Driving, Parking, Bookkeeping, and Facebooking

Don't let the pretty skyline fool you.
Denver=parking nightmare.

  What a week! I'm totally ready for a weekend, though a vacation would be nicer...
    The bf left for Europe this week, and I was the lucky one to drive him to the airport. Airport is a lot farther than I thought! I was in the car for about 3 hours straight, and it was right at the heat of the day. Miserable.
    Plus, I was low on gas so I didn't want to push my car harder by running the AC. It's September, Earth--you're supposed to start cooling down more in this hemisphere at about this time!
    Wednesday was by far the roughest day, though. I just discovered that the SBDC offers classes for small business people, many of them free, and decided to sign up for their Quickbooks seminar. I have been turned down for several jobs now for not having Quickbooks experience, so I wanted to take a class to at least get the basics.

    It was VERY basic, but it was only $35, so what could I really expect? On a sidenote, I'm talking to you, employers, if they're hiring an administrative assistant, you can't really expect them to also be the accountant/bookkeeper. Those are two separate positions and having one person do both can lead to doing one job better and the other worse. Overlapping positions can be really stressful for the employee. I know--I was the executive assistant/receptionist/content manager/editor/writer/technical support/sometime project coordinator/etc.
    Also, if Quickbooks is so important, don't say "helpful". "Helpful" makes it sound like you're willing to train. If you aren't, say "required". Then I won't bother applying. Except now I can, because I do have experience, albeit minimal.
    Anyway, that class set off a shitstorm for the rest of the day: they didn't give any info on parking, and parking in Denver is an effing nightmare. The class was supposed to be 3 hours, but all the parking lots/garages/meters only allow you to stay 2 hours, or the max you can pay for is 2 hours and then you have to pay for the whole day ($10). So, after searching for spaces for about 15 minutes (making me that late for the class), I finally parked and paid for the whole damn day.
    Turns out, there was a 20 minute break in the middle of the class, where I could have gone down and just paid for an extra hour or something. Furthermore, the class got out about 45 minutes early, meaning I probably could have gotten away with a 2 hour pass in the first place. In short, blarg.

If only I had Coca-Cola's resources,
maybe I could get some more attention
to the Facebook page I manage...

    I had also signed up for another class, FREE, up at the north SBDC later that evening to learn about Facebook fan pages, but my day was shot after I ended up getting an interview at 3:30. Still didn't stop for gas yet because I was so ticked off about the parking when I left Denver, I made it to the interview three hours later. The gas light came on just as I pulled up.
    The interview went all right, but when I went to gas up the car, I didn't have any King Soopers points and had to pay full-price. Then, I ran over a median, despite desperately trying to avoid it. Why are there so many medians? They seem to exist for no other purpose than to damage the undersides of cars whose drivers either didn't see them or have terrible depth and distance perception like me.
    The evening class was one of the only redeeming points in the whole day. I actually learned quite a bit, and felt more comfortable around some techie/internet people in a college campus classroom than a stuffy conference room in downtown Denver. There's a lot more to Facebook business/fan pages than I thought, and now that I know what else I can do to improve the page, I feel a little better about moving forward with it.
    So glad it's finally Friday. I got to visit my friend from my old job and work on the redesign of my other website (super-excited!). Plus we had totally awesome Indian buffet for lunch and free wifi at the public library. Today makes up for such an awful Wednesday, and semi-crappy Tuesday airport drive.
    It's nice that there are always good days to make you feel better about the bad ones.

It's the freakin' weekend!

Working for the Weekend

  For the first time, I was asked to work this weekend. I didn't have to go in to the office or get anything done by a weekend deadline, but it's more the why I had to work this weekend than the fact that I had to at all that bothers me.
    I work hard, and I put a large part of myself into the company. I get stress headaches, my eyes get dry and bloodshot, I get back pain sitting in a chair all day, and I strain my brain staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying: I put a lot of time, effort, and both mental and physical strain on myself at my job. I do this willingly. I work hard, and I take pride in the work that I do. I don't half-ass it, and I don't cut corners because that's just not how I was raised to do things.
    So when I am asked to work over the weekend to redo an assignment that was originally assigned to someone else, I get a little perturbed. The assignment was completed by this person, who shall remain nameless, but it was not up to snuff. I will leave the reason for why it was not up to snuff out of this, because it is a really poor excuse for poor work, but I will say that, not only should someone not turn in work like this in the first place, but they shouldn't be in such a state as to turn in work like this.
    If you are not able to do what is assigned to you, you probably should take the day off until you are ready to come back and adequately do your job. I do my job. I don't like doing other people's jobs for them. I will do it when asked, because I figure, if I'm asked to do it, that makes it part of my job. But I also figure that if I have to do someone else's job for them, that makes them a liability rather than an asset.
    It's one thing if someone has pneumonia or has a relative in the hospital--those are reasonable, good excuses. And in those cases, I'm fine stepping up and taking on a little extra work while they're out. But poor work quality while you should be in fine working capacity, leading to someone else having to fix your mistakes, is not ok.
    This is a job, not a class. You don't get to take it over if you fail a paper or test. Separate your personal life from your work life. Don't air your dirty laundry in public. And if you can't do your job, don't do it badly and leave it to someone else to fix it. I'm telling this to you, dear readers, because unfortunately, my aversion to confrontation will prevent me from telling it to the person whose job I had to do this weekend.

Welcome to Adulthood. Failures Will Be Shot. Or maybe just fired.

Have you ever cleaned up somebody else's mess at work? Did you confront them about it? 

Leave a comment, and feel free to use phony names to retain anonymity.

Spring, Sprang, Sprung

    I think I always liked spring better than fall. For one reason, school gets out in spring; while in fall, it's just beginning a whole new year. I like to see the flowers coming up--the irises were already pushing up a couple weeks ago in February here. A few trees around campus are getting leaves. I can't say I dislike spring more than fall for allergies, because I always seem to get them in both seasons. Spring is when I get to start bringing out my cute sandals and shoes, when I don't have to wear three layers of clothing anymore to survive the weather, and, I have a spring birthday.
    It seems that so many nice things happen in spring for me. The only thing about spring that isn't so nice happens at school. Yes, it does mean that school's almost out for three months, but it also means it's time to knuckle down. For some reason, the end of spring semester at school (in college, anyway) always seems to be much more exhausting and frustrating than the end of fall semester.

Crappy cell phone picture from two years ago :)

    It's possible that Spring Break causes this. Teachers have several weeks after break and before finals, so they have plenty of time to assign papers, projects, and excessively time-consuming assignments in this half of the semester. In the fall, Thanksgiving break (or fall break--as they seem to think is a more PC term...) occurs only about 2 weeks before finals. So teachers don't have the time (and, I might add, aren't permitted to) assign any large assignments or tests during the week prior to finals. In any case, the end of spring semester (subsequent to the break) always seems to cause more stress and cramming than any other time of the semester, even midterms and finals.
    I'm really hoping that this spring will be different. However, I have no syllabus for any of my classes that has concrete dates on it for anything except the final. I have no idea when my papers will be assigned, when my tests will be, or worst of all, whether they will all be due at the same time. Teachers must all run on the same wavelength when it comes to due dates, because they always want to assign something to be due at the exact same time as in other classes, or at least within a few days of each other, having no consideration or concern for the fact that, as much as they'd like to think otherwise, students do have other classes they're taking, and--gasp!--those other classes might be more important than their own class.
    There is a kind of hubris that I think you develop if you become a teacher. You find your subject incredibly interesting and relevant, so everyone else ought to, too. This is a mistake. In a class of 30 or 40 students, maybe 5 will enjoy it and appreciate it. It's probably less if it's a particularly unpleasant class like biochemistry or advanced calculus. While it may be a helpful subject or a required subject for some students, there are very few who will actually like it and commit any of it to long-term memory deliberately.
    Upon reflection, it looks like I've only taken 5 classes, out of 37 in my undergrad, that I actually liked. Now, this is classes only--I've had plenty of teachers that I liked. Most of the teachers I had, in fact, were good teachers. There was only maybe 1 each semester that wasn't. But considering I spent three and a half years in college for my BA, and I only liked a total of 5 classes that I took--that's only 1 semester's worth of classes, by the way--it seems like I mostly wasted a lot of time and money studying things that I didn't care for. While I may have learned a few things on the way, and met a few really interesting and intelligent people, that still seems like an unusually small percentage of my education spent on topics I enjoyed.
    While I can't say I regret my time as an undergrad, or even the degree I got (though it has done me little practical good so far)--I did enjoy being in school and taking those classes even if many were for the teachers rather than the subject matter--it is deeply troubling to consider the results of a college education. Its near inability to help me find a job, its expense, and the fact that, if I'd had more of a choice in my classes and still have been able to graduate on time, I probably would have taken a much wider variety of classes. I could have spent more time studying things that interested me rather than putting up with classes that I had to take for my major, or core credit.
    I guess the ball is in my college's court: College must redeem itself and give me a good reason to stay. If it doesn't, well, I guess I've some serious soul-searching to do...
    And, I'm sure you've noticed, I managed to digress--again. I edited out some of the even worse digressions before I published this one too. After all this, to return to my original topic, I'm glad it's getting to be spring. I'm hoping that spring fever will hit everyone and they'll be in such good moods, they'll be more flexible about due dates, extensions, and life in general.

Spring forward.