Because this is a public blog and my posts here are autobiographical, I of course will not be using real names. Anyone mentioned here is a real person, but their identities will remain anonymous. Glorious Food Products is also a fictitious name.
I have worked at Glorious Food Products for over five years now. My manager is a narcissistic person I'll call Henrietta Martin. In the course of these past five years, I have tried to tell her what I actually do in my job. To no avail. She knows all and I am her "lesser". Henrietta is really big on "place" in life and I am definitely pond scum. She has often referred to my job as "shrapnel".
In the course of these past five years, I have tried to tell her I enter about 600 accounts payable invoices per month. It's time consuming and leaves me no time for other things she wants me to do. These past couple of weeks, we have been implementing Bill Dot Com and she has been fully involved in the AP process. For the first time ever. She has been monitoring Bill Dot Com several times a day for the past couple of weeks.
Yesterday, Henrietta came over to me desk and says, "There's a lot of invoices that come through daily. I can see that you have processed a lot each day, but they just keep coming. It must make it hard to keep up. I think you probably enter over 600 invoices a month."
You think?
Honestly, why do companies allow people like this to become managers?
My now former co-accountant, Tom Brandon, is the only person on a planet of 8 billion people who thoroughly understands my situation. He worked at Glorious Products for 3 years until 2 weeks ago. Leave it to him to get a job during a pandemic, lol. I can't think of anyone more deserving though. He was literally my best coworker, ever, and we're talking two radically different people here. On paper, it doesn't work. In real life, working with him made work life at Glorious Products fun and bearable.
I am a 57 year old middle aged woman with just an Associates Degree in Business from Northeastern. My goal in life was to find love, a husband I would cherish who would cherish me. LOL, what a dumb ass. Anyway, Tom is a 26 year old guy who is just a few weeks shy of his MBA from Boston University. His goal in life is to make something of himself and he has worked his ass off to do it. Class after class after class at BU on top of a demanding full time job. I can't think of anyone I admire more.
But his greatest attributes are his personality and work ethic. Tom has a calm demeanor all of the time. I'm sure inwardly he was probably bothered by a lot of stuff that went on, and probably me too because I'm not good at keeping my complaints to myself, but he never showed it. He was caring and compassionate toward me when I was upset about stuff, and always treated me with respect. He never copped an attitude with me over my "place" at work and always, always supported and helped me whenever he could. He is an amazing person and I pray (even though I'm not someone who prays), that he never becomes someone like Henrietta as he becomes employed at higher and higher levels.
After Henrietta told me she thinks that 600 invoices might be a lot, I got up to talk to Tom. But of course he's not there. The only people in the office these days are Henrietta, Melissa in QA (who stays far, far away from the rest of us, as she should), and Ken, the coughing, sneezing, non-hygienic, smelly contractor who wipes his hands on his leg after sneezing, UGH!
Tom and I are connected on Chat, but I try not to text him too much. He is in the middle of learning a brand new job and the last thing he needs is his former coworker bothering him while he's at work. But I had to Chat him about this and I kept it as short as possible. I told him no need to write back, but he did write, "Frustrating/Infuriating". Yup. He gets it :) He lived it too.
My cousin Reyna in Seattle gave me the most wonderful advice in ways unique to her; she has quite the gift for coaching people. She said, you have chosen your path (in regard to my job) and you need to find a way to make peace with it. I am not saying this as well as she did, but that's the gist of it. So my post today is not a lament (well, okay, it is), but even so, although I am not fulfilled by my job, I am fulfilled in many other important ways.
6:23 AM
I took an online course that ran through the first six weeks of this year, from the first week of January through the week of Valentine's Day. The course instructor mentioned that while when we are young, it is as though there is a plethora of doors sitting in front of us, that we can choose to open, two things happen. One, when we select a door and go through it, it removes all the other doors as an option. Two, if we choose NOT to choose, doors will start disappearing from our list of options as time passes. So we would do ourselves a favor to take the reins of our lives and make a selection, rather than sitting…