I hate this fucking job.  

  • “AP clerk” has got to be the single most boring job I’ve ever had.  
  • Okay, not quite.  Comdata was worse.  Call rep at an inbound call center, processing authorizations for fuel cards over and over and over again, 90 seconds per call, for 8 hours.
  • But this is pretty goddamn close.  Entering invoices in the system, one by one, having to decipher the handwritten codes and vendor numbers put there by the people who decide which job account it gets billed to, having to go look them up when they malfunction and tell someone to fix it please.  That’s two or three days a week.  We’re talking hundreds of invoices here; this company has like three dozen active construction jobs throughout the state.  I, with my slower-than-average speed from being new to it, input about 150 on Monday, and almost 200 on Tuesday.  And I know my coworkers did a few batches too to help me out.
  • Also making a copy of every single invoice to send back down to the jobsite for their records, not that it apparently stops them from calling and being like “hey can you pull X invoice for me?” all the time.
  • Thursday is check run.  A couple hundred checks are printed, along with our copies to keep, and my job is to go through the bin of “to pay” invoices and match every. single. fucking. check. with its invoice.  Staple our copy to the invoice, set the actual check aside to go out.  Then stuff a couple hundred checks in a couple hundred envelopes, and get them ready to go out with Friday’s mail.
  • Friday is fucking filing.  Take all those check copies and invoices that were matched on Thursday, and sort and file them in the giant filing cabinets that take up a good two-thirds of the department’s floorspace.  
  • So it’s horribly boring, is giving my back a solid 50% increase in pain over its usual level because I’m spending my time not only *at* a computer, but hunched over trying to read invoices to input, or bending or reaching for files and stuff, and it’s also high-stress because of the sheer volume that needs to be handled.  
  • This is also an actual corporation, as opposed to a small office like before.  I hate that.  It’s so impersonal, and where within a couple of weeks of starting at Stq I was actually giving a shit about us winning bids and things going well…here, I give precisely zero fucks about the profitability of this big company.  
  • I *was* really busting my ass to keep up though, since I’m slower than the others what with being new, because I cared just enough about them to not want to make their jobs harder by having to pick up my slack.
  • That is ceasing as of Monday morning.
  • I had a short day Tuesday - some big benefits-meeting thing they were all going to, so I didn’t go in to work until 10AM.  My normal hours are 8:00-4:30.  I stayed until 5 on Tuesday, thus giving me a 6.5hr day.  
  • Well, on Thursday, I had my regular hours, but I stayed an extra 20 minutes or so to finish getting checks ready for mailing, cause I didn’t want to just be like “lol sorry gone, y’all finish without me”.
  • I did input this on my timesheet, because accuracy please?  Actually I only claimed 15 minutes, rounding it to 4:45 for my out time.
  • I submitted the timesheet on Friday afternoon (it’s done online through the temp agency) and poked my head into Margaret’s office to let her know I’d sent it in so she could approve it whenever she had a moment.
  • And she was like “Uhh…yeah about that.  I can’t pay you overtime.”
  • My eyebrows made a break for the ceiling.  ”I’m not trying to get overtime.  I just stayed a few minutes late to finish getting the checks ready.  And I also had that short day on Tuesday.  So actually, I’m still under 40 hours for the week.”
  • We were giving each other stiffly-polite smiles.  She replied, “I know, and I’ll approve it this time, but I need you to know that going forward this can’t happen again.”
  • Understood.  Oh, very understood.  
  • Let me just point out that I make $14/hr from the temp agency.  Which means FICo is getting billed probably around $23-24/hr.  Let’s even round up to $25.  With OT being 1.5x, they got billed basically an extra $10 for those fifteen minutes.  So they were still paying less for the whole week than they would have paid for a perfect 40-hr week.
  • Ah, but this is corporate.  Procedure is god.  It’s not authorized, therefore the actual amount or the logic thereof is irrelevant.
  • Fine then.  You wanna give me shit about staying a over few in order to finish my work for the day, because I didn’t want my coworkers to have to pick up the slack?  That’s fine.  From now on, my ass is out the door at 4:30 on the dot, no matter what I have to stop in the middle of.  Peace, kittens.  I’m not volunteering my time.
  • And speaking of coworkers…bleh.  They’re nice enough people, they really are, and they’ve made an effort to make me feel welcome, which I really appreciate.
  • We just…have absolutely nothing in common.  Not a single thing that I can think of aside from “we all enter this room and spend eight hours here every weekday”.  
  • They’re all older, all have kids, most have grandkids.  They’re all gossipy as FUCK, very VERY loud, and they have awful taste in music.  I spent all day every day from Tuesday afternoon on with my earbuds in, listening to Pandora on my phone because I will flip my shit if I have to listen to country or disco any longer.
  • Oh and then there’s the coworker I am most directly working with, and who’s training me and answering questions as I come across weird invoices or new codes I don’t know how to input.  Who called her computer f***** when she was pissed at it, and later when a jobsite manager called to talk about some invoice or other, got pissy with him.
  • Which I kind of understood, as he didn’t have the invoice number, the amount, the date, nothing, which means all kinds of work for us to figure out wtf he wants.  I’d be cranky, too.
  • But that doesn’t justify bitching at him about “Look I can’t understand you” and muttering under her breath “speak fucking English”.  The guy was, at a guess, southeast Asian of some type?  Judging by the accent?  And after she got off the phone, she was mocking him for his accent - it wasn’t that bad, really.  It was enough to present a little difficulty, especially over the phone, but really not that bad, and he speaks better English than any of us does any other language, so.  She was going on about “God, I’d hate to work with him.  Maybe next time I should tell him to put a translator on the phone!” and laughing.  
  • She even went and looked up the jobsite to find out his full name and laugh at that, too, because lol furriners.  Fucking really?
  • But what do I say?  Especially in my first week, when I have absolutely no power to get anyone to do anything, even something simple like fucking behave themselves.  So I just put my earbuds back in and ignored it, refusing to join in the validating laughter from the other ladies.
  • I feel trapped there.  It’s supposed to be a temp-to-hire position.  I will literally go postal - snap and and start murdering people one day - if I have to work there long-term.
  • I can actually already feel it fucking with my mental health.  I had this problem at Comdata, too.  Worse, then, because I wasn’t on meds, but I recognize the feeling.  Shades of the same thing.  The extreme dullness and repetition, the impersonal corporate environment, the stress of needing to be both fast and perfect, little to no recognition of the actual good work I do when I get shit right…when I was at Comdata, it drove me to hide outside the building and self-harm on my breaks.  Here, I doubt it’ll do anything that bad, but I’m feeling the same sense of “oh fuck i can’t do this get me out of here i hate this i can’t go back in there”.  
  • I could quit - tell the agency this placement isn’t going to work for me.  But it creates more hassle and paperwork for both them and the company I’m at, and temp agencies are all about reputation and history with the handlers; when you’re new, you have to wait and poke and prod for a long time to get even one assignment, and if you get booted off a placement at the employer’s request, you can kiss any future placements goodbye for a good long while at least.  Whereas a temp who gets good ratings from supervisors will be handed jobs one after the other whenever she’s out of work.  
  • So yes, I could duck out.  But it’s work, and payment, which I need.  And I’m worried that choosing to leave could damage my standing with the temp agency.  Tanya gave me a glowing review when I left Stq, and it’s because of that that I even got this position, which pays way better than most OfficeTeam positions and is temp-to-hire.  
  • Objectively, this is a fantastic assignment to have landed.  
  • So I should be grateful for it.  And I am, to an extent.  But…I can’t deny this job is literally driving me crazier already.
  • The fact that every day this week as I’ve driven home I’ve been thinking “Ugh, I need ice cream/candy/alcohol to unwind” should probably tell me something, too.  Those are not the healthiest coping mechanisms, especially not as an every day impulse.
  • And then there’s Wednesday morning onward, where each morning I was like “No I don’t wanna go I hate that place don’t make me go…”  At Stq, yes, there were stressful days, there were days I’d get up going “…this is going to be a long one…fml”  But I never outright DREADED going to work when I woke up.
  • So I don’t know what to do now.
  • I sent Tiffany (my OT handler) an email Friday.  She had emailed me for a follow-up, with “On a scale of 1-10 how satisfied are you with your current placement?” and some other questions about my experience with OT in general.
  • Golden opportunity, right?
  • I texted my mom to ask “How do I politely say HOLY FUCKING SHIT GET ME OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW I’M BEGGING YOU?”  I was mostly just whining, but she actually had some advice, so I wrote a response to Tiffany:

I would say, on a scale of 1-10, I’m at about a 7 with this assignment; it’s work and it pays pretty well and I’m grateful to have it, and the people are great.  But on the other hand, I’ve discovered that it’s very, very repetitive, and not challenging in any real way for me, especially compared with the variety and opportunities for creativity, responsibility, and problem-solving I had at [Stq], which I really loved.  Comparatively, this position does not make use of my strongest skills.  I’ll be honest: as nice as it would be to have the stability of a permanent position, I’m not thrilled at the idea of doing this on anything more than a temporary basis.  

  • I didn’t send it until Friday afternoon, so I didn’t expect a response then.  I’m kind of nervous now, though.  Wondering if I maybe shouldn’t have said anything?  
  • Blah.  
  • On the plus side, when I texted Ozz from work yesterday about taking out the kitchen trash, he actually volunteered to clean up the kitchen and the bathroom.  VOLUNTEERED.  This man who I had to pull kicking and screaming off his computer to help me with housework.  O_O
  • I’m certainly not complaining, though.

6 Notes/ Hide

  1. notsoscairdycat said: Did my long answer disappear??!
  2. jadelyn posted this