Areas of Unrest

9 June 2000 - Work Isn't Working

QOTD: "One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." - A. A. Milne

Reading: Janet Evanovich, High Five

Listening to: the original cast album of The Fantasticks

The stress level at work is rising ever higher. Most of my time is spent in tedium, reviewing proposals. I know it's important to get technical evaluations, but the negotiating team tends to look only at cost and ignore what we say. The only other significant task I got done during the week was to prepare a briefing to a visiting colonel, the program manager of a program we will probably have to interact with in the future. Oh, and I gave the briefing, but that was 20 minutes out of the week.

My evil coworker is still trying to play his smarmy games to steal credit for other people's work. Milo (my boss) is back from vacation, which should help, but there are further complications in that Milo is having a bit of a power struggle with someone from another group within the department. There's bound to be further confusion, since the Air Force just announced a reorganization of our program and our company will follow with a matching realignment. I'll hear about it this coming Thursday and it is definitely not something to look forward to. For one thing, the odds are high that I'll have to move offices. Aside from that being a pain, I have an astonishingly wonderful office right now, with lots of space and three windows.

The upshot of all of this is that I'm reading the weekly job postings with a lot more interest than I've shown in a while. I was hoping to stay around to see our first delivery come on line, but my sanity is far more important.

The general level of stress was abetted by exhaustion since I had story swaps back to back on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Wednesday was Long Beach Storytellers and Nancy had called me last minute to ask me to do the workshop and to emcee. Fortunately, I had an inspiration regarding the workshop and dug out the Life Stories board game. The game involves moving markers around the board and drawing a card to match the color of the square you land on. The cards have different questions on them, intended to prompt personal stories. The yellow cards have some odd activities on them. For example, one card which came up required everyone in the room to imitate someone snoring. We had about a dozen people, so we went around the room until everyone had had a turn. Then we had a short discussion about the game and how one might use it in a storytelling workshop. It was very successful and proved to be a great way of doing a workshop without having had time to prepare for it. Emceeing at Community Storytellers on Thursday was easier, for the most part, although one person ran over time and I could not get his attention.

I don't want to do my job anymore and I don't want to try to make a living out of storytelling. Anybody know of any open position as an heiress?