Dammit, dammit, dammmmmmmmmit.

I’m doomed to Big Payroll forever, aren’t I?

So, I had a first interview for the out of the blue job I got the call about two weeks ago…

And a second interview yesterday.

And now I’m sort of patiently waiting for a call or an email or a carrier pigeon or a fax or a smoke signal telling me “yay” or “nay”.

BAH!

I know that I’m one of three candidates being considered, so I guess I have a 33% chance.

It’s not a totally perfect situation…for example, one of the company’s core values is one that I don’t share (hint: it’s the reason I have a category here called “Snaked Again, Naturally”). But it’s an environment that’s at least 50% less stress, theoretically better money and the location is literally a quarter mile from where I work now…

(which will be super awkward in the line at the nearby Starbucks)

In other news, I found out – through sheer nosiness – that one of my teammates has given her notice. Which means that Big Payroll Co may work harder to keep me, but it also means that after my coworker leaves, it’ll be me, Broomhilda, Boss Belinda, Token Dude and The New Girl. (And two other New People To Be Named Later).

(Oh, and Broomhilda interviewed for a job working closely with Pattie, our former team lead).

This means that I really, really want this job. It’s not just the anxiety talking when I say that my team in a month will be radically different from how it is now, and not for the better. I just can’t do it.

Yay!

(I’m filing this in “Mahnewjobiscoolis”. Yes, Mahnewjobiscoolis and I believe that even now, but after a full year of this…and months of being under the thumb of Boss Belinda…I don’t want it anymore).

So, all of this talk about Congress continuing to allow the Social Security reduction thing has made me worried. Not because I care if my own paycheck is +/- 2.0% but because they’re talking about continuing this credit for two months.

Two months. Not an entire quarter??? This is going to be SUCH a freaking pain in the ass later in 2012 when all of our new clients are a mess because when we load the previous quarters wages, we generally load it all by quarter (because otherwise it’s a huge PITA) and how the hell do we load a quarter of wages when 2 months of Social Security is 4.2% and the rest is 6.2%?

Congress, stretch it out just a smidge and continue it through March. Or stop it on 12/31/11. Either way. I don’t care. Just please, PLEASE do this one tiny thing to make my life a teeny bit easier.

(American Payroll Association, I think it’s time for your lobbyists to get the eff on this!)

Thursday, I drove Gene to a doctor’s appointment and guess what I did while he was there? I drove to work (which was literally across the street from his doctor’s office) so I could cobble together a client’s file because I forgot to tell anyone about it. Actually, that’s a big lie. I remembered, I just didn’t feel like explaining to anyone why we do this; the answer is

:: shrug :: “I dunno”

And my boss Belinda does not like that answer. If it were up to her we would do no extra stuff for clients at all. Admittedly the file is pretty easy to put together (although I suspect it would take Broomhilda an hour and 47 phone calls to me to figure it out) so really the client  should do it her own darn self but… well, the client more or less screamed for this file earlier this year and so I do it for her every week.

(Freaking weekly payrolls).

The good news about this week is that I will be so crazy busy that hopefully I won’t have time to complain, even to myself. Or maybe I’ll show up tomorrow and get fired for not telling my team about the client with the file, or the necessity of running a report every day to tell us who we need to nag about their payroll. Hmm. Yeah, I should probably have done that. I also think I didn’t tell anyone about running empty payrolls when clients don’t need a preexisting check date.

Oh boy! Now instead of dreading returning to work I’m also super anxious about it. YAY. (Speaking of anxious, my search for a therapist hasn’t gone anywhere, so good luck to me with finding a doctor who’s nearby, accepts my insurance, has evening hours and can deal with my effed up schedule for the next 120 or more days).

(Then again, if I get fired then I will be less anxious and my schedule will open up tremendously).

2) And yes, I still miss Target. Mostly for the frozen Cokes.

3) I sped-read all three Hunger Games books in about a week and a half. I had barely finished the first one (which I borrowed from the library) before I went ahead and ordered the second and third books for my Kindle (or, my Kindle app on my phone and on White Dog). So good. The first movie comes out the day after my birthday in March so I think there’s a pretty good chance I am going to force a certain husband of mine to attend a midnight showing (OK, maybe not).

4) And yes, if you haven’t read them, you should. For no other reason than to get the taste of the Twilight saga out of your mouth. (Ptooey).

5) So, remember what I wrote last night about ‘working off the clock to make myself feel some peace’? Yeah. So I did that tonight, worked until 6:45 (only the last 45 minutes were off the clock of course) and felt amazing until I got home and sat down and it all crept in. I had four tasks to complete. Finished one of them (they got to go first because the client called and read me the mfing riot act), got about 90% done on another (just have to pull the trigger once I verify that the client understands that they will have to pay ~$200 for us to amend a tax return), and glanced a little at the third. The fourth, arguably the biggest, remains untouched. Boss returns from her trip on Monday so maybe I’ll luck out and manage to get it all done tomorrow.

6) Fumbling towards getting back into therapy. My old therapist is rather booked up so I have left a message with another doctor, whose specialty is Life After Infertility. What’s making me crazy isn’t really the infertility thing, but it’s always there anyway. What I really want from therapy is for someone to say “Hmm, yes, your work situation is awful. Quit immediately and get a job folding tshirts at Kohls.” Doctor’s orders, right?

7) It’s not that I’m eager to work for minimum wage, but spending my work day folding tshirts and organizing stock at Kohl’s sounds so relaxing. No one would ask me how questions, no constant phone calls, emails, etc. I could probably pretend to be mute. I would never wake up at 5:30 in the morning for weeks on end worrying, “Did I remember to put the blue shirts next to the brown pants?” Is it wrong that my idea of a happy place is envisioning an entirely tidy dressing room at a department store? What if I point out how much I hate to clean at home?

My team lead said something fairly rude today to Broomhilda and my first thought was “Aww, crap, I’m going to be alone with Broom for an hour or so later today and all she’s going to want to do is bitch about that.” I was right. I had an hour off the clock to try and get Huge Things Done and instead I had to help her out with her crises and listen to her complain about what the team lead said. I could have finished another item off my to-do list of To-Doom if it hadn’t been for that. Ugh!

9) For the record, I think team lead was about 30% in the right and 70% in the wrong. Tomorrow’s his last day and I’m not sure why he picked today to be the day to get all leader-y and why he picked that particular topic to be the Hill to Die On. As of tomorrow by about 5:30 our team will be down another member (down to 5 from 6, originally 8, members), and with it goes about 30% of the brain power. Look at it this way: Not counting Boss Belinda, I’ll be the most senior member of our team.

(No, it’s OK if you don’t remember)

I would like to go back in time to LaineyD (September 2009 edition) and slap her. “Oh wahhh, yesterday was pay day, WAHHHHH”. Every day is (somebody’s) pay day now and I would be so frakking grateful for it to EVER be “all downhill from there!”. For fuck’s sake. Every day at work is like that one spot on the rollercoaster where, after going at a 90 degree angle for seemingly 74,000 feet you stop and just go across for a moment and you’re all “Ahh, relief!” but then it turns out now you have to go 74,000 feet back down instead and midway through THAT the Loch Ness Monster or a T-Rex leans over and swallows you whole. So you never get to actually get that feeling of “Whoo, caught up!” for more than an hour at a time.

(It’s also a lot like studying your ass off for a stupid test and not getting any extra pay for it).

(Grr).

And now…ummm… I kinda don’t want to do payroll anymore. (Have I ever talked about how much I dislike that phrase, ‘do payroll’? It just sounds so ignorant, like there aren’t another 10,000 verbs that might be more descriptive…such as “got fucked by payroll”).

I actually was supposed to have a job interview yesterday but I had to cancel. (A teammate was to have the afternoon off for a doctors appointment, so that trumped my interview with a major corporation in their HR department). That sucked. It would have paid about 10% more than I make now, but the drive would have been easily 45 minutes to an hour each way. And we probably would have had to buy a second car, so goodbye 10% more than my current job.

Maybe I’ll feel better after my vacation, which is coming up in about a month. Still don’t have the official plans together but we’re easing towards them now.

So, that’s all that’s new here. I am fine, hope you are too.

Yesterday I took my exam for the Super Hard Payroll Certification. I was given 4 hours to take the exam and about midway through, I thought, “Well, this isn’t going well…”. I was able to mark any question I wanted as “Review Later” and I marked at least a quarter of the questions. After I’d gone through all the questions once I went through the review questions and checked my math and thought about the answers I’d given to the non-calculation questions. There were at least a few that I had no clue on.

At the end, I thought to myself, “It’s OK if I failed and it’s great if I passed, it’s OK if I failed and it’s great if I passed.” I truly had no idea how I’d done. After you click on “finished test” (or whatever it’s called), they make you answer some demographic questions about methods you used to study. Strangely, “Signed up for study group that was cancelled, jerks! Had to study using help from coworkers and ghetto flashcards made from penguin notepaper*” was NOT an option.

Afterwards, my result came up on the screen. “Test result: Pass”. And I looked at it and thought, Hmm, now which one is “Pass” again? Then it clicked that the next word was “Congratulations…” and that they would probably not congratulate me for failing this freaking thing.

So, that’s the story of how I passed the exam using 3 markers, 8 pages of dry erase notebook, and my trusty $10 Staples calculator BUT had to use context clues to figure out that I had passed.

Ah.

* I couldn’t find any note cards at home the night I decided I wanted to make flashcards, but I did find a pad of penguin shaped note paper, so I had to improvise.

Long Answer: Here is why I haven’t blogged lately. It’s all just a loooong string of worry.

• Worried about the stupid test (a week and a half to go!), passing it, failing it.
• Worried about work (a lifetime to go!), getting it all done in 40 hours per week. Big boss had a meeting where one of his talking points was “(company) has a negligible amount of overtime!” and I wanted to jump up out of my chair and a) throttle him or b) say “That’s because you BANNED it, you asshat. It’s easy to crow about the lack of something when YOU BAN it! All that means is that some of us are working off the clock!”
• Funny story: Left Tuesday @ 2:50 PM (two hours early and I hadn’t had a lunch that day) and returned Wednesday to find a fat (not phat) stack of shit to do, assigned to me by the recently returned Belinda. OMFG, I’m pretty sure I was being punished for daring to leave early. I’m still working on that stack, BTW, and it’s going to fire off a giant shitstorm on Monday and OH GOD WHY WASN’T I SMART ENOUGH TO GET A REAL JOB???
• WHY?
• Work to-do list has 14 items to do. I’m currently on item #5, I believe. I miss the good old days where my to-do list was “1) Make To-Do list, 2) Read Yahoo! for an hour”. Gene and I watched the season premiere of The Office, and at the scene where Pam’s watching something weepy on YouTube, I said, “Oh, for nothing better to do than watch YouTube at work!”
• I need 4 hours at the office to finish the stack from Belinda, start up two new clients, take an online class in whatever (it was due on 9/2 so I am pretty behind!)*, and complete an exercise from another class that was due today at 7. I’m so embarrassed, but I had to ask for an extension for the exercise as I was too busy doing things that would actually make some money for My Fearless Employer. When the email from our trainer came in to approve the extension I almost cried.
• Ooh, right, been on the verge of tears @ office since Wednesday.
• Belinda said I should take half of today and barricade myself and study for the stupid test. Ha ha. Instead, I spent a little over an hour (half of it off the books) going over one troublesome test related thing w/ a coworker. Time well spent? Who. the. fuck. knows.
• (Seriously, if I’d spent 4 hours today studying, the crap from Belinda from Wednesday would be even further behind and I’d get yelled at for that. The stack is actually 8 smaller tasks, each of which takes at least 2 hours to complete so really, my wish for 4 hours to get all of that done is foolhardy at best. Can I have 8 hours instead?).
• And on the home front…
• Furnace is effed up so we need to replace it to avoid death by asphyxiation (carbon monoxide for the loss!)…
• Which will probably cancel Las Vegas, which is OK, since I’ve only had my motherfucking hopes pinned on it since APRIL. (Not that I planned to strike it rich there, just that no one at Mandalay was going to ask “Hey, Elaine, could you reset my password/answer my question/input pay data for the equivalent of 480 people?”)…
• And tomorrow I get to take Scooby to the vet because his coat (skin?) is looking really awful (and not in a “My dog’s coat is not SHINY” way, more of a “Why is my dog spotted?” way).