all the permission in the world doesn’t save me from exactly what happened here, where no matter how many times a thing is said, there’s always someone who hasn’t heard it.”)

No matter how many times you say it, PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS KEEP DOING IT. This never ever ever ever ends. I know it’s “new to them,” but it’s always new to them because my clientele in this area rotates and goddamn, I’m tired of the same fucking things. You can’t teach anyone anything like “here is how to make this one deadline,” so you can’t ever do anything about it.

Even answering a bunch of e-mails in a row multiple times a day now (saying the same shit) exhausts me. How am I going to deal with answering phones all day every day?

I am just so sick of being here! I am sick of the same old shit but worse all the time!

But: I read this charming article (washingtonpost.com so be advised on your limited clicks for that) about a girl who always wanted to be famous and made YouTube videos and got YouTube famous and...guess what? She’s 19 and feels all burned out and drained and like people want too much out of her, just like I do right now! What’s the fucking difference other than I have a regular paycheck and health insurance and presumably she doesn’t have either of those things?

And then on the way home I ran into that girl who gets bullied. She had some interesting news today: apparently HR has been consulted with regards to her bully as far as she can tell from the office conversation, and she has a meeting scheduled with her manager tomorrow, and bullying coworker has gone from complaining and bullying all day to being quiet and nice to her for the last two. She suspects someone else might have reported her or something? Anyway, she plans on enjoying it while it lasts. I really hope someone has done something to drop the hammer on her bully so that the lady shuts it forever. Hey, worked in my office. I cross my fingers for her.

She continues to be all, “I don’t know how you put up with it for two years! I know you said if you don’t have any other job or choice that you do, but....” Well, that’s it, really. I didn’t quite cite anything like “My therapist told me to read Man’s Search For Meaning, and let’s face it, compared to putting up with the fucking Holocaust my shit is NOTHING,” and it could and has been worse.

But that said: I was having very, very dark thoughts all afternoon, and then I ran into her, and I was exhausted when I got home so I bailed on my meeting to get drunk and watch YouTube and write another stupid rant again.

Under no circumstances can I do what I want to, whether or not it’s for a living. I just cannot do it. I will make my life even worse if I try and enough people find me and decide to dox and stalk me.* If I start doing YouTube, which I know darned well I should, the trolls will come for me, as they come for all the women.

* Yes, it’s stupid to have this blog, but literally nobody reads it except for one month a year, I no longer have a mailing list, Diaryland is so old it doesn’t have RSS set up on the site, and nobody reads anything other than Twitter any more anyway. Nobody knows if this updates and reading is HARD, man, and frankly, it’s low risk. I’d keep it offline except it’s a lot easier to find stuff I want to look up later for storytelling if it’s on a regular website than in my mixed-up files or if I kept a paper journal, Sedaris-style. Okay, I do keep paper journals, but they are a pain in the ass to find anything in and I mostly just use them for projects like angst cataloging, doing “gratitude journals” when someone forces me to do yet another gratitude journal, and the “go through this book and keep a journal” thing I just finished and was so burned out on doing that I’m amazed I did the whole thing.

I cannot find any other job. I have nothing else I want to do, this list of supposedly not-too-stressful jobs doesn’t look too good, I hate every job opening I see and I don’t qualify for any of them anyway even if I didn’t hate them because they all look like more of the same shit I hate already. Every job wants me to be the finance and payroll and party and travel planner and run the phones and front counter. That’s even worse than what I have now. If I quit or get fired, I would just sit around the house until I became homeless.

This is the endless circle or ouroboros or whatever. I always end up back in the same spot every fucking time.

* Cannot leave this job
* Cannot find another job
* I have no business sense to run my own business and don’t really wanna anyway and want someone else to pay my health insurance and to know when the money is coming in on a regular basis
* Never gonna win the lottery and apparently it ruins your life to win anyway so why bother

And the “my inner attention whore won’t fucking stop whining and I want it to SHUT UP AND DIE” issue:

* Am having a hard time finding a regular real life stage IRL, which I would really really really rather prefer doing to online video.
* It’s too fucking dangerous, especially as a woman, to go attention whoring it up on YouTube. (Plus frankly, I like in person on a stage. Video does not interest me at all. I have someone film me around half the time because that is a thing you are supposed to do, but I’ve only showed them to a few people.)

As I write this thing (and even after reading that article above), I’m watching a video of this guy, who apparently also went to the Comedy Spot at some point, talking about how he used to live in his car in LA, lost his job for making videos on the Internet, ended up homeless again, ends up moving in with his best friend/future girlfriend’s family, and then made this “Learning to Knit” video I just found that I’m adding to my list of possible things to put in my yarn mailing list and that’s how I found him in the first place. That became a hit, and now apparently his job is vlogging his life. Which works out great if you are a dude! (On an off-topic note, I’m starting to wonder if this pic I found on his Instagram is why I’m never into anybody any more. Hm. The world is all frogs, man.)

I’m exhausted now. Two more days to go for the rest of the week, followed by two days off, followed by ... well, you know. And over. And over. And over. And over. Until death or firing, anyway. At least the stuff I’ve been watching tonight, between that Brandon guy and his videos and watching Michael and Maria suddenly randomly make out on Roswell, has made me laugh. Possibly the alcohol is involved in this as well.

I have no finish to this, so I will say something fun that I saw today before the burnout kicked in: There is a guy that works in the building who is some kind of tutor, as far as I can tell. The fellow is frequently seen wandering around in a cape, and I have seen him playing music at various Renaissance and Dickens fair events. My old roommate Ian seemed to know him back in the day and Dawn has talked to him, but somehow despite the mutual geekiness I haven’t really talked to him myself.

However, the other day I wandered down a section of the building I normally don’t go into and found this dude’s office. Not only does he have various puzzles and riddles stuck on his door, after his technical title he has “and WIZARD” taped on underneath it. To which I was all “damn, his boss allows him to have that on his door?!?!”

Anyway, today I was walking back into the building behind him. He didn’t have the cape on today so I noticed that not only did he have a sporran strapped on (that’s basically a Scottish man-purse, I have several pocket belts along these lines myself), he also seriously had a wand strapped onto him as well. It wasn’t quite Harry Potter long and elaborate-ish, but that was pretty definitely A Magic Wand he got there.

Now I am wondering. He does kind of have a Hagrid vibe....

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