Vibes in plenty to your brother, Tep, and to you. And I agree with everyone else--he's doing what he needs to and he sounds much more on top of those needs, for self-care and accountability, than in 2016. It's still so incredibly stressful to be watching and worrying from afar.
ION, I've beaten my previous record--my very first holiday party related requisition was rejected by Accounting within 90 seconds and had to be redone from scratch because in following Rule A to the letter I had violated Rule B. I want to fucking burn it all to the ground.
OMG JZ, we have the same job! Or had, because technically that is not my job anymore, but I am still stuck until we find someone, but we won't because I have been doing it so long I at least know some of the little weird things that get things rejected
Today my head exploded because- the project I am working on, putting a program's syllabi into a system to manage syllabi, was not actually understood by the faculty to mean they would need to learn a new system to update said syllabi. I know this because I suspected this and approached the faculty. My boss was like- yes— they voted on it. What they understood is that they would update their word syllabus like normal and we would upload and change in the new system. Not sure who the we is. I also realized we are implementing this for a program using iPads, but this system has never been tested on iPads, so we don't actually know if students will be able to view the new syllabi!
I think I'm being written up for anger management.
After sweating through last year, during which every single thing I did was rejected and returned and everything got paid at the absolute last possible minute only because I frantically called and begged, I found out that literally every single accounting procedure for event approval I'd learned two years earlier had changed and gotten exponentially more complicated, and in the aftermath of it all when I griped to the person who'd done it the year before, he said casually, "Oh, yeah, that's right. They changed all that the year I did it."
Which would have been nice information to have, you know, LAST YEAR. I spent two months trying to wrangle bills for tens of thousands of dollars and feeling increasingly stupid and incompetent and like the world's worst failure (and also asking for help and tips and advice, and getting one atom of information at a time in totally unconnected fashion, so I didn't realize the scope of the procedural changes until after it was all over).
Anyhow, in the aftermath of it all I wrote everything up in granular detail, step by step (like Jordan Catalano: "Start with the basics. Even if you think it's, like, too basic? Start there."), and sighed in relief because our sister institution was going to do it all this year and when it came round to our time again the other division in my group would take care of it, and now they'd have a set of notes to work off of and update so it'd be painless for everyone.
And last month we checked in with the sister institution, and they were basically all, "...Ohhhh, yeah. Oops." And every venue there was booked. And there are now 250 people at both institutions expecting this and it's an important Team Building Event and skipping a year isn't an option.
So one of the admin heads found a few SF venues not yet booked and got bids and got a contract, and the other division was going to do it. Except they're in the middle of recruiting new faculty members and the only admin analyst in the division couldn't do anything but that, so it fell back in my lap again.
The venue itself has been reminded multiple times in the last two weeks that it needs to register as a vendor if it wants to get paid, but hasn't. The invite list is 500+ people long, including names that are dead, retired or moved on to other places and there's no clean central list of confirmed actual appropriate people, so that needs to be audited line by line.
And today I submitted one, just one, requisition (for a photo booth rental), following the instructions I'd written up a year earlier to the letter, and within 90 seconds the req was bounced back to me as unacceptable because this specific vendor can't be paid out of this specific type of requisition, so I need to throw it out and redo it from scratch.
Which only took a couple of minutes, but it just made me feel utter despair and K-FUCKED radio blasted its greatest hit, "You Sure Do Suck And Everyone Knows It" right into my brain, and I snarled, "I want to kill everything, including me."
So I'm being written up because of fucking math and accounting.
Oh JZ that sounds so terrible! I'm so sorry. I can only imagine how I would have reacted, but I doubt I would have been as restrained
As much as I admire the people I work for, I so profoundly don't want to be here anymore.
JZ, I'm so sorry. That sounds like a nightmare.
Oh, JZ, that sucks beyond the telling of it. I'm sorry you're in the middle of such an epic clusterfuck.
