binglemumps

Got tired of the old purple flowers and Spanish comment page. I like the look of this one, all nice and clean. The only thing I had a problem with was that the font for the calendar was in size 12 Times New Roman, so I got rid of it. Hurray!

I am at work and am billing this blogging time to my most hated client again. Today the consultant I work with on this client (who’s the funniest guy ever cos he’s all meek and quiet but occasionally makes comments such as the following) said about the consultant from the other department who’s running this project, ‘He needs to take a tranquiliser’. And he couldn’t be more right. Seriously, the guy goes ape shit over every little thing that goes wrong. Dude, just chill ok, no one’s going to die or anything. How can you be 60 and act like that?? Jeez.

The people you work with on a project makes such a ridiculous amount of difference. The other night I stayed in the office till 1.30 with 3 other people working on another client, and came in at 8am the next day. We’ve frequently pulled things like this for this particular client, and I didn’t even mind it. After 11pm or so the delirium sets in and suddenly everything becomes a source of amusement, and it kinda ends up feeling like you’re just hanging out with your friends. I’m probably the only freak who felt this way about that late night, but it’s things like this that makes everything else feel worthwhile.

Today is our company’s yearly outing to a baseball game. I’ve skipped out on this the last 3 years because I don’t give a shit about baseball and I’m not interested in socialising with most people outside my department.

Last night we go out for drinks and these people keep asking me if I’m going to the ball game. And when I tell them no they give me the standard disappointed look and the obligatory why not. So I tell them the easiest reason I have - I don’t like baseball. Which is true. I really don’t f***ing like baseball. I guess I never tried to watch a game and I don’t know how it works, but I don’t really care to try. This is when people try to tell me, it’s not about baseball, it’s about hanging out and getting drunk.

At this point I’m just like … Leave me alone ok, if you REALLY want to know why I’m not going,  it’s because my personal time is so bloody precious, I’m not going to waste it doing something I don’t find interesting, especially not when none of the people I enjoy spending time with is even going to be there. And yes, that means that I just don’t find you in particular worth carving out my personal time for.

It turns out that I have to work all this weekend anyway. I like how people sometimes try to make it sound like it’s my fault that I have to work on weekends. It’s not my fault ok, and you’re not doing anything to help, so f*** off and go watch your stupid baseball. Jeez.

are actually really good when they’re fresh. The last time I had blueberries on their own I thought they were boring and tasteless, but I bought a quart of really fresh blueberries the other day to make blueberry cupcakes with (which, btw, turned out fantastic in my opinion) and had 85% of the blueberries leftover thereafter, a fraction of which I am currently consuming and greatly enjoying.

I was snooping around the blog of one of the analysts I work with, and it’s kinda scary how alike we are in some ways. Like how she collects all these quotes from conversations with her roommate (some of them are quite funny even to outsiders) and how she wishes she had more friends and how she likes cooking and how she likes to push herself and thrives under pressure (in a subconscious way, not like in a I-want-to-be-an-I-banker-life-in-the-fast-lane-woohoo! kinda way). She is a bit more emo than me, but I guess that is to be expected from such a young one.

So it’s probably no coincidence that I enjoy working with her a lot, because her attitude towards work is also a lot like mine. Except that she’s a lot better at filing and less afraid of asking questions. People tell me sometimes that I should make her the new me, to which my gut response is always - NO I WANT TO BE SPECIAL. What kind of compliment is that anyway, when you tell me that someone is really good, ‘just like me’. Haven’t you heard that everyone likes to be unique? Anyway, in spite of my childish behaviour I have come to realise that imparting knowledge takes a great deal of effort and practice and is something that I’m not terribly good at. So if under my tutelage (because I have come to see her development as a personal special project!) she blossoms into an analyst as good as me (and I am, of course, very very good!), I will consider it nothing short of a monumental achievement.

So today I brought some blueberry cupcakes to work (yes we have returned to the cupcakes) and one of my coworkers told me I should stop spending so much free time baking and go out and get some sun. This particular guy has a penchant for making presumptuous statements like that. The first thought that ran through my head was boohoo I have no friends to go out with, which was quickly followed by, actually, I am just too damn lazy. The days I do have something else to do, I don’t really feel like doing it.

And seriously, I just feel like I don’t have time. On Saturday I have to sleep 10-12 hours (yes, I have to, this is non-negotiable), then I go grocery shopping and the gym, and then it’s time to cook dinner, then I shower and watch some anime and it’s 12 and I have to sleep so I can wake up before noon the next day. On Sundays I go to People’s for a bagel, and I study/work for a few hours, sometimes go grocery shopping and the gym again, do laundry, and bang it’s time to cook dinner. Where got time to go out?? Plus, weekends are for chilling, you know? I’m so bloody stressed out during the week already, I don’t want to spend my weekend rushing about trying to DO things. Sometimes I just want to Not Do.

Anyway, sun very good meh?? Too much sun will get skin cancer know or not?? Tamade. Bet he was jealous cos the cupcakes had a cream cheese frosting that he’s allergic to so he couldn’t have any. WELL THEY WERE DAMN GOOD CUPCAKES SO THERE.

I got my midyear feedback today and I was kinda demoralised. People said lots of good things of course, but all the good comments are getting old. It almost makes me feel like I haven’t made any progress in the last 3 years. Then there were the usual ‘opportunities for improvement’ (which, incidentally, is one of the most pretentious phrases ever invented) which I’ve also got used to seeing. But there was one particularly incisive comment that left me feeling kinda inadequate.

It’s not that I resented it. In fact, it was one of the most constructive criticisms I’ve ever received and something that will actually help me improve in a substantial way. And I know that whoever wrote it was not at all implying that I wasn’t doing a good job; it was really a suggestion on how I should be working when I move to the next level. It made me feel crappy because it reminded me of how many things I still need to learn. I need to be on top of everything. I need to make sure things get done on time. I need to delegate (btw one of my sore spots). I need to learn when to ask for help. I need to learn when not to ask for help and make independent decisions. I need to catch up on things I should know after 3 years of work experience, but don’t know because my client assignments were improbably skewed in a stupid way. I need to have good work-life balance so I can be a good role model to people around me (yah seriously wtf, that is the least of my concerns right now). I look at the people I work with and I want to be all the good things I admire about them, but it is a lot and I don’t know how to get there.

It really sucks because I’ve been working my ass off and I think I’m doing a good job but suddenly it feels like it’s not enough. I feel guilty when I’m not working because there’s so much I need to do. Then I feel guilty that I’m working so much because I should be managing things properly and delegating more and maybe stop being stubborn and give up a client (although it comforts me a little that I went over my client list with my supervisor today and after half an hour we came to the conclusion that I can’t get off any of my clients at this point, i.e. I don’t have to feel bad about not giving anything up, which is a pretty ridiculous chain of thought when you think about it).

And it hella annoys me when people tell me I should be delegating more. Every day I go over my list of to-dos a few times and try to figure out if there’s anything on it I can delegate. I am well aware of the pros and cons to all parties involved if I delegate vs if I don’t. Don’t f***ing tell me everything can be delegated. OF COURSE everything can be delegated. I don’t need to be told that 1923810 times. But (a) if I’ve delegated something ALREADY and I’m supposed to review it wtf am I supposed to do, delegate the review to someone else and review the review?? (b) how am I supposed to delegate something if I don’t even know how to do it myself?? (c) does it make sense to delegate something when it comes in this afternoon and needs to be done by tomorrow morning and it’ll take twice as much time just to explain it to someone as it’ll take for me to do it myself, especially when the corresponding benefit to said person’s learning experience will be negligible compared to the costs?

Pfffffffffft. Man it feels good to type a long string of disgruntled text. Actually I’m really grateful that my supervisor is who she is. After going over all the things I should be doing (like work-life balance hah) she conceded that actual implementation is just not that easy. She was in the same situation back when she was in my position, and she worked harder than anyone else for a long time before she got out of it, so she understands my problems perfectly.

So anyway, I was going home from work today feeling all sad, then the lady who was cleaning the floor in the Bart station was unnecessarily mean to me. I hate people who are unnecessarily mean. So many things in life are inevitably hard as it is, why make it worse for someone else when there are 0 benefits involved? Then I got on the train, and this guy stood up and gave me his seat even though I said it was ok, and it made me really happy. That’s why I try to do nice things sometimes. Such a small gesture can do so much to make someone’s day better. Why not? I wanted to tell him that what he did had a far greater effect than just providing me with 15 minutes of sitting, that little things can make a difference. But then I didn’t want to look like a nutcase. Oh well.

I had more work to do but now that I’ve expended all my energy complaining about work I think I’ll just forget it and go to bed.

SYTYCD is on tomorrow!!!!!!!!

I went to a client meeting today, one of my firsts, and realised that I’m completely incapable of making grown up conversation. It’s not just that I can’t think of interesting stories to tell, it’s that I don’t even know how to respond sometimes when someone says something that isn’t particularly interesting to me.

After the meeting we went to dinner and I was forced to stand around for an hour + while being largely excluded from the various conversations going on around the room. I was the most junior person there and by faaaaar more junior than anyone on the client side. I just don’t know how to schmooze. I can’t just go up to the CFO or whoever and get all chummy and crack jokes etc. And I’m definitely terrible at talking to people close to retirement age.

I must appear utterly boring and opinion-less to people I don’t know very well. Can I get through life like this???? Is my career doomed????

After spending the whole week expecting to slog the whole weekend away on my no-end-in-sight project, today at 5.30pm we found out that the consultant felt so bad for us that she got someone else to slog the weekend in our place! So now I have TWO WHOLE DAYS of NO STUDY and NO WORK. WHAT WILL I DO!

It was quite overwhelming when I found out. I was quite lost. S was saying maybe we’ll end up going to work anyway cos we won’t know where else to go. But now that it’s sunk in I’m very very happy. I can get my hair cut! And go to the gym twice! And bake chocolate cupcakes! And watch a lot a lot of anime and sleep like 12 hours a day. Omg!

What I’ve learned this past hellish week or two (or three or four) is that I must really love my job. As I have been complaining to every living breathing person I’ve had contact with, I had to burn my last weekend going crazy over my 96-hour exam, had a few days where I slept 2-4 hours and worked the rest of the time - like, literally, aside from commuting and showering I didn’t do anything but work - and still it’s never crossed my mind that I want to quit and do something else. And even though this project has pretty much ruined my life for the past month, I’m still glad I got to work on it. It’s super complex and stuff that a lot of people are not familiar with, and I learned a lot a lot, and it’s just so cool to be involved in something that’s quite a big deal.

I realise that I’ve only been talking about work lately. I’ve become such a boring person. But it’s ok, cos now I can spew out things like section 414(q) and 410(b) and people will be like wow she’s the l33tz0rs!

My nice new phone has been very new and nice, except that today I let it run out of battery and it’s been stubbornly refusing to turn on while it’s charging. Which is precisely the complaint py had about this phone before I bought it, and I’m beginning to see what a pain it is. I want to go to sleep so I can get in to work early tomorrow, but I have to wait till my phone can turn on since I use it as an alarm clock…so here I am stuck blogging because I don’t want to study.

So so so tired. At work I commented that at least I’d managed to get a proper weekend (which means I got to study instead of work hah), and S said he did too, which is precisely why we’re paying for it now. A week or less before exams and there we are still stuck at work at 8pm, as if we hadn’t billed the shit out of April already. The other day someone told me that this is a very easy job to hate. I never thought about it that way because I still like the work I’m actually doing, but it gets so hella frustrating sometimes. I mean, there have been days on end where we work until we can’t work anymore, then we wake up and work some more, and you lose track of the days because you did the exact same thing over the weekend as you did every other day of the week. And we don’t get OT pay or comp days or bonus, it’s all we can do to scrape together some time to take study days so we don’t fail our bloody exams. Like, f*** man. We’re just trying to fricking study here.

Sigh. I know I’ve complained about this before, but the only thing that’s changed since then is that now almost everyone else is suffering the same thing, which I guess is good in some ways but bad in most. The worst part is that my coworkers are the most important thing to me in my job and I have a feeling that most of them aren’t going to be sticking around for much longer. =’(

And my phone is STILL not turning on. UGHGHGHG.

So we moved to our new office this week (from 3 Embarcadero to 4 Embarcadero, big move) and on Monday we all received a little welcome baggie on our tables. It had-

(a) A mug, in tune with recent efforts to go green. To make sure we use them, they have also hidden all the paper cups they used to keep in lunchrooms. The nice thing about the mugs is that they have our names printed on them. I like the idea; I always felt guilty when I expended a paper cup a day on my water supply, plus I think the names are a really nice little touch.

(b) A 1gb iPod shuffle!!! I must’ve told everyone this already and everyone knows I’m no Apple fan at all, but if I have a free shuffle I’m damn well going to use it! I was kinda hoping they’d have our names engraved on those too, but I guess that would’ve been a bit too much, plus this way we can still sell them brand new on eBay =D I was considering doing that since in all practicality I honestly don’t know when I’ll be using this, between my Zen and my almost-decidedly-incoming PSP, but I don’t really want to sell it or give it away when it was such a nice gesture.

Presents for doing absolutely nothing but throwing my stuff into moving crates and walking into a new building on Monday! It feels so undeserved but I’m not going to raise any complaints.

I woke up at 6+ today and couldn’t really get back to sleep. Then I proceeded to spend the entire day being dead tired at work. But somehow when I got home after dinner at 10+, I was wide awake. How do you figure? Not that I’m happy about having to stay up till 2am to work on a bloody FAS report. I know I told myself I wouldn’t complain about my hours, after learning how much harder my friends in Singapore work. But tamade!!!! Still not happy about staying up till 2. Pfft.

So I just had to mention that today I threw my wristlet away with my lunch trash.

We had lunch in the lunch room, and a few minutes after I got back to my cube I realised I didn’t have my phone, which I had kept in my wristlet. I couldn’t find it in the lunch room, but I wasn’t terribly panicked because I was convinced that either (a) I had absent mindedly kept it somewhere safe out of habit and completely forgotten or (b) Joe was playing some stupid trick on me. After some mild concern Joe decided to help me look again, and we looked in the trash can Just In Case. I tell you, at the time there was very little doubt in me that we wouldn’t find it there. Even now I’m quite disbelieving about the whole affair. I still think Joe might have planted it in there, although hiding my stuff in trash might be going a bit far even for him.

WTF right? I have zero memory of it. So inconceivable. Can’t believe I did that. Never gonna get over this.

I’m semi-recovering from alcohol consumption so I’ll allow myself to ramble a bit. Had our holiday dinner at Medjool tonight. I’m not much of a connoisseur as you know, but I thought the food was ok. I find that a lot of times when I go to expensive restaurants I end up thinking the food is just ok.

However. The seared sea scallop might have been the best scallop I’ve ever had. And the bruschetta thing was so good that I even liked the feta cheese on it. And the prommes frites were really poppable (although you’re really paying 7 bucks for a plate of potato chips). And they didn’t overdo the alcohol in the Fuzzy Navel.

I was happy because I made a reservation for 16 people and we really did have exactly 16 people show up. I was told that it was a surprisingly good turn out for a Retirement event. So that was good.

After dinner everyone kinda went home, and only 4 of us stayed to get drinks. I guess we do have to go in to work tomorrow, but I’d gone to dinner with a Friday night mentality already. This was actually the first time I’d hung out with my coworkers without Joe being there. The last two years I’ve barely gone out with them, aside from lunch every day with Joe and Chris. I guess I just grew into the habit of having the two of them there all the time. Over the last few months I’ve grown more comfortable with the other people I work with, and I’m really happy. I think the group of people we have now is the best we’ve had in the time since I started work.

I’m idealistic I know, but I do believe that it’s things like these that keep people together. Joe once commented that the people most likely to leave the company are the ones who don’t go out to lunch or hang out with other people, and that’s got to be true to some extent. I don’t have any loans to pay off or children to take care of right now, and as my mum says, I just don’t know the value of money. So it may be easy for me to say this, but you could never pay me enough to peel me away from the people I work with.

Before I started work, someone older and wiser told me that you never make friends at work; you may think they are friends, but they’re really not. I don’t know what the technical definition of friendship involves and I know that these people might drop out of my life the moment the only thing connecting us vanishes. But whatever it is I have with them, I’m just glad I have it.