Corporate America

Today I am having lunch with my valley girl. Tomorrow it will be the West Hollywood guy. I might learn more right there that I have ever learned in my one month alone in my corner.
We are under such surveillance here, we cannot exchange one word without having our nice black guy following up within seconds to make sure nothing negative is said. A way to feel like a Big Brother state, without the need for cameras and monitoring devices. He checks our computers, as mine had been left on all Thanksgiving when I arrived yesterday, which means someone checked out my files. I would prefer cameras because then you can at least forget that they exist and take a bit more freedom. With a human overlooking you at all time, it is more difficult.
Anyway, I will meet with my colleagues and I would expect them to tell me how they feel. They will probably tell me they feel like me and then I will understand that what I have gone through this last month is completely normal and I was not an isolated case. And then it will make me feel better and I will be happy to continue working here for at least four more months. Once my rent ends, I will reconsider my situation.
It is also possible that they are quite happy and have not experienced any of what I have gone through. Especially the West Hollywood guy, he seems to be the perfect employee, always smiling and happy, never in any trouble. I look forward to hearing his story. Might come late though to have an impact on my staying here or not, as I might get my check for the rent this lunch time, and even if I were to wait until tomorrow, we will go to lunch after I got the check.
I am in some sort of dilemma, go and see my boss to ask him for something to do, instead of wasting my time searching the Internet to learn more about Texas and transportation, or wait until his wife arrive and have my meeting with her. It would be sensible, especially that today could be my last day after all.
So I am going to wait, and write, even if it makes me feel quite guilty.
Merde! I'm trying to reach Stephen, but he appears to be on the Internet, he does not answer his mobile phone or read his SMS messages, and he does not appear to be reading his e-mails either. In this day and age, I just cannot reach him!
I have ten minutes before going to lunch with the valley girl. I need to talk to him about my meeting with my boss (his wife was not in today so he invited me in for a chat). So I cannot go to the bank, I could not speak to him! And I am in a terrible mood about it. I'm so annoyed with him! What the fuck is he doing online on the Internet, in the last ten years the guy never even spent two minutes online. It is killing me. The most urgent moment of all, to sort myself out!
There is no more time, in 6 minutes I have to go to lunch. I could not even speak with him if he were to call. I cannot go to the bank, I'll have to wait until tomorrow. And it complicates things so much!
First of all I need to assess if I should continue to write this blog as I have been, meaning for myself and not caring too much about any eventual reader, or if now that I have put it online and received already a few comments about it, I should try to adapt it to make it more interesting, meaning changing the topics as often as possible. I don't think I want to write this for anyone else but me, and if it interests anyone else, then fine. If it bores them, they can go and read another blog, of the exact type they wish to read. As simple as that.
Now that I have that out of the way, there are three things I need to discuss which ultimately brings me to one main question. The question is, should I get out of Los Angeles while I can, or should I stay for another four months and see how it goes? At the risk of destroying my relationship, losing my job in Parliament Square, losing the apartment in London if Stephen comes over, etc.
There are many risks, and neither my conversation with my boss, my colleague the valley girl or my phone call to Stephen helped me establish the answer to my question. On the contrary, everything is telling me: get out of here while you can, before everything crumbles in front of your eyes while you are powerless to save it!
So my boss repeated to me that he was not impressed with my report and the fact that perhaps he cannot trust my judgment. I had to defend myself and tell him that I read that report again today, and I feel I was quite correct and his conclusions were perhaps biased. It was not really the place to try to save my neck, so I did not insist, the damage has been done anyway. The important is that they don't think it was a mistake to hire me, that they hope to eventually see my potential in action, hence, they want me to stay and discover where our working relationship could lead.
So this is encouraging, even though it is not really. I have confirmed that he did not have much time to look at my reports. He feels they will be interesting to read once he has more time or develop something more specific about what they are about. So of course all this hard work was not exactly appreciated. They sacked too many people recently and he now has to do everything himself, especially marketing.
So he apologized for having left me alone in my corner for the last two days, and to be honest I don't really mind. However now I need to come up with the names and contact details of people I will need to contact to gather intelligence. He gave me that to do since he does not have the time to work on this.
He did not speak about my problems with my director, and perhaps I should have. It was impossible since he spoke mainly about that conference we were working on. It was difficult to bring him back to the subject at hand, which was what he expects of me and Stephen in the future.
Well, me being a conference manager with some report writing when it is the right time, is what is still on the table, as I expected it to be. For Stephen though it is not as we thought. He was supposed to be responsible for their new telemarketing department, but of course, only once they decide to hire more people.
So for quite a while, god knows for how long, what he will be doing is basically telesales, cold calling people all day to convince them to attend conferences. I would not do that myself, how can I expect Stephen to do it? However he did not react when I told him, he was too busy complaining about the whole thing in general, reminding me it was a crazy idea and that he would only come for me, and he would sacrifice everything and the cats, and his mother does not speak to him anymore, etc.
This whole business has turn sour indeed. And yet, I have to remain here, I have to continue, I need to find out where it may lead me. I was not exactly encouraged by my valley girl, who told me, after a while, and only after I had compromised myself enough by telling her everything I really thought, she finally told me what her experience is.
It took her forever but she finally thought I was on her side and she told me exactly what I thought myself, about the director, with whom she too had a lot of trouble with at the beginning. With the bosses as well, who make her feel terrible, incompetent and never encourage her whatsoever. She said she was on their black list.
She did not want to tell me about all these people who appear to have left quickly, some of them lying (one said he had to go back to South Africa, but he was spotted in the Valley twice, so he lied to get out of here) and the numerous people who seem to have been sacked. I would like to know why, so I could at least be reassured that it was justified and it won't happen to me by inadvertence. But no one will speak about it, and I know my boss is lying when he tells me why they left.
So I am pretty much at the same point I was. I have confirmation that my reports were half read because of a lack of time, so I know they did not help establish my potential. I know I won't be able to impress them, they will not admit to work well done. I can only achieve what is expected if I work very hard. As long as they don't call me in the office to spit on me and my work, then I can assume I am in the clear. So it is not going to be easy, I never thought it would be, I just did not expect it to be so bad so soon. My honeymoon was over after 5 minutes.
Now, I am not a wimp, despite what someone could think reading my complaints, and I can go through this, I will survive it. I just have to get on with the job, and perhaps it would be a good idea to stop blogging at work. There are still three hours before the end of the day, God knows how I will survive it.
It has been hard again this week, even though it was more emotional and psychological. Hard decisions to make, depending on certain events requiring full analysis on my part, etc. I just want to go home and relax, especially that yesterday I did not, having to buy that bicycle for $80, which was supposed to be new, but I don't think it is and I had to spend another $46 in tools and lock for it, which means I shopped until 9 pm yesterday. I should have perhaps bought a new bicycle, it would have cost me the same and at least it would have worked fine.
The wife of my boss is here this afternoon. I wonder if she stayed at home this morning in order to avoid meeting me today. Is she still embarrassed somehow, avoiding me? In which case I am not out of the woods yet. Something my valley girl said, she hopes to learn to speak to the bosses, as if somehow communications was a bit like a train wreck.
I think we are very similar, we both worry a lot about nothing, we are both highly sensitive and we take everything very personal. As a consequence we almost become dysfunctional people. And she said it, we are the perfect employees, because one word is sufficient to hurt us, bring us into a higher gear and work all night. They just need to say: have you done this yet? And then we work like crazy and then when we come back to them with the results, they are happy indeed that it worked fine, but never say so.
My Spanish friend, the one in telesales, is actually from El Salvador, from the main city San Salvador. She is however not related to Isabella also from that city. Apparently there are many of them out here, and she said that not everyone was as Patriotic as some people from El Salvador.
I don't know what she meant by that, but I suspect that her country is a place where the revolution has been going on for many years, and probably a tyrant has been at the head of that country for years, and America must have supported him because somehow they had some commercial advantages to all that, and what else. It must be the typical story. I do intend to do some research and find out more about it though. I could be completely wrong.
Something was a bit weird this morning in the meeting. Though I know my boss is intelligent, sometimes I wonder. He said to me I had to answer all the questions he put on a sheet, there were about 40 questions altogether. I had to answer all these questions for all the most relevant events. And that was at a time when none of us had established yet a list of all events, and certainly not established which ones were the relevant ones. And of course, only he would have known which events were relevant, since only he had in his mind what he wanted to do with this event.
For example, he wishes to keep it very specific, to one particular project. This is something I learned quite late, after I gave him my report. So today again he accused me of not having answered his questions, and he acts very stunned and surprised that I could go away like that, work two days trying to achieve this research, and come back with not having answered his questions. And he again mentioned that he could not believe that I did not do a thorough research, enough to find all the (irrelevant) events his wife found.
Now, I'm sorry to say, but the guy perhaps is not that intelligent. First he would know I did not have enough time at the time to first do an exhaustive research of the market, two, not enough time to write the report, and three, that my report was actually trying to answer the questions on his guide. Now, why would he decide to be so blind and not see what is evident? I told him today but his answer was that in which case I need to be clearer and to the point, he does not have the time to find my answers in my 4 page report. Fair enough.
At the same time, he wanted me to answer all these questions for all relevant events. In the end he identified ten. What he really was asking was actually more like a report of 100 pages, and he wanted that in two days. This is so unrealistic. I understand now that these are management tricks, however you still need to be logical in what you are asking, and reasonable, otherwise we will just disconnect and learn to not take it personally as my valley girl said and does.
Poor her, actually she was not responsible for one person being sacked, but two. Her two assistants, whom she convinced everyone were incapable of doing anything. At the same time she was told she was incompetent and tells me she is on their black list, especially after this wedding of hers which took forever to prepare and was taking most of her time. The wedding cost so much, if they had decided to forgo it, they could have bought a house instead. And now she regrets not having bought one instead.
I don't think I have mentioned yet the guy responsible for sales. Probably because he is such a nice guy, until I guess he finds out I'm gay. I'm pretty sure it won't sit well with him, he is so much into sports and pushing his kids into football and baseball, etc.
Just saw photos, very nice family. Somehow I feel he could be gay, or is it just that he reminds me so much of my first boyfriend, with his manners and expressions. Quite possible, and yet he is so tactile, especially with the girls around here, he needs to touch them all the time.
He used to drop me home on his way back home at 5 pm, but now I have a bicycle, so it won't happen again. I feel he will eventually invite me to some sport event or ask me to actually take part in sports, but he has not done so yet in the last month. He mentioned that we should go for a bicycle ride, I'm not sure yet if I will accept. He has two nice sons, and perhaps his second wife has daughters, or I don't quite understand who are all these people in the photos he showed me.
And now I feel terribly guilty that I have been writing all day instead of working. Even though it is clear my boss just gave me anything to do until he finishes what he is doing and can again concentrate on our project. He said: take a few days to identify the main persons we need to contact. Something for once that I actually could do in two hours! So I guess the question would be, what I would be doing if I was not writing right now, wondering how long the last hour and forty minutes would actually seem to last, five hours more like it.
I would like to go and buy myself a toasted egg sandwich, but she only sells them in the morning, and I'm not sure why. This is ridiculous, what we eat for breakfast these days is so heavy and diversified, especially in the U.S., that we should no longer make any distinction between what we are supposed to eat for breakfast or for lunch. And she is losing business, because I am not going to buy one of her three layers sandwich which cannot fit into my mouth, with chips on the side which are not barbecue, my favorite.
Merde, I have just sent another e-mail again with a spelling mistake. I am so terrible at this now, I don't read myself again and I used to depend on Word as my editor for the emails I send. However at the moment I am a bit stuck, because I cannot use Word as my editor, my version of Word is too old. I cannot either set the spelling check, and hyperlinks just don't work.
So in essence this whole computer is basically completely out of date and I can't even download anything because I don't have administrator's privilege. As a consequence the whole thing is bugged, because I have applications requesting updates, which will no longer work unless I download these updates, and ultimately my computer is broken and I am powerless to change anything since I am locked out of it.
It is like teasing me. Here is a computer, but don't dream of using it, this is a privilege for the administrator, whoever that is. I don't know who came up with this great idea of creating user accounts and an administrator, but we should shoot the guy. Thank you for locking us all out of our computers and render them completely useless. At this rate, I might consider an Apple, as long as it is impossible to lock us out!
You can tell this is the end of the day, and that I am forcing myself to write just so the last 20 minutes might pass faster. I'm so bored and tired, I need to get out of here. All my bosses are still here, usually the director and the wife leave at 3 pm and my main boss would still be here by the time I leave at 5 pm.
They must be struggling for real with the marketing of that conference. I bet I could help them a lot, however they are not asking for my help and my success rate recently has not been that great, as he reminded me today in our meeting. So I guess I should let them play with the database, and stand far from anything that they are doing. I should soon enough start working like crazy again, you'll see.
Now that I have a bicycle, and that I will be home almost instantly, perhaps I should stop at Taco Time or McDonalds. Especially since I know I will get my check tomorrow and that I will have access to the money instantly. Now I am not so poor, and I will be able to use my pay check to pay for my apartment, instead of using my debit card from England, which was complicating things.
In fact, being unable to reach Stephen at lunch time is the reason why I will now deal with this cashier check for my rent tomorrow instead of today. And I only realized later today that this was great since I will receive my pay check tomorrow anyway and I would have had to go to the bank a second time, and complicate my life to get the money via London today. Well, there must be some destiny involved, it will not even allow me to make a mistake, it will force the events to make sure everything is maximized in my life.
My only mistake was to lose patience over this impossibility to reach Stephen when it was supposed to be like that. Where does this leave free will? God knows, and I don't care, time to go home.
30 November 2005
Shut up! Don't be a wimp, you are here now, for quite a while, just accept it and move on with your life
C'est étrange. It is strange what happened yesterday after my meeting. I thought it was the end of it, my boss told me what he had to say. He basically told me hang in there and I will find you something to do, let's forget the past mistakes. And I kind of went through a second honeymoon which lasted since yesterday and will probably finish today.
They paid me for the Thanksgiving holiday, when I should not have for the first month, and now my boss smiles to me again and she talked to me about paying her to get her car, some sort of huge SUV Lincoln, that my ex-boyfriend in Ottawa told me on the phone yesterday to forget about it.
And the woman in HR is nice again. I can usually tell what the weather is by how her good morning sounds like. If she smiles, then the bosses like me, and if she barely says hi, I know something is wrong. And she has been dark lately, but since yesterday 3 pm, she is nice again. So it is nice to be in their good grace again, even though I have not done anything to deserve this.
It is more that perhaps they realized yesterday that I was ready to go back to London and that, until I had paid for my apartment, for me it was relatively risk free to leave now. I must have frightened them, it must have looked like a threat, which was not my intention. I only wanted to offer them the chance to correct their mistake if they had thought for one second that it was one.
I wonder now if requesting this meeting was necessary or just a waste of time, and god knows the consequences of frightening them like that. I think they thought I was so committed already that their aggressive management style would work fine on me. I'm stuck here after all from their point of view.
I think they suddenly realized that I could leave and go back to London at any time, even, I was kind of considering it right now. It was a wake up call, and they moved from putting pressure on me to work harder, to being nice again and wanting to help me get a car without having to go through a credit check and all that stuff. They will probably feel safe again once I have paid for my studio apartment, but once again they should realize that I don't mind losing $2,000, and that if it becomes necessary to move back to London, I will at any time.
I am also a bit worried about paying a certain amount of money every month just for a car, when I could spend $2,000 right now for an old one and not have to worry about it except perhaps getting it fixed once it breaks down, which will be soon I suppose. You get what you pay for and I should have learnt my lesson with the bicycle, I should have bought a new one. Well, my salesman here at work told me that at $80, I could not go wrong. So perhaps it was worth it.
I kind of again feel uncomfortable at work, I'm not sure why. This feeling that I don't have something clear to do. Well, I should be identifying the right people to call, but I have trouble doing that, it is difficult for me to start. I'm just afraid that suddenly something will happen, I don't know. It is weird.
I hope I will get into gear and forget to worry about everything. It would be nice for a change. It is all a state of mind. And this morning when I cycled here, suddenly that question of if I really wanted to live here came back to me, if it was a mistake and all, and I told myself quite firmly: shut up, don't be a wimp, you are here now, for quite a while, just accept it and move on with your life. And that second voice at the back of my mind was so powerful, that I think I will listen to it right now and get back to work.
I'm afraid that my ingenious plan to hide what I am writing might not be adequate. I just re-opened the Excel sheet and it opened right where I was writing, Column DZ, Row 503. Not only that, if the Black guys knows about this, from the beginning, then I am definitely giving away everything I am writing. And I have had very vague hints that it may be so.
I am also worried that when I delete certain files from my history, it might be going into the Recycle Bin. And I don't have access to the Recycle Bin, so I cannot delete them for real. However I'm sure the Administrator has access to that bin and can quickly see what are these files that I am deleting, which are obviously the files I don't want them to have access to. At the same time, it is possible that I am really attracting attention to them by deleting them.
I am becoming obsessed with these Big Brothers measures (I used to write in French in my files, and it was less worrying), and I now really hate Microsoft for having made it so easy to spy on us like that. I am going to do a huge research on the Internet, I want to know everything there is to know about how employers can spy on their employees and how I can go around it. So for now I will also hide the columns. He might not think of that one and not realize that some columns have disappeared.
No matter how much you are trying to plan your day, as soon as it depends on other people, it can all change. I almost walked here this morning instead of taking my bicycle, thinking I would be dropped home by one of my colleagues after seeing the preview film with Jodie Foster tonight. She is sick, so now I'm not so sure if I want to go alone. I was supposed to have lunch with the West Hollywood guy, but I just had to mention having to go to the bank and he reported everything to tomorrow. I wonder if he too will have a lot to say about management, like my valley girl. Especially that he is right under the director, and also has meeting with the boss.