Dispatch from the Zone – My Excuse

It’s been an odd couple of weeks for me. Starting with the Thanksgiving holiday, where I grumbled about having to take Friday as personal vacation because my company doesn’t give it as a holiday (as my previous companies have done), all was well until that Sunday night. I’m only telling this now because a lot of you know already and if you don’t it will no doubt be mentioned at some point in the future and I can get all the explanation out of the way now.

In short, I laid the bike down that night and sliced my leg open, resulting in six stitches and a couple of missed days of work. I spent Sunday evening in the ER, hence no post last week. It was a fairly deep lacerating and “heavy bleeding” according to the paperwork I got. I took one quick look at the gaping hole in my leg and that was enough.

I’m not posting icky pictures here of the wound, there’s not much damage to the bike so nothing to see there. It was a low-speed accident, luckily, and no other vehicles involved. I jumped a curb, hit a small tree and went down. I didn’t even realize I was injured until one of the kind people who had stopped to help me saw the blood. I thought it was just mud on my pants (which by the way are still intact). So, long story short, I’ve been hobbling around for the last week, and getting grumpier about it by the day. Another week and the stitches should come out.

At any rate, I made it in to work that Tuesday, and managed to get around well enough. I was supposed to have had my review that Monday, but it was rescheduled to Wednesday. After that I got grumpier. It wasn’t horrible, but I am still steaming over being reprimanded (in the nicest way possible) for not being ‘helpful’ enough to some entitled bitch who ran into the office looking for some conference that she had no information on (no title, room number, who was putting it on – nothing), and felt I should simply have known where it was. Well, there are a lot of conferences and symposiums and lectures that go on there, and sadly I am not an electronic display board that lists them all. So she bitched to someone in my department, who in turn came to my manager to express their displeasure over this. I am told I did not ask enough, or the right, questions to figure out where this self-important nobody needed to be. This wasn’t the only criticism sandwiched in with praise, but it was the biggest one (I was also told I wasn’t displaying enough enthusiasm for the job. I’m an admin assistant, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to express enthusiasm for this). The interesting thing is I never heard a word about any of this until the review the other day.

To sum up, I am more desperate than ever for a new job.  Maybe it’s my paranoid imagination, but it feels a little like they’re building a case.

All that aside, I’m back to polishing the vampire novel with the goal of having it ready to start querying agents in the new year. I need to get on with this. I need to at least say “I tried” even if it never gets published.

Getting back to our weekly card draw, this one ‘jumped’ out as I was shuffling.

The Ace of Pentacles is the Root of the Powers of Earth. Aces are beginnings, and pentacles deal with money, and material concerns. This is good, some new venture kicking off, hopefully a lucrative new project. I have some ideas for a new venture, I hope this is a good omen.

So, that’s where I’ve been and what I’ve been dealing with for the last week. How’s it by you?