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Scenes from Temp Hell
Mar. 4th, 2008 05:37 pmSo, way back when I was doing temp work as a regular thing, I came across a phenomenon I call "Temp Gaslighting," wherein one is hired to cover for an employee who was fired or otherwise left on bad terms with the organization, and one discovers, in the course of time, that the instructions and guidelines left for one by the dearly departed are deliberately, subtly, insiduously wrong, so that by following them one appears to be slowly revealed as an incompetent nincompoop, and the former employee looks like a shining light in comparison.
Which...I don't think is what happened with the current job. Just that my predecessor was both a lousy teacher and a terrible recordkeeper, so that I am constantly stubbing my toe by trying to do things the way I thought she'd told me to do them. (::sigh::)
Of the good, though, is that one of the staff I support came in today, rather tentatively, to ask me to clean up and maybe proofread a big whacking procedures manual for a subset of the radiology staff, which turned out to be chock full o' comma splices and mangled syntax and deeply unfortunate formatting choices (half-inch margins all the way around! Random indenting and bullet-pointing! Every third or fourth sentence in bold italics, just for the hell of it!) So I get to play editor, which is much more fun than trying to re-re-schedule meetings with a half-dozen people who DO NOT UPDATE THEIR FRIGGIN' CALENDARS GOD DAMN THEM ALL!
Also, and as random a side note, I always knew I sort of disliked Outlook, at least as an e-mail application, but now that I have to work with it 40 hours a week? I am alternating between snarling viciously at the monitor, and crying like a little girl for my lost beloved Gmail. OMG Gmail, I love you so much, never leave me again. ::racking sobs::
In non-temp-hell news, I have been chosen for a second interview for a job (an actual, more-or-less-in-my-professional-field job), and while on the one hand it's nice to get at least that degree of affirmation, on the other hand I'm not at all sure I actually want this job, at least not as much as several jobs for which I have applications in the hopper. I have a terrible feeling that I'm going to end up in that unpleasant tapdance of trying to figure out how long I can string out the good folks offering me the B-list job while waiting for the people hiring for the A-list jobs to get off their asses and figure out what they're doing. God, I hate that particular ethical dilemma...
Which...I don't think is what happened with the current job. Just that my predecessor was both a lousy teacher and a terrible recordkeeper, so that I am constantly stubbing my toe by trying to do things the way I thought she'd told me to do them. (::sigh::)
Of the good, though, is that one of the staff I support came in today, rather tentatively, to ask me to clean up and maybe proofread a big whacking procedures manual for a subset of the radiology staff, which turned out to be chock full o' comma splices and mangled syntax and deeply unfortunate formatting choices (half-inch margins all the way around! Random indenting and bullet-pointing! Every third or fourth sentence in bold italics, just for the hell of it!) So I get to play editor, which is much more fun than trying to re-re-schedule meetings with a half-dozen people who DO NOT UPDATE THEIR FRIGGIN' CALENDARS GOD DAMN THEM ALL!
Also, and as random a side note, I always knew I sort of disliked Outlook, at least as an e-mail application, but now that I have to work with it 40 hours a week? I am alternating between snarling viciously at the monitor, and crying like a little girl for my lost beloved Gmail. OMG Gmail, I love you so much, never leave me again. ::racking sobs::
In non-temp-hell news, I have been chosen for a second interview for a job (an actual, more-or-less-in-my-professional-field job), and while on the one hand it's nice to get at least that degree of affirmation, on the other hand I'm not at all sure I actually want this job, at least not as much as several jobs for which I have applications in the hopper. I have a terrible feeling that I'm going to end up in that unpleasant tapdance of trying to figure out how long I can string out the good folks offering me the B-list job while waiting for the people hiring for the A-list jobs to get off their asses and figure out what they're doing. God, I hate that particular ethical dilemma...