Work has been… busy, for lack of a better term. There’s a lot of people on holidays this week, including someone who handles a lot of the work that’s been put onto my boss this week – which in turn puts more work and responsibilities onto me. I’ve somehow ended up taking out a task that belongs to someone else (who is not on vacation this week), I’m not sure why. Oh, even better, I got handle a huge pile of paperwork this morning and got to sort it all (fun stuff). None of it was in order, and oh, could I get it done in an hour? (I finished sorting the pile in ~40 minutes, but that’s not the point.)

Stress from other people that goes to my boss ultimately goes to me. Because I am essentially the only office-working underling that he’s got. I say that in a positive manner, of course – I don’t mind the underling title. He realized today how many more days I have left at work (11 more work days, my last day is on September 3rd and then I have a long weekend and then it’s back to school) and he just looked incredibly shocked, with wide eyes (despite the fact that I know he put it into his company cellphone and onto his computer’s calendar) and went “Really? Already? You know, I could get them to hire you on full time!”.

[Which is a really generous offer, but I do have school in September (1.5 years left for my first BSc!) and I have some classes that I’m really excited about. Plus I’ll be moving back onto weekday volunteering (so I get to see my usual volunteering supervisors again) and overall, I am looking forward to going back to school. But it’s all very cyclical for me, I know come April, when I’m busily studying for finals, I’ll be looking forward to going back to work and I’ll even miss people from work.]

He has no idea what he’s going to do once I go back to school. Which I find to be a compliment. But I also know that they’ll find a way to muddle through things without me… Even though if they were to look at my coding system for any of the notes that I’ve done, no one is going to be able to understand it because I use very non-standardized shorthand for everything. I mean, it makes sense to me, but that’s because I wrote everything. I also colour-code things with highlighters and it doesn’t mean the same thing for every single project that I do so… Yeah… Looking back now, I could have done it a bit differently…

I’m just glad that people who were on vacation this week should be back the upcoming Monday – which hopefully means a little bit less stress being passed from people to my boss and then down to me. Hopefully. I’m tired of my inbox being ridiculously full before I even get to work (I had 20 unread emails before I arrived to work, all from today).

What’s been a source of stress in your life this week?

4 Responses

  1. New medication has been my source of stress.

    It’s certainly a great compliment from your boss, but he should know by now that about this time every year, he has to say bye-bye until the summer. I’m glad you’ve got some good classes, or ones youre excited about anyway.

    1. It’s actually the first summer that this boss has been my boss 🙂 Aside from my first year with the company, the other 3 years were with another person being my boss (who is still at the company, and was the one who hired me, I was just shuffled out of that department and into another). I am quite excited about most of my classes this upcoming term (I’m taking: ecology, entomology, introductory oceanography, structure and reproduction of fungi and animal mechanics & locomotion. I’m mostly looking forward to my oceanography, entomology and fungi classes 🙂

  2. I don’t know why it makes me grin that you’re needed that much. 😛 At work, I feel that it gets really stressful with more and more piles of work to mark (though that also depends on the kids, some of them do stacks each day, or do stacks and don’t come in for a few weeks, then return with a huge pile). I have to keep up to speed too, otherwise I won’t be seen as “efficient”. Though I have been working in the same place for over two years, I’m used to it now. My boss has given me compliments and I know she freaked out about a year ago when I said I was taking some time off to study – I was needed. xD

    I usually only get excited about school when it’s the holidays, because I get pretty bored of doing whatever I do in the break.

    1. I was *really* stressed out in… 2008, I think – especially for my last few weeks of work because I was then juggling ~13 projects all at *once*, all by myself.

      It’s a lot nicer this year, mostly because I fully set aside projects now. As it is right now, I fully feel that my boss gets a lot more responsibilities than should be asked of one person, which is why some of it does get given to me to do – which I don’t mind, as it is the reason I’m employed. 😉

      My boss gets jokingly annoyed with my efficiency, because sometimes he can’t come up with enough stuff for me to do to keep me occupied!

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