Listening to: Tiki Bar playlist on Songza
Holy crap what a week. Last week, one of our debit card numbers/PINs was skimmed to the tune of almost $600. The money’s back in the account and the debit cards have been reissued. But our new PINs will arrive via mail, and we can’t use them until we activate them at the credit union’s ATM. Since we still (mostly) run our household without credit cards, many of our bills are tied to those old numbers for auto-pay. Combine that with other things, and I am emotionally limping into the weekend.
Now here I am – Saturday afternoon. The blinds are open, the sunlight is streaming in, the tiki music is playing and I have some iced coffee nearby. Let’s do this.
Here is yesterday’s Friday Five. The theme is “Shadows”.
1. When have you had to choose the lesser of two evils?
I could either have married WM or put up with his whining about not being married for the rest of our lives. (Two years this July! Love you!)
2. When have your good intentions resulted in something awful?
I gave in and now he is married to me. (Two years this July! Love you!)
3. In your experience, have two wrongs ever made a right?
At one of my early office jobs, my supervisor was a real d-bag. He was a liar, he was sexist, and would fire his subordinates if they disagreed with anything he said. I was his admin assistant who also doubled as a web editor. But I still got paid the smaller salary and when I expressed interest in the actual web editor positions, he’d give me the “but you do such a good job in this role we couldn’t possibly replace you!” line. Whenever I’d get a cold (which wasn’t often!) or suffered from allergies he would blame it on my lack of exercise and poor eating habits. After all, he NEVER got sick. And eliminating Diet Coke from your diet also eliminates pollen!!! One day I went into his office when he was in a meeting and dabbed a used tissue all over his desk phone receiver and mouse. He was out of work for three days.
I’m not proud of what I did. It was wrong. But I’d like to think I saved his future assistants from being bothered whenever allergy season came around.
(He was later fired from that job for fraudulent expense reports. As his former assistant, that surprised me NOT AT ALL.)
4. When have you had to let virtue be its own reward?
Every. Single. Day. My horn? I don’t toot it. I let my actions speak for themselves.
5. What is the worst toll stress has ever taken on you?
My last two years at the C-P were awful. I stopped sleeping well, and would cry every Sunday night at the thought of going back in. The workload was relentless and the reward for doing your job well was covering up for people who didn’t. The summer before I left, I was in charge of building a website for a food publication they were going to do. All the editor gave me to work with was a single PowerPoint slide (!!!) with rectangles and text on it. This was in addition to my other work. I worked nights and weekends from home in order to get it launched on time. Once the framework was finished, I had to beg and plead with my contact in the newsroom to send me the stories so I could populate it. She did, but told me I had to find the photos on my own. On launch day, the ad director came out and congratulated all of the sales reps for their hard work on the print section. He didn’t mention the website at all. I walked out to my car and lost it. I ugly cried for about 20 minutes, until one of the supervisors saw me and tapped on my window. And I told her point blank: I worked more on that site than the rest of the department COMBINED and that my work is never, ever appreciated. The next day there was a $25 gift card to Ponzios on my desk.
That site doesn’t even exist anymore because once I left, they decided that it didn’t need its own stand alone site after all. Grrr.
***
That was an intense set of questions. Need to end on happy thoughts before I lose my one meager Bloglovin subscriber. (Which is me.)
1) Did I do anything this week to achieve any of my personal goals?
2) What micro-steps can I take this weekend/next week in order to move toward those goals?
I enjoy this little ritual and will probably keep it around even when the train schedule returns to normal.
Ah, oh my goodness. Bless you. You answered the questions the way I was hoping people would, and I have to thank you. I needed that.
Two things: (a) I am reminded of of something David Letterman mutters whenever he says “I’m not one to toot my own horn”: “…although if I could I certainly would…” and (b) I don’t know what Bloglovin’ is, but in Feedly you have one subscriber too, and you’re not about to lose him. 🙂
Aw, thank you, solitary Feedly subscriber! Bloglovin is another way to follow blogs, and I (humorously) beat myself up about it because I never knew the darn thing existed until about six weeks ago.