Friday 27 March 2015

"But I want to be a paperback writer"

I don't have much time to write tonight, I spent way too long trying to figure out why I couldn't log into gmail and just realised that I was using the wrong email username all along....it's been a long day, just saying.

I've been having a frustrating time at work lately. We've been booked up about a week in advance, often under-staffed, and because everyone's in a hurry it seems like the notes attached to files aren't being read and we're often over-booked or booked incorrectly. And, of course, this means that the scrambling-to-get-everything-done state we're already in gets all the more frustrating. But on top of all of this, it's also come to my attention that my coworker/friend-turned-salon-manager has been over-stepping my boundaries and meddling behind my back. I'd like to think that she's doing what she's been doing because she's sincerely trying to be helpful or supportive, but when I discovered via our groomer-trainee that she had called our Ops Manager last week and asked if I could leave work 15 minutes early for "family issues" without even talking to me about it, I was pretty embarrassed! Apparently because she knew I was mid-cycle she thought I should go home early and hop in the sack with G? This happened a little over a week ago, and beyond thinking it was weird when she had come skipping into the back where I was busy blow-drying the dog I was working on to announce that I could leave 15 minutes early, I didn't find out the details until just a couple of days ago. The difference between getting home at 7:15PM and 7:30PM that day didn't really make a difference to my personal-life, but having our Ops Manager think that some "issue" at home was affecting my professional-life was never something I would have wanted! Yours-truly is the employee that has only called in sick to work once during my two years with the company!

I've had other issues with our salon manager when it comes to her meddling behind my back. A couple of months ago she casually told me that she had been talking to our Ops Manager about how they needed to find my "replacement" asap, to which my Ops Manager asked if I was pregnant, and she responded "no, but every month that passes she's closer to going on mat leave!" I had to really hold myself back and calmly remind her that they'll have nine months to find my "replacement" once I'm actually pregnant, but currently it's a bit premature. Never mind we'd been TTC for 9 cycles at that point, and would have been going on mat leave then if we'd been so lucky to have gotten pregnant so easily.

For all the occasions that I've politely tried to let her know that the things that she's been saying to myself and others are actually hindering me and upsetting me, not helping me at all, it's all seemed to go in one ear and right out the other. I don't know what to do about it really. Do I over-step her and talk to our Ops Manager about what's been going on? Do I call our company's HR? All I know is that I can't continue on like this. I'm getting so frustrated and angry that I was ready to quit on the spot on Tuesday.

The woman whose dogs I groom every couple of weeks, on my day off, says her daughter is interested in a business partnership where she'd do dog-walking and I'd groom. I've agreed to discuss this possibility, but I'm not sure what I'll end up doing. I don't feel like I'm "done" with grooming, though I do feel like I want to leave my current company by September, but I also don't feel like it's my true career. Do I really want to start a business that I'm not sure I'll want to have in five years, or have as a career? Grooming is a trade, a fairly creative one, but it's not what I want to do forever.

I want to be writing. I want to be at my desk, working. We're lucky because G's income is roughly three times what I make, we don't live a very luxurious or materialistic lifestyle, we generally have maybe a couple hundred dollars worth of credit card debt, and even though our mortgage payments are on the high side we only have about 13 years left before that's paid off. I don't NEED to work, financially-speaking, I just feel like I need to contribute to our household bills and have my own money for anything I might need to buy, even if it's just for gas in the truck or the occasional chai latte with a friend. Writing doesn't pay bills or put gas in the truck right now, but I'd be so much happier.

Seriously, what should I do?

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