“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
― Leonard Bernstein

Three weeks from today will be my first day in nearly five years that I don’t have a full time job. Getting there is equal parts exhausting and frustrating, but strangely not in the least terrifying. I thought I would feel more panic or at least fright about the future, but there’s none of that.

The legal team at J.’s future employment has started the ball rolling for our visas.

We have short term housing worked out.

J. has a current job.

I’m getting braver by the day about diving back into freelancing.

All good things! No, the trouble is not the future, it’s (as it often is) the present. Getting from here to there. The proverbial now.

My trainee is still struggling mightily and there is so much out of my control when it comes to her training. I can’t force people to hold certifications to suit her time frame, I can’t even always get her to commit to the training time I want. I had to arm wrestle with administration to get what I have now, and the whole experience has been an lesson in a lot of energy expended for very little thanks. I may have to post about that next.

Training itself is challenging, and not just because my trainee has very poor retention! She constantly makes little mistakes and errors – from typos to major data storage snafus – that she does not catch herself. I fear even running to the vending machines now because I’ve come back to find her giving a patron majorly incorrect information, and once stopped her from disseminating highly confidential paperwork. She requires constant supervision. Lest you think I’m being too hard on her, these are things she should already have experience with as a dispatcher, it’s not new aspects to her job at all. I can see why they are trying to find her a new position, but I’m surprised they think giving her mine is a way to minimize damage.

It is the end of my semester and my supervisor is truly swamped with trying to get her assignments completed, and so she is not as available for me to address concerns with her. It’s not her fault, but the business culture of my office is (unfortunately) rather dog eat dog and I honestly worry about being blamed for my trainee’s lack of knowledge once I’m gone and no longer able to respond to such criticism. That sort of thing has happened to others in the past and I’m anxious to avoid being another casualty of it.

My new 6:30am drop off time is seriously hurting. I’m in a perpetual state of nearly-but-not-quite sick and due to the way schedules fall out we often don’t get home until after 6 or 7pm at night. At which time we need to cook, clean, and run any number of other errands. Last night I didn’t get dinner on the stove until nearly 9pm – the hour I wanted to be in bed. Speaking of dinner, a diet of pizza and cereal because we have not been able to make it to a grocery store during normal business hours isn’t helping. Dinner was a heavy duty vegetable minestrone to combat fears of scurvy!

Three weeks from today is going to be a good morning! The next 20 days are going to be stressful in the extreme. Perk me up, kittens, bring me your offerings of humorous tidbits, words of wisdom, or even commiseration as I do battle with elusive retailers for the MP and rewrite another section of my manual for my trainee!

“Monday is a lame way to spend 1/7 of your life.”
– Author Unknown

Weekend was a blur of family photos, a bit of local activism, and many dinners. For the first time in memory, Sunday dinner at my godparents spread out over three tables (plus one for the kids)! All wonderful but not exactly relaxing. Hence when I stumbled through the office doors this morning at that hated time 6:30am, I didn’t even try to force wakefullness; I just set another alarm and fell haphazardly onto the loan sofa in the department. I awoke an hour later covered in some sort of sofa-fuzz that needed a lint roller to resolve, but refreshed and ready to start the day.

Until our housing management company called and said our previous managers did not properly transfer our deposit so they have no record of our prepayment of this month’s rent. Currently, we’re tracking down four year old bank account information to prove ourselves and liking our former managers less and less by the minute (although to be fair we like the new ones quite a bit. We just wish they’d been our managers to start with as I imagine if they had been we would not currently be having these issues). I spent lunch wheedling information out of some people who did not want to give it to me and chasing information up phone trees like a metaphoric cat. And my trainee forgot every single thing I taught her on Thursday – plus she’s taking two days off next week which is two days of training she won’t get and desperately needs, since I only have 16 days left.

Mondays. I do not recommend them. Pizza for (a late) dinner, I think. Onward.

I’ve been watching a parable in motion the last little while, minions, and the results of pondering on it have been varied.

I’m training my replacement at work.  She is a very kind, good natured woman who loves her dogs and is a bit too generous to unappreciative family members.  But she is getting old and is increasingly unable to do the job she has now, and the department (in an effort to care for its people) wants to shift her somewhere else without letting her go.  It’s a very noble idea and I admire the sentiment behind it, but the application of it has been really frustrating to adapt to.  Because, though she is a lovely woman, she lacks some basic work skills that people take for granted these days.  I thought I would have to train her on responding to media requests, it turns out I’m teaching her how to cut and paste in electronic documents.

It’s uphill work and sometimes I get frustrated with her lack of focus and memory retention (she is older and not in excellent health), but working with her has been an insight into how I must look coming out of survivalist mode and into a new professional landscape.  Here’s the problem I (and a few other friends I’ve talked to about this) am facing.  I’m ambitious, I want to work hard, and I want to learn new skills.  But I’m mediocre.

I’m not talking about personality or aptitude (although that may be a conversation to be had when my ego is less fragile), I mean that I am indistinguishable in many ways from a lot of other workers.

I work at a university, and every year the incoming class of freshman – though admittedly growing, in my opinion, more loutish every year – have skills that I don’t have.  For the purposes of creating and marketing content, there are more ways now than there were when I graduated less than a handful of years ago.  These kids understand them almost intuitively because they make up the world they move and operate in.  I was born before the internet, the nephews and nieces we visited this evening have known how to operate smartphones since the could scoot haphazardly across the floor.  Frankly that same dubious personality and aptitude might be my best selling points currently, because looking over the skills and resumes of friends (to say nothing of these freshmen)…I have got catching up to do!

When I say I’ve been in survivalist mode, I mean it.  An entry level job where I have been able to gain some work skills, but precious few for the industry I want to work in, and even fewer local opportunities to pursue them elsewhere.  There was no other work to be had when I graduated, and within two months of my graduation work got even harder to find.  I was lucky I had the ability to put food in my mouth, so I hunkered down and focused on surviving – I’m only in retrospect realizing how stressed and scary it’s been, just surviving.  I see how people get stuck doing it.  I’ve always believed that to lever yourself up out of anything, poverty, ignorance, or bad circumstance, required a foothold of some kind, something to push yourself off of.  I believe that now more than ever because I’ve been living without a foothold for a long time (with a good education even) and it’s rough.  It’s limiting.  It doesn’t allow you to pay enough attention to peripheral developments that can help you.

That’s what happened to my trainee.  She learned how to do one thing and one thing only.  In the meantime things developed (like email and word processors) and she was so busy surviving on her one skill that now she can no longer do it, the road to learning to do something else is a hundred times more challenging for everyone involved.

Moral of the story: never quit adapting, minions.  Mediocrity is optional.

To that end I’m reaching out to friends and acquaintances I admire who can help point me in the direction to gain skills I lack.  I’m using every interaction I have for the MP to try and learn something useful and use it to be more effective.  I am trying to remember how to be creative and more proactive after a few years of monotony and prescription.  I’m trying (and gah, the sentimentality of this hurts physically to type) to be more optimistic and brave than I’ve needed to be for a long time.  It feels a bit scary and uncomfortable, to be honest, like stretching muscles and parts that have atrophied when I wasn’t looking.  I’m not special at all, and that’s okay.  It just needs to be remedied.

Alright, that’s it!  Everyone out of the confessional!  Er, unless you have some wise words or musings to add in which case let’s just quietly snag those wafers and wine to munch on and slip back in to chat.