insult and injury

3:24 p.m., 2002-03-19

quote of the day

she just rides into town
knowing what they'll say,
knowing they're around the corner.

--Tori Amos, "Daisy Dead Petals"

last night fifteen minutes before I was supposed to leave, my boss Laura Shear handed me a list of jobs I'd billed time to and told me to go through and research all of them. so that I could justify the time I'd spent on each one. she thought there were... too many of them... that there's no way we were so busy that I had needed to work on all those jobs.

I did it. I scrawled notes for each one of them. in the middle of it she called me to bitch me out for changing some of my hours. see, until a charge "posts" to the client, you can go back and change it if you notice a mistake. I spotted a couple of instances in which I was, technically, standing over the printer or waiting for the database to refresh-- it's left up to our own discretion whether to bill the client for that stuff, so in a couple of cases I changed my mind and gave some time back to the client.

Laura called me and informed me in the coldest possible terms not to do that-- as if I were an Arthur Andersenite shredding subpoenaed documents. "Let's not add insult to injury," she spat, and hung up on me. I was left wondering who she thought had in fact been insulted or injured.

when I was finished and the boy had been waiting for me for an hour and a half, I rang Laura. then I e-mailed her. then I walked over to her office. I was finally forced to conclude that she had left without so much as notifying me, let alone giving me the "answer" as to whether or not I was going to be fired.

today she has not spoken to me beyond a startled "hello" in the hallway when I came around a corner and she had an interviewee for the coordinator job with her. now it's time for me to leave, and I've been sitting here all day in an undercurrent of cold anger and fear. my HR representative Gail D'Almeida just came up and told me that she wouldn't have a chance to meet with me until next week, but "nothing's going to happen before then anyway." according to her, the big thing that's been hanging over my head is nothing but a "followup" and I shouldn't worry.

I don't work tomorrow. Thursday I'll come in again, still waiting for the other shoe to drop. applying for other jobs in every second of my spare time.

building hate.

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