Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Thursday, Mar. 10, 2005 - 9:41 p.m.

Show of hands: who here thinks I'm gonna get fired tomorrow? Come on; put those babies up there; don't be shy. Mine is.

I spent my entire day getting kneecapped by Bruce in true Tonya Harding fashion. Well, that, and fruitlessly asking for something, anything, any kind of work to do.

See, we're supposed to be on this big stressful deadline to deliver a show this Sunday. Everyone buried, everyone panicked, everyone in need of help. Only, when I asked, almost everyone said no thanks. I pestered the kid who parcels out my assignments to death, since Bruce refuses to deal with me directly. She won't even speak to me directly, if she can at all help it. She *will* stand in front of me and tell the kid to tell me, but she won't tell me herself. So I pestered the kid, who I found out was a logger until the week before I started. Which means that I have about 5 years experience on him. And I'm making twice as much. But I'm not allowed to so much as breathe unless he tells me to, and he is really bad at delegating. He does everything himself, until he has so much he can't handle it, and then, if I stand in front of him and plead for something to do, he might actually give me something. That act I was supposed to put together that Bruce took away from me in disgust and gave to him? He never even did it. It never got done. Because he has too much on his plate, and - I believe I said this - sucks at delegating. And I outrank him anyway, but there you go. With me, standing in front of his desk, pleading for work and being told to "check [my] email".

You can only check your email so many times, people.

So I started going around to people, asking if they had anything they needed help with. And every once in a while, someone would say, hey, yeah, can you find all the times that Susan says the word "dragonfly"? At which point, I would go, look up all the times Susan said "dragonfly," paste the sentences where she said it into a Word document, attribute the tape # and time, and then give that to the editor who requested it...and then spend another huge chunk of time with nothing to do, asking Bruce and The Kid and The Boss, "Do you need any help? Can I do anything?" I finally got a project from one of the editors around 4:30, and that pissed off Bruce, who flipped out and told me to stop asking editors if they needed anything (which happens to be my job), and then she walked over to The Kid in mid-sentence to me, and started yelling at him that he was supposed to be managing me, and she couldn't have "people going around knocking on doors" and bothering the editors, because everyone is way behind, and when "people" knock on doors, it just throws everyone even further behind and causes all kinds of stress. She told him everything has to go thru him and then he has to tell me what he wants me to do, and then she walked off, but not before I cut in and told her it wasn't The Kid's fault, and that if she wanted to be angry with someone, she should be angry with me. She ignored me, finished scolding him, and left. He looked miserable and buried his head in his hands. I apologized, and he asked me to please not talk to anyone else. Then one of the editors (the guy who took pity on me and explained the Deep Dysfunction of workplace) called me into his bay and said "[Bruce] told me not to ask you for anything, but I'm swamped, and it takes [The Kid] too long to find stuff; would you find this for me?" I said sure, but I'm not allowed to find stuff unless The Kid says so, so could I email it to him? Sure, so that's what I did. And then I listened to iTunes for several hours, punctuating the boredom with occasional pleas for work that fell on deaf ears, and finally at 8:00, I said fuck this, and left. There's more to this story, like the editor who had asked me for help earlier that she bitched at, and the bitching at that I got for doing my job right before she bitched at him, as well as the lecture that I got about how one of the senior editors needed help badly, why wasn't I helping him, and I said I just came from his bay, and he was finished and fine, and she snapped "I mean yesterday," at which point I wondered why the fuck she didn't tell me that yesterday, then, and how in hell I was supposed to know that when I was on two different project deadlines from The Boss for other things yesterday, and I am not hermetically liked to her office, Erwin's bay, or either person's brain. Not to mention she walked past my desk at least a dozen times yesterday and didn't even say "boo," let alone "go help Erwin."

So I have put two and two together (coz I'm quick like that, yo), and figured out that she plans to tell The Boss that they don't need me, they have The Kid, and he makes half what I do, so why waste the money on me when they can just let me go and let The Kid do the job on his own. The only thing left to figure out is when I will get my walking papers, and I think this Friday, since Friday is the Traditional Walking Paper Day of the television work week, and since I'm not working this weekend, and this big project will be done by Monday. Of course, they could wait until Monday, but that's very non-traditional, so I kinda feel like if I make it thru Friday, I will make it thru Monday. I will not plan to work past Monday, though.

That being said, if I make it past Monday, odds are good I will make it to next Friday.

Then again, the place *is* insanely dysfunctional, and they might pride themselves in letting people go at any old time during the week, in which case all bets are off. I will bet you I don't make it a month, though. Any takers?

Peace out,
Katie

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