I'm pretty much decided to leave early and start drinking.

Sounds like an excellent plan. Are they going to announce and (re)hire for this phantom new position? (Obviously not soon enough).

Consuela, who do you work for?! All I keep picturing is that commercial with monkeys overrunning an office.

My porn name sounds like it should be my soap opera name instead: Priscilla Coolidge.

If I could come up with my own porn name, I think it would have to be Angel Kake.

Porn name: Pepper Magnolia. Kinda has an Ellroy feeling, I guess.

If I had to come up with a porn name, I think I'd pick Studley Do-Right.

If I had actually married a dude I was engaged to ages ago, I would have a porn star name, Heather Hunter.

That whole thing is like a masterclass in bad employee retention.

Pretty much, yeah. If my quality of life hadn't improved by like 200% when I started this job, I wouldn't have stayed this long. The people here are not nearly as cool & competent as at my previous job, and the management is ridiculously incompetent in many ways, but I'm still so much happier than I was there, I can't see leaving yet.

Amy, I work for a federal agency that fishes people out of the water. Among other things.

I admit that a good part of the problem seems to be specific to my particular office, where the current division chief is someone who's never held a job anywhere else, and seems to take Mad Men as a business management guide rather than fiction. (Though to be fair he's never hit on anyone: but he treats professional staff like junior high students, plays favorites, and is far more interested in his own power base than in actually supporting the mission.) If there were a change of personnel at that level, I suspect things would improve immensely. Not that it's ever going to happen.

Advice for Buffistas:

Do not attempt to change the blade of a mandoline for the first time after a very long day and a glass of wine. Especially if you do not have bandaids

Timelies all!

My deepest sympathies, Jilli.

As for my name, I was named after my maternal grandfather, Stanley. (He died about 8 years before I was born) There was already a Susan in the family, and my parents had friends with daughters named Sharon and Sherry. Supposedly, my paternal grandfather suggested Sapphire at one point. Yeah, that would have worked =real= well for a suburban white girl. Had I been a boy I would have been Steve.

I'm up in the SF office today, so I can't do my normal down time work, so I've been attempting to clean out my email inbox.

I'm down to only 816 messages.

Suela, every single time you post about the job sitch it makes me wince, because it everything about it is so familiar - the delays, the lack of communication, the fear that someone who happens to be a veteran will snatch one's job, the one hand not knowing what the other is doing, the apparent tendency to draw names out of a hat to fill a position, the terror of filling out a job application knowing that some completely abstruse system of keywords and criteria will determine whether one even ends up in the potential hiring pool. People may grip about federal employees having "gold-plated benefits" (though in my experience they are just average), but they PAY for them in ANGST.