¿Qué?

I have to say that my new job is a welcome change in some respects and a baptism by fire in other respects. I started last Friday, and had a half day so that I could meet the people I'll be working with. That was actually a special request on their part because someone was going on hols starting Saturday. It was pretty much a waste of time. Half the company was already on holidays, and I would have been better off starting on Monday after everyone, except that one person, had come back.

My boss, who was described to me by the recruiter as a dragon lady, is nothing of the sort. I was a little disappointed (because I like dragon ladies so so much!), but she still expects me to work my butt off. She has a tendency to digress, so we spent pretty much all of Friday afternoon talking in her office.

Monday, I met the person I am replacing. She couldn't handle more than two months of the work, so she quit. She spent half of Monday not explaining things to me because she never learned how to do them herself. Tuesday I was all on my own except that I got to spend a little time with my supervisor. Probably too much time by the way he acted. He only works 4 days a week, so I'm pretty much on my own on Fridays. That's bitten me in the ass once already. My supervisor has only been on the job for 3 months, so he's not quite crisp yet but he has a prior history with the boss. They used to work together at another company. My supervisor believes that he has a very strong moral compass, which has forced him to two jobs before ending up with the old boss again. That may have led him to quit one the jobs, but it sounds to me that he quit the second job on account of laziness. With a really thick Hong Kong Cantonese accent, he explained to me that he quit his last job because he didn't want to serve as a payroll back up. He basically told his boss to find someone else. Nice try! He's so hard to understand that we basically take twice as long to get anything done than if I did everything myself.

Wednesday, my boss thought it would be funny to speak to me privately in her office. I fully expected to get the axe, because this was so important that this couldn't be discussed at my cubicle, directly opposite the coffee machine and right next to the photocopier. She wanted to discuss my job scrip. She asked me if I would be willing to do switchboard relief for no rise in pay. The cute little smile on her face was the only thing preventing me from jumping across her desk and ripping out her pixie cut one hair at a time. Why would you take time out of your very important day to arrange a special meeting with the temp just so you can ask him to answer a few phone calls? Aiyah!

Thursday was the day that I caught up on some old billing. I think I did pretty well, except that rather than look over the entire oeuvre my supervisor would only find the first mistake and bring it back to me to do over. See, the English language is a pain in his ass. He'd really rather someone else did the reading for him. I am in fact the only native English speaker in the Finance Department. Which came back quite oddly the next day to bite me in the ass. What's new? But I still haven't finished with Thursday. The point is that rather than correct all the problems at once, I had to do the invoice over like eight times. At the end of the day I figured I'd spend a little overtime to catch up on some of the stuff that had just come across my desk. My boss came by to use the photo copier and said, "You still here? You got to go home. You really got to go!" Some slave driver. Until the HR manager gets back, they can't sign me to a contract so they've got me on an hourly rate. She wants to save a few bucks and keep the overtime until after I sign the contract. We understand each other on that point, and she's very open about the fact that she'll work me like a dog after Labour Day.

Onto Friday. I arrived that morning to a nice little note on my desk from my manager saying that she wanted to speak to me about the invoices I had prepared the day before. Later on, when she had time we talked about the things she didn't like. She mentioned that the invoices are supposed to be very specific about what we are billing, and I knew that. In fact, that's exactly how I had prepared the invoices the first time, but my supervisor had told me specifically NOT to prepare this batch of invoices in that manner. I explained to her what had happened the day before, and then she asked me if I had received an e-mail from my supervisor. I did receive an e-mail about pay stubs from my supervisor. She asked me to read it again. Nothing in the header about revised invoices. Way way down deep somewhere near the bottom of the e-mail was a little note about the invoices. Either my supervisor is a complete idiot, or he did that on purpose. I'm new, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. That means he's a complete idiot. We'll have something to talk about tomorrow. Then my manager talked about some other bullshit that quite frankly should be the project manager's problem, but apparently I have to check that shit too.

I set about correcting the invoices, when my boss came to be about ten minutes later in a panic. Why she came to me I'll never know. As I said, there are quite a few different languages spoken in my department. At any given point on Friday there were two native Spanish speakers, plus a guy who had spent several years in Latin America and spoke Spanish pretty well. She could have gone to them, and they had even offered to help, but instead she requested my assistance with a conference call. I had no background on the situation, and my boss clearly had no idea what the difference between translating and interpreting is, nor an understanding of what was required to handle an interpretation by conference call. We got through it, and it was brutal, but then she decided to rip me a new one. Maybe she smelled blood, because she only did so after someone else tried to get their pound of flesh. I really didn't appreciate the way she acted. After we left the boardroom, she apologized for putting me on the spot like that and admitted that the guy who tried to make me cry had no business doing that. The rest of the day went pretty well, but I didn't get anything done.