The Work Blues

Lately I’ve been feeling despondency towards work. Or to be more exact, the excitement of the job faded away after the first two weeks, which were very frustrating. The previous girl left so I had no training at all, and the business manager who hired me was also new, only a month or so on the job. All the procedures and rules we had to follow were a pain. But rules are rules and I’m used to them by now.

After the initial two weeks, we had Ema come in full time so things now aren’t as bad as they used to be. This blog has always been a place where I can say what I want to but I figured, if I didn’t complain about work here then I wouldn’t have such a negative views. That worked well. Anyway, now that I think about it, I should have written about it since it’s the best way I know how to deal with it.

I’m usually good about work, but this past month, things have been piling up with my school projects so I’ve missed out a couple days at work – which is never a good thing. I got in trouble jsut today about it but I’ve resolved to not miss any more days of work from now on mainly because I don’t want to look for another one that will work with my part time schedule. The people aren’t so bad here and more times than not I get so sit here and do my own thing. It’s the work (when I do have work) that makes me a bit depressed. So I asked one of my bosses if I could be an intern for the feasibility studies we do here. As a consulting company, it’s doing pretty well.

At least this way I can apply what I’ve learned to work and maybe get some good stuff to write on my resume. Most likely I’ll be doing the grunt work and number crunching. As well as putting together the powerpoint slides. It’s better to get something out of work than nothing. This way, I won’t feel like I’ve wasted time.

But why can’t I feel a bit happier about it?

Where am I?

At work this morning, someone called in to ask where my office was located. Mistakenly I assumed he wanted to know the address so I gave it to him but he soon clarified his question. He wanted to know what city we were in, and I told him it was San Francisco. A minute later he called again and asked what state San Francisco was in. Maybe this guy was Canadian or something, because I couldn't detect a foreign accent throughout the conversation with him. I really should have asked if he was or not – because I would have felt better if he was. Maybe that's why he doesn't know where it is, it's not like he watches or reads American news, has ever heard of Nancy Pelosi or anything else other than this place having a large gay community and sourdough bread.

But I wonder, wouldn't people know that San Francisco is in California though? Or maybe it's because I live here that I assume people actually know where it is. After all, it's not like it has a name like California City, in the state of California – that being equivalent to New York City, in the state of New York. But then again, Kansas City isn't in Kansas. So people shouldn't assume, like this guy and in this case I really can't blame him.

It could be that San Francisco is famous for being San Francisco, and nothing else, not the state it's in. California is a big state. It really is, so it could be that people don't know their geography. Oftentimes it's the latter; the media have made enough video segments and articles about it already. Either way, I'm sure the caller wanted to make sure where the heck the city was for some marketing purpose. That's always handy. I bet he knows where Los Angeles is because most people (from the US at least) know that, right?