Chantal - Have Laptop Will Travel: Friday

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September 20, 2004

Friday

It didn’t help that I have a sharp knife on my desk.

Four weeks ago, I was given a one-month reprieve at work. Elsa, who was far friendlier at the time than she is now, had assured me that my contract would be extended for a further month every two weeks in. Elsa’s the type of person who’s used to getting what she wants, so when her boss – one of the candidates for being my possible boss – muttered to me two weeks ago that he’d sort it out, I didn’t have any reason to think otherwise.

The only reason I knew that the four weeks were coming to an end was because I’d spent three of them waiting for data, specifications or even a conversation with Elsa about the new database. I started chasing for information about my contract on Wednesday, but by Friday, she’d not managed to reach her boss, or speak to his boss, and was settling for grunts and shrugs. When I asked her, mid-morning, if there was any news, she asked ‘What about?’

Back to the knife. I initially brought it in back in November for my birthday; though I don’t eat cakes or anything else sweet, I bought two cakes from a luxury bakery for my colleagues. The knife never made it back home, and has since been used for lunches and slicing lemons. It wanders around my desk, but it wasn’t until Friday that I had to make a point of hiding it from view, lest I get too tempted to take it on a tour of the office. Dezirée, formerly the environmental assistant, was holding her leaving party that afternoon, as she’d finally managed to secure a job in the prisons service. When I mentioned the knife to a friend, she joked that I’d be seeing Dezirée again soon.

So it started at 8 am, when I was standing outside the office, finishing a cigarette and reading a newspaper, my usual routine. Elsa’s boss being on leave and unreachable – much like her memory and reliability – I’d suggested the previous afternoon that she check the status of my contract with his boss, Geoff. Geoff arrived shortly before I’d finished my cigarette, an ideal time to pounce, I thought. Nobody’d approached him in the last month. ‘But we extended your contract for a month,’ he said. The month was expiring in 8 hours’ time.

A further complication was a very blonde deadline. A week before, at 2pm, Elsa had emailed me a spreadsheet to import into the database, which would then have to be broken down into 16 further tables, not to mention all the tweaks needed to convert the database into something vaguely usable. She planned to launch it at 9am on Monday. I was on the phone at about 2am on the Monday morning wailing that I was dreading the deadline too much to go to sleep. At 9.30 am I was told that it’d been cancelled, rescheduled for this week, with a trial launch Thursday lunchtime. As two spreadsheets took 4 days, rather than about 4 minutes to import into Access, I was left with a few weeks’ work to cram into about 2 days. In the meantime, Elsa was too busy bonding with her new colleague to appreciate how stupid and impossible the deadline was, and despite the deadline being her giving a pretty presentation on the database, she only saw it for the first time 10 minutes before the presentation was due to start, to which only 1 of the 5 or so invitees attended. Not only was it the first time she’d held a discussion with me about the database in over a month, it lasted 2 hours as the sole attendee had to spend much of that time educating her about what she should already know about her job. I left with a page’s worth of notes of changes, but decided around lunchtime on Friday that if she wasn’t going to discuss them with me, I clearly didn’t need to make any of them ahead of the database’s launch and presentation to the top-level managers tomorrow morning.

Back to the deadline now. Okay, so I love being busy and working hard. What I definitely don’t like is working so hard I see new grey hairs emerge every time I look in the mirror, falling asleep on the train home at 4.30pm, and being too exhausted to bathe for a week. I’d send Elsa frantic messages about how badly things were going, but she was probably too busy chatting to her new colleague to notice. Or care. For me, it’s important that my work is as good as it can be, so I’m hardly going to be satisfied with her launching a piece of crap if my name’s going to be associated with it. When I ‘thanked’ her for the most hellish 5 days I’d experienced in a long time, she simply said, ‘You’re welcome’.

So that’s the background to Friday, or at least part of it: scary deadline and uncertainty over contract. If you want, add to that the uncertainty over who I work for (I have five contenders for who I might be working for), which team I work for, what I’m meant to be doing, much less working towards. In nearly 6 years of temping, this truly is my first run-in with ‘hands-off’ management. I don’t like it.

I suppose you can guess the outcome, but let me take you through the day, all the same. I remember emailing Katie, my adopted sister, first thing, and I think that was my last sane moment of the morning. I had built a database earlier in the year for a lovely older man called Ian, who commutes down from Ipswich, and we’ve become good friends since. He was the first person I talked to, after Geoff, and somehow he managed to calm me down, which only lasted the few seconds it took to return to my desk and growl at Jenny. After too much growling, I returned to Ian for another fix. Again, it only lasted a few seconds. Around 9, I decided I needed a serious nicotine fix to rehumanise me, and to take my mind off of my knife, and bumped into Elsa. I’d texted her at 8 with the news, but she just shrugged when I asked her, ‘Well?’, and shrugged again when I spat, ‘Spending the day jobhunting, and I’m deleting your database.’ I crossed to the other side of the office and bumped into Laura, who I used to walk to work with every day back in the old building. We chatted for a few minutes, then I asked her to grab me before she returned to the other office. While outside, I decided I’d walk her over, I could do with not being in my office for a bit.

It’s very strange that, despite the near-incestuous company culture we have, these days, when I hear someone’s leaving, my first thoughts are ‘Congratulations!’ rather than ‘Awwww no fair’. Laura told me that a good friend is finally leaving, and I’m thrilled for him, as I know he’s been unhappy for a long time, extremely sad though I’ll be to not have him around any more. I spent about an hour over there – I’m usually almost neurotic about never leaving my desk these days, even if it’s just to boredly search the Internet – probably the longest I’ve spent with Laura this year, and exactly what I needed to stop snarling (her offering me green tea helped too). Usually when I go to the other building (it’s only 5 minutes away), I’m there for hours catching up with all my friends there, but on Friday, I felt I should at least pretend to care about my nightmarish deadline.

By 12 or so, I’d finished typing up my list of things to do on the new database, which was only about 45 items long.

I’m getting a bit bored – as it’s pretty late – so let me return to Elsa for a short while. As I said earlier, I’ve been temping now for nearly 6 years, which means I’ve worked for a very large number of companies. I’d like to think I’ve got a good idea of what defines professionalism – if nothing else, the assumption that I’ve been hired specifically to fill a role – and so I violently object to those who misinterpret that to believe they’ve been hired to surf the internet for trainers, talk all day on the phone to their family in India, plan their next diving or skiing holiday, or, in the case of Elsa, talk first, waste everyone’s time second, and work if there’s any time leftover. She and I were good friends – we met in the smoking room, so I owe my 6-week contract extension to Marlboro – but particularly since her new colleague started, let’s call her Eliza, I’ve avoided her, as I can’t bear the 15-minute wait for her to acknowledge me, chat, work, chat, chat some more, wrap up, unlock her desk, dig for her cigarettes, lock her desk, send messages to her colleagues, chat to her colleagues and wait for the lift, simply for a 3-minute cigarette. She often wanders over with me to the Oxo Tower to get my lunch, but one day, it was at least 15 minutes before she and Eliza were both ready, and although I walk slowly at the best of times, I was a few minutes ahead of them the whole way there. I got annoyed, and Elsa has stopped talking to me since. I’d already been avoiding Eliza since I stopped to say hello one day and got rescued an hour later by Elsa’s boss . There’s lots of other stories to fill out the background, but let’s just leave it at there being increasing friction between Elsa and I over our definitions of how to behave in the workplace.

Theoretically, I love my job; I definitely love my salary, which is about double what I could get anywhere else. If there was no Furball (ex-boss) or Elsa, I would unreservedly love it – but then I remember the chronic mismanagement and disorganisation. I don’t sit near whichever team I now work with, much less for, so I figured I’ll keep doing my old job – working for up to about 10 teams – but also building the snazziest database I’ve built yet, which would be a great note to leave on. Apart from Matt and the Furball, I think pretty much everyone is desperate to leave as soon as they can. Elsa had promised to have me kept on till May, but I was already aware I’d be unlikely to survive more than a few months, which would be drastically reduced by the amount of contact with her. A pub trip on Tuesday (they kindly changed it from the wine bar, as I hate wine, to a pub) is the first indication I’ll have of actually having colleagues, but I’d need a lobotomy before I set foot in there.

Back to Friday. It’s after midnight, so I’ll need to wrap this up; I’d also planned to do much jobsearching in five countries before I go to sleep. At noon, Geoff had only just returned from an all-morning meeting in the other building and was munching on his lunch. I decided to give him two hours, then two and a half hours before approaching him for an update. Then three. At 3pm, I came back from a lengthy cigarette break to be told that Geoff and the Furball’s boss had been looking for me, which meant News. The Furball’s boss, erm, Mike, was adamant that he’d be unlikely to be able to extend my contract beyond two weeks, not the ongoing month I’d been assured. He also acknowledged that I had some outstanding work to do for the environmental team, however I need to discuss it with their manager, who won’t be back until after the two weeks are up. Mike also told me that I should prioritise jobhunting and interviewing. Geoff said that Monday’s deadline had a snowball’s chance of actually happening. Elsa gets a nearly-finished database, and I get grey hairs and distinct ringmarks in the bathtub.

Two weeks. Two people approached me on Friday about potential new projects; well, one was Ian, and the other one is a former colleague who’s drowning in paperwork. I never did finish Ian’s database anyway, so that needs doing, but he said he’d spend the weekend thinking up further improvements I could make.

Two weeks. I gauge one week will be spent jobhunting and interviewing. The other week will be handing over all of my databases to poor Matt, who, if nothing else, will be left completely at the Furball’s mercy without sympathy or backup. So when do I get to finish off three databases and possibly develop a fourth?

And yet, I never heard so much as a peep from Elsa during all this.

Her boss is back tomorrow, so I’m anticipating, at the very least, an argument with him about his complete inability to secure the contract of someone who presumably works for him. There’s maybe another three or four arguments to be had tomorrow – I should probably leave my knife at reception – not to mention a complete lack of clarity as to how I should spend the next two weeks. If, um, Doug can’t be arsed to renew my contract, and Elsa can’t spare the time to kickstart what was originally a life-or-death project, then presumably I shouldn’t be wasting my time on it.

So it’s after midnight, and I’m sitting in semi-darkness as I can’t bear to face tomorrow. I loved my job, I adore my colleagues, but after a month of the Elsa-and-Doug experience, I’d have been grateful had Friday been my last day after all. I know that tomorrow will start with confronting Doug about why he wasn’t able to do his job, followed up with why Elsa’s allowed to get away with not doing her job.

The ironic thing is, I keep getting told that my contract’s not getting extended as ‘there’s no work for me’. I know I’ve just crammed a few weeks’ work into two days, but I think the three months’ work looming ahead of me contradicts that fairly well. I had worried if my bad habit of contradicting and arguing with the Furball might have had some influence on my contract not being extended, and probably, my blatant disapproval of Elsa’s behaviour probably doesn’t help.

I want it to be Monday evening. I want Elsa to be taken off the database, and for my contract to be extended for long enough for me to find a glorious job in France, Spain, Holland or Mexico. And also for Matt’s copy of The Book I’ve ordered for those who suffer most from proximity to the Furball to arrive. But above all, for Elsa and Doug to revert to simply people who lurk behind a filing cabinet and rarely talk to anyone outside their own team.

And Christ, the Furball’s back tomorrow. Our fun’s over.

Posted by chantal at September 20, 2004 12:42 AM

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