Grumpy
I was feeling very depressed yesterday, so I decided to go to Malvern. The real reasons for feeling depressed were manifold, but the catalyst for deciding to do something so random was the fact that I couldn’t get to Leicester to have lunch with my boyfriend. Three months on, Cross Country trains persist in running rail replacement buses every weekend and are stubbornly ignoring my letter of complaint. Since my boyfriend had to be at work by quarter past two, and the journey from my house to Leicester essentially takes the best part of three hours when factoring in a bus via Coleshill, I would have to have got up at seven to have arrived at eleven and have three hours with him. Incredibly nice as my boyfriend is, it didn’t seem worth it. In fact, after the exhausting week I’ve had, I couldn’t have faced getting up that early for anyone 
This past week has been totally horrible. I’ve been auditing a company which manufactures pieces of tubing for the aerospace industry in the small town of Swadlincote in Derbyshire. To get from Birmingham to Swadlincote is not an easy feat on public transport. First I have to get a bus from my house into the city centre, then a train to Burton on Trent, the nearest rail station. From there, route planners suggest a 15 minute walk across Burton to catch the X2 in the direction of Leicester. I have caught this bus before, whilst working in Ashby de la Zouch last year, and it was perfectly fine, but unfortunately it doesn’t start running until twenty past eight which was too late for my purposes this week. I therefore had to coerce someone else into coming out of their way to pick me up from the station, or on the mornings where this wasn’t practical, take a taxi at the cost of ten quid.
Now this is a difficult journey but not an impossible one, and I would not be complaining about it so much at all were it not for the fact that the client started work at 8am. In fact, the accountant told us, she was often there at six or seven, and we were welcome to arrive at that time also. I pointed out that the whole audit team lived a rather long way away and therefore there was a limit to how early we could be there, but ultimately it is written into our contracts that we have to work client hours, so we would have gotten into trouble had we not made efforts to be there for eight. Unfortunately this involved me getting up at half five every day
The audit itself was a bit of a nightmare. I was in charge, and assisting me I had a first year recruit to the firm and a qualified guy who had only joined the firm two weeks previously and didn’t know how to use our computer software. He was technically above me in the pecking order, and so being in charge of him was a little embarrassing. Thankfully he was a nice guy who didn’t get uppity about it. Nevertheless, matters were complicated by the fact that I wasn’t there on Thursday because I had to attend the aforementioned careers fair, he wasn’t there Wednesday morning because he had an office induction, and the junior was taken off me by the manager on Tuesday because there was a greater need for him elsewhere. When the manager came out to review the file on Thursday, I obviously wasn’t there and my work was half finished, so I spent an anxious day waiting for an enraged phone call. When he did call he was actually fairly reasonable about things and by dint of a fair bit of unclaimable overtime, I managed to get everything just about finished in the end. But it was still an unpleasant draining sort of week and yesterday morning I would quite happily just have curled up and died.
This week is going to be horrible too, because I am going to be incarcerated in our training centre at the Manor. I have to leave this afternoon and spend tonight there which is rubbish, and the thought of a whole week cooped up there with no potential for escape is already making me feel frustrated and claustrophobic. Added to which, other people have told me that this course is pointless and excruciating, and involves us doing a presentation, then having our speaking style and body language pulled apart by the trainers in front of everyone. For someone with as little self confidence as me, that isn’t a prospect to be relished.
In the evenings I will have the joy of writing my annual appraisal. It needs to be written in such a way so as to preempt and defend myself against the criticism my line manager is going to put in his half of it. I can’t be bothered to go into this all now but I’m pretty much sick to death of working so hard and getting absolutely no recognition. I can’t try any harder or put in any more hours than I am. I was upset on Thursday because I finally got back a job appraisal for an audit I did in January. To put this into context, I spent four weeks on this client this year. That is to say, four weeks staying in the desolate hellhole which is Wantage. I had to get up horribly early every Monday and I got back horribly late every Friday. Once there, I started work at eight, forfeited my lunch break and stayed at the client until seven, sometimes later. I then went back to the crappy little hotel we were staying in, ate a poorly cooked meal, and went upstairs for another few hours of work. It was an understaffed job with far too tight a deadline. The person in charge knew nothing about the client and gave me the two critical areas (stock and revenue) to audit on my own. I could not possibly have put more time or effort into this job than I did. It blighted a month of my life and at the end I agreed only to claim a measly seven hours overtime so as not to blow the budget and get a superior into trouble. Four months later I finally get my appraisal back and I don’t get a single positive comment. Not so much as a thank you for working hard. Instead my sole feedback is a criticism that I need to document my work more carefully because I didn’t always have sufficient details in my explanations of what I had done and the supervisor had to raise review points to ask me to clarify. Yes, I remember some of those review points well. At least three of them asked me to define what I meant by my use of the word unusual when I made a comment to the effect that I had scanned such and such a piece of documentation and not noted anything unusual. This being in response to a task phrased “scan such and such a piece of documentation for anything unusual” which itself failed to define unusual… It just seems such a petty thing to pull someone up on. I’m aware my work wasn’t perfect, but it was as good as it could be working those hours in those circumstances
Yes. So, anyway I went to Malvern yesterday to let off some steam by having a long walk. I’m not sure it helped because today I still seem to be tired, grumpy and depressed, plus I haven’t slept well with pain, but Malvern is a nice place and perhaps I’ll cheer up once I’ve had some breakfast. Right now it feels like life is a pointless wasteland with nothing to look forward to, but I am aware that after a piece of toast this may come to feel like an exaggeration 
Tags: pointlessness