My Absence

Sorry for the long gap in between post, but it has been a busy couple of weeks. This past week has been very interesting at work.

The Good:

With all the goings on with the impending opening of our new building, things have been pretty busy. And on top of that I have sort of been designated leader of our small team. It is something that just happened unknowingly and I have started to get the attention of the higher ups. I was invited to attend a conference call with our headquarters, which only the supervisors attend.

The Bad:

With all this added attention I feel like I started to receiving some ire from the rest of the crew. The conference call was only meant myself and our 'phone guy', but I mistakenly thought we were all requested to attend. So I have been telling everyone not to forget the meeting. So when the 'phone guy' mentioned that the meeting was only meant for me and him, it wasn't a good feeling. I still wanted everyone to attend so it didn't seem that we were divided. There is someone with more experience than me and I am starting to feel like he is beginning to resent me. He has been flippant to me on several occasions and has some made some comments about being left 'out of the loop'. I don't out of my way to leave him out of things, but he has the type of demeanor that rubs people the wrong way.

And the Ugly:

The person with more experience yelled and cursed at me yesterday. This all started when I pointed out some incorrect information involving some printers. This past Wednesday we were configuring our printers and we came to an agreement on how we were going to set the up. He decided that he wanted to enter this information into the server. This whole process took him about an hours, when it only should have taken 5 minutes. But I said nothing and worked on my tasks for the day. The following day (yesterday) I was testing some security settings on the printers and I noticed that the information he entered in was incorrect. I let him know about it and he got a bit gruff with me, but I did say anything. In a completely unrelated conversation with my other co-worker I thought I figured out how to secure a printer. He spun around in his chair and yelled [paraphasing] "If you are going do the damn thing let me know, and I won't bother doing it!"

I was so mad that my heart started to beat really fast, but I did not explode. I calmly turned and asked why he was being so hostile. I don't ever remember what I said because I was boiling on the inside. I haven't yelled at anyone since 1997 -- seriously. The person, unfortunately, was my older brother. I was being confronted about something I had no part in and I was already stressed because I was participating inthe qualifying round of the Empire State Games the next day -- and the same week I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. I remember screaming so loud that that I hit this wierd vocal range where I was using all strength to yell but my volume low with a high frequency. It was the strangest thing...but I digress.

After I said what I had to say, I went back to work. About 5 minutes later he asked my opinion on a project he was doing. I was still not happy, but I offered my advice which he used. Not sure whether or not he used my advice to offer a truce. Just in the one week, he had a shouting match with 3 of the 6 people in the building. I wonder how long he will last there if he doesn't change his demeanor.

So that was my week at work. How was your week?