Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Thursday 5:49pm 10Aug06
I want to work on White Wishes for the rest of the evening so this one will be short and sweet, I think.
My first day back at work and I had to contend with a couple people who screwed me up while I was off. I had to wait to find the words to tell them both with tact not to step on these toes. First thoughts can be great for writing but they're not always so great for talking. My initial reaction is filled with more swear words than not.
I ended up writing both of them emails because I knew that I could deal with the problem and not totally annihilate them with my anger and possibly threats. ha ha! The gift of writing does come in handy.
Of course the second person hadn't read my email before he'd come to my office but that was okay too, I'd long since calmed down and didn't yell and I genuinely like him although I wasn't too sure I liked him this morning. Had he been there this morning I would have torn a strip and then some.
People take me the wrong way. I don't seem serious at work frankly, because I figure if you have to work for a living you might as well make it enjoyable. I do love my job. Most times, it seems as though I'm not doing anything because I have music going and I'm laughing more times than not. But that doesn't mean I'm not doing my work. I get so much more work done when my environment is enjoyable than when it isn't. Plus a huge part of my job is customer service. You can't give great customer service and feel miserable. They don't correlate or is it correspond or compute?
Most people don't know that for me my work is foremost about survival. I cannot pay my rent without a job. I cannot come home and work on my writing if I'm stressed out about how I'm going to pay the next bill that shows up in my mailbox with clock like regularity. Shit, just because you lose a job doesn't mean the bills will stop until you get a new job.
I take my work seriously and I pride myself on doing a superior job. I actually said one day to a girl that I was training on our tenant request system when she asked, what if I make a mistake, "Don't!"
Check your work before it's done, they're paying you.
I don't care about what shoddy work others do unless it impacts my work. I don't want my work to touch it, I don't want my work attached to it, I don't want any part of it. And I will turn into a nasty beast if confronted with it. Some times some people are so busy looking at how you do your job and worse yet telling you how to do your job that they screw up their own. I do not tolerate it.
Maybe people need to know what it's like to have to scrape pennies together before they can appreciate their jobs enough to do their jobs.
As I say repeatedly, I don't have the answers. I try not to ask why people do things the way they do because I've realized that I'll never have a valid answer. I've realized that asking myself how can I deal with those kind of people is a better question because it keeps my control in my pockets. And every now and again the answer is to be a nasty beast, let people know they've crossed a line that I will not allow them to cross twice. Just so we're clear on what's going on.
Okay, longer than short and maybe not so sweet but I'm gone to work on that there novel that I mention intermittently. The good thing about people pissing a writer off is that it's motivates us to write. There is always a good side to the presumed bad...
EY
