19 posts tagged “slack”
I wish it were one or the other--today I'd pick death. Okay, fine, yes, let that stand as my character note for today's installment of Redzilla Theater: I still haven't done my taxes. Normally, I have them done at least a month out, but this year, I don't know. I just keep looking at the little pile of W-2's and student loan statements and mortgage papers and I don't wanna.
Also, I don't want to print a hundred certificates for the department's honors ceremony that's tomorrow night. Also, two hundred programs for the same. Also, payroll paperwork for the summer.
In short, today is a Death of Slack day, when I must work and earn money, on which I will pay taxes. It's time's like this my parents' basement looks pretty good.
It's true. All I've done today is slack and it's quite tiring. Of course, my slacking looks like real work to most folks. In the last five hours, I've:
- finished a draft of a new short story [small town deputy discovers that law enforcement is open to interpretation]
- critiqued three other writers' short stories
- posted new short story for critique
- worked on my critique for somebody's novel [sound of sharpening knives]
- researched agents for an older novel I'd abandoned. (A reader and fan of that novel made me feel guilty this weekend by saying, "Aren't you ever going to try to get that one published.")
- researched markets for a couple of essays
- worked on yet another draft of my stupid query letter for All of Flesh [whimper]
- started another story
So, I'm not ignoring you all today on purpose. I just have a lot of slacking to do.
I'm tired, my people. I slept most of Sunday, and stayed home sick this morning to sleep. I'm tired, and I think that means it's time to tap my slack account. This means that the rest of you are going to have to pick up the balance. While I slack, somebody else is going to have to push the papers, file the reimbursements, and balance the accounts. Somebody else is going to have to tile the bathroom, mulch the flower beds, refinish the furniture, polish the silver, sew the curtains, patch the torn jeans, knit the scarf, mail the submissions, update the Netflix queue, cook dinner, wash the dishes, wax the truck, sweep the walk, oh, and scoop the litter box.
I'll be back on duty tomorrow, if you all could just keep things running until then. Thanks.
Such a delightful morning. I've got four separate payroll crises--all caused by the failure of other people to follow my simple instructions. Naturally, at least one of the problems involves a faculty member who thinks I'm psychic. Of all the amazing powers I've claimed to have over the years, I've never claimed to know what a PhD was thinking of doing with her grant money. Like trying to guess whether a monkey plans to take a nap or fling poo.
Two of the problems took nasty phone calls in which I brow-beat people who had failed to listen. The other two problems will require the use of my time machine to unfuck the problem. Anybody want to go back to July 29th? That's where I'm headed.
I've also just hired my new student worker, after tormenting interviewing the various applicants. I have to say, after years of having bosses who were micro-managers or nutjobs, I like having a boss who says, "Whatever you decide will be just fine." That's right, pal.
Outlook for today--in control, but nobody better cross me. I plan to get in slack today and anybody who interferes with that plan is cruising for a bruising.
The slack has to be paid for with work, real work. All those days I spent Voxing and writing and painting my nails and watching movies on my computer...I have to pay for them all. I don't object to that. What I object to is having to pay for 7 weeks of slack with 1 day of nightmarish proportions.
I like my boss. He's a nice guy with a burning interest in French cinema, and particularly French dystopian fantasy (City of Lost Children is one of his favorites). I can have a conversation with him. More importantly, I think I'm the only person in the world who could do my job and not hate him when it was all over. Today I have glimpsed into the dark morsel of fury that is my predecessor Raisin's soul.
Today, contracts for fall GTA's and lecturers are due. Boss and I have both known this for weeks. Every time I ask, he hems and haws about class assignments and salaries. On Tuesday, he gave me some initial information. I waited, thinking, he's going to change his mind. He always changes his mind. He did, on Wednesday, and then on Thursday. He swore, that was it, those were the final numbers, the real assignments. I said, "Are you sure?" "Absolutely," he said. I did the paperwork. Mountains of it. It takes 9 separate pieces of paperwork to appoint a GTA or lecturer. They remake the electronic forms each year, so that you can't even recycle last year's forms with new data.
I did them all, but I didn't print them until he asked for them this morning. As soon as they were in his hands, he frowned, rubbed his chin. He really needs to grow a beard for this sort of pedagogical behavior to be plausible. Of course, there were changes to be made. Not once, not twice, but three times now he's made me change the forms and re-print them. I'm sitting here with three hours to go before the deadline and I don't dare print the changes I've made, because I feel certain that he's going to walk in here sometime in the next three hours and ask for me changes.
I can live with this. 7 weeks of freedom for one day of frenzied make-work and dithering indecision. I am just the sort of person who can stomach this kind of behavior. Nothing to do, followed abruptly by everything to do. I no longer wonder at the level of Raisin's hatred for my boss. I just marvel that she never killed him.
Ah, there she is in all her pristine glory, alongside my "wife" pen, a double broad 14K Pelikan with piston ink-fill, and my "girlfriend" pen, a cheap, but lovely Sailor gel pen that I will throw away when she's used up.
When we left Florida, I left behind my thankless work at the Church of the Valet. While there, I did a little of everything, from Sunday bulletins to newsletters to posters to devotional books to marketing letters to making coffee. I'm a good little employee. It's true, I enjoy my slack, but I always get the work done before the slack. The joy of slack actually makes me a very efficient worker, and makes me hard to replace at a job. It's difficult to find someone who will cheerfully plunge into a task and do 20 hours of work in 5 hours for no more reward than the other 15 hours sitting undisturbed at a computer.
Apparently I'm not just hard to replace, but nigh impossible to replace, according to my undercover contact, E. I gave the church more than two months notice, so that by the time I left they had my replacement picked out. New Me #1 was a parishioner, and nice enough, but she didn't have a lot of experience on InDesign or Publisher or Dreamweaver or Excel--the 4 software programs I used most in the job. That could be fixed with some classes, I thought. What couldn't be fixed was her inability to do 60 hours of work in 20 hours. (My cohort, Gymbag, who got the job after John was promoted, with whom I supposedly shared the duties of my job, actually never did any work. According to E, he still doesn't. In fact, he doesn't even know how to do most of the work.) New Me #1 lasted less than a month.
New Me #2 was a military wife, who quickly got tired of Gymbag's laziness and quit.
New Me #3 quit after the Senior Pastor Rev. Doc. made an inappropriate comment about her weight. This is not a first for the Rev. Doc. When we hired the new children's ministry director, known as The Notorious CMD, he couldn't help but make remarks about her rather considerable girth. He once took a piece of cake away from her and ate it. Once when The Notorious CMD called the office for E, the receptionist used the intercom to say, "E, please pick up CMD on line one." Overhearing this, the Rev. Doc. said, "Wow, E, sounds like you have your work cut out for you. [guffaw]." Rev Doc is a dick. In fact, that would be his nickname, except that there was already a Dick at the church.
New Me #4 was recently fired for incompetence. Like Gymbag, she never did learn how to correctly layout, edit, and print the newsletters and bulletins. Unlike Gymbag, she wasn't a lifelong church member, so they felt okay about firing her. Throughout all of this, Gymbag has earned a higher salary than I did, than any of the New Me's, than the long-suffering E, who has had to pick up the slack at every turn.
New Me #5 started to work yesterday, and according to E it was a catastrophic failure less than 45 minutes into it. She gave New Me #5 a tour of the church and then took her to her office, where she suggested that #5 familiarize herself with the computer system and files she'd be working on. #5 sat down and pushed the monitor power button. Nothing happened. She pushed it again. Nothing happened. She pushed it again. Nothing happened. Then #5 said, "I don't think this computer is working."
E said, "That just turns the monitor on. You need to turn the CPU on."
#5 said, "The what?"
Maybe it's not so much that I'm hard to replace as it is that the administration of the church doesn't actually understand how to hire a competent employee. That they got E and me was just a fluke. Monkeys in a room full of resumes, flinging poo to choose an employee, have as good a chance.
It's one of those strange days. I don't have anything particular to do, yet I can't quite rally my brain to do any of the little things that I could do. Oh, sure, I'm thumbing through a literary market book, trying to figure out where to submit a handful of stories, but it's half-hearted at best. I've got my Japanese books and my Spanish books, if I felt like studying. I don't really. I can hear someone in the German office typing industriously and frenentically. Weird. I wonder what she's doing that still needs to be typed.
I guess I could work on a story or something. I'm fascinated by this news story about the guy who had a completely random episode of amnesia that lasted for several years. Not fascinated enough to go find a link about the story, or to actually put pen to paper and write about it. I could work on finishing the novel about the machine that creates desire, especially as the contest I was going to enter it in has an upcoming deadline.
Is this post-home-remodelling-project ennui? Or is it just regular old ennui? Is it ennui? Why do I keep saying ennui? Too much trouble to pick another word.
Maybe I'm just tired. I have been living in a forced labor camp for several months now. As always, I was relieved to get to work this morning and sit on my ass doing nothing. I guess I'll just keep doing it, it's going so well.
If you could have one superpower, what would you choose?
Submitted by J.T.
This is one of those questions I can only answer through process of elimination.
Invisibility: It would be cool, but for someone like me totally wasted. I'd be sneaking around all invisible and then I'd overhear some jerk saying something I disagreed with or something that pissed me off, and I wouldn't be able to resist popping back into visibility to give a piece of my mind to the jerk. Wasted.
X-ray vision: No thanks. Like I don't already see more of people than I want to.
Flying: The way my luck goes, I'd just die a horrible death after flying into a flock of seagulls. Plus, when you fly yourself, you don't get to check any of your luggage.
Fire or Ice: I can barely be trusted to adjust the thermostat. Trying to warm myself up, I'd probably catch my pants on fire. Or your pants. Or your house. Or Yellowstone forest. Conversely, trying to cool myself off on a 110 degree summer day in Kansas, I'd probably usher in the next ice age. Sooner than 40 million SUV-driving soccer moms.
Ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound: Dude, I live in Kansas. What tall buildings?
Communicating with animals: My cats swear at me all the time. Like I want to know when they're saying "bitch" and when they're saying, "Dipshit."
Teleportation: Okay, this one is tempting. To go bamf*ing all over the place. Get to work in ten seconds instead of twenty ass-freezing minutes. Unfortunately, I'm not a great navigator, and sooner or later, I would end up trapped inside of something, because I bamf*ed to the wrong place.
I guess this all means that I'm going to have to stick to the super power I already have: Slack. My power is so finely honed that I can steal time right under my boss' nose. I'm doing it right now. Bwahahahaha! I guess that makes me a super-villain. I can live with that. Now, I better get payroll done so I can work on my Japanese lessons.
Please, Vox, get with the times, and stop being so coy. If I ever slacked off at work. These people are lucky to get 2 hours worth of work out of me a day.
If you hunt for posts tagged with "slack" you know what you get? My blog, over and over again. Because I am the Mistress of Slack. I am a Buxotic Nunsnake of Slackness. The Dark Master of Slack has me on his cell phone speed dial. (I'm #3, because he's got Rev. Ivan Stang on #2, and voicemail on #1). I don't expect you to take me at my word--just read some of my paeans to slack:
Rat in a Cookie Jar: The Joy of Slack, part 1
Happy Bored v. Miserable Bored: The Joy of Slack, part 2
How do you find the time?: The Joy of Slack, part 3
Or just do a search for "slack" in posts, and you'll find me.
If you do a search for "slack" in people, you'll just find a lot of people too lazy to put up an icon picture.
Uh-oh...did I just jump the shark? Is this my first past blog highlights post?
