3 posts tagged “grumpy”

What are you most grateful for in your life right now?
Submitted by Becca-Pink.

Nuthin.'  I'm in a downward spiral of stress and grumpiness.  Maybe it's be S.A.D. again or maybe it's that modern life is rubbish.

Ask me again in three months when I'm not going to and from work in the dark and can sit in my garden in the evening, watching the swifts catching insects until the stars come out.

..... to switchboard operator.

My team are all out on their Christmas lunch today.  Except me.  Someone had to man the switchboard while they're all out, and I didn't want to go out with them anyway, so it's me, like Captain Hogthrob, alone at the helm.

Oh, the loneliness of command.

Late December is a stupid time to go out for Christmas lunch.  Every eatery is packed, the service is always stretched and if you're having the 'traditional' English Christmas lunch it's gonna be turkey, sprouts, roast and boiled spuds, and a couple of other veg.  The turkey is usually like cardboard and the veggies boiled beyond recognisable taste. 

And while I quite like working with the people I work with, I prefer not to spend time socialising with them.  We'd only whinge about work and I can do that any time.  When I was on the IT team we never went for Christmas lunch in December; it was rarely earlier than May, which is a much better time.  Places are much quieter, the service is better, and they're not trying to push you out of the door so they can shoe-horn the next drunken mob on to your table.

And so I'm having a learning experience instead, because I've never operated this switchboard before.  Being a 'government' office we get all kinds of interesting calls.  So far I've had a chap who wanted to report a health & safety issue because he'd seen some bloke working on his own at a vehicle scrap yard, someone from a housing association wanting info about reserved rights to buy a council house, a rather innebriated woman who wanted to complain about the shocking state of Arriva buses and someone who wanted the phone number of their local Jobcentre.  And several people who could easily have dialed the number of the person they wanted, and knew they wanted, because they call them on a regular basis.  Do our staff not tell their clients their  DDI number?  Maybe they don't want their numbers revealed, which is a shame for them because I've been telling callers the numbers so they can call direct in future and not waste my time putting them through.

Because I just noticed that although my profile said I live in the UK, my Time Zone was Los Angeles, or somewhere else in the US.  And my D.O.B. was 1975!  I wish.  I'm sure I set it correctly (as 1954) when I set this thing up.

In other news, I am at home today because I had stomach pains and a dose of the shits last night and felt like crap this morning.  I had something similar last week, but there was no stomach pain, just the runs and it went within about 18 hours. 

It was pissing down this morning, so staying in bed rather than getting on a steamed up bus to travel to work with a load of coughing and wheezing commuters, even with a mild stomach ache, was preferable.  And it allowed me to wrap my Christmas pressies in peace this afternoon.  I should really be logged in to the office and doing some work on the office reorganisation, but I have absolutely no enthusiasm for it, particularly as it seems to be a pointless exercise to me.  It doesn't help that I've lost two key staff from my team and we're struggling to cover the work, so extra crap like re-writing all the job desrciptions is not at all welcome.

But it's Wednesday, so maybe I'll win the mid-week Lottery and be able to hand in my resignation in the next few days.  Yeah, right.