All You Can Do

It’s Christmas time, right smack dab in the middle of the Yuletide holidays! Slowly, I have noticed the ‘holiday silliness’ infection creep over the office—similar to the phenomenon which invades school classrooms this time of year as teacher just try to maintain some sort of order as each day brings the children closer to the holiday break. My boss started her career as a school teacher, in fact, a seventh grade teacher, so she at least knows how to identify the holiday chaos monster.

We had a staff meeting today—two hours right out of the middle of our morning where we discuss among other things, how we were going to cover the office and phones over Christmas week. State says we have to have some coverage: I plan to take off a day before the great holiday and every day following Christmas and coming back after New Years. I have to do this to some degree so I don’t have my ‘earned vacation hours’ taken away—I need to take a good whack at my hours to bring my stack of vacation hours back into safe compliance for the start of next year.

We talked about the next round of cuts the State will be implementing immediately a possible 3% or more in cuts. This may burn me or not after the first of the year—and see. I think I’ll survive . Everyone just sort of blew the news away and sort of goofed—it Christmas. The boss had to act like a 7th grade teacher once or twice but we got through with only one staff being sent to the “principals office”, she probably just needed that a good ‘talking to’ can bring. One of the out of office program people brought in Christmas treats, weird things made out of pretzels and the rest of the afternoon decayed into holiday anarchy with work being accomplished on a call by call fashion and visiting with staff and support folk as they drop by, righting the afternoon off to “outreach”.

The building management has been remodeling the bathrooms, which serve our floor all week which makes staff have to use the elevator to access the middle floor of our building which is deserted but has workable bathrooms—its kinda scary to beam up there to take a wiz or in my case a tap. So down stairs there is major hammering, sawing and yelling as the labors labor. More chaos to the Holiday chaos.

I am trying to be a good little focused worker—I m going to play Santa tomorrow at he local independent living center—for video go to last year’s entry for December—or search the blog by “Santa” and you should b able to see the video of me being Santa—but I am getting excited as tomorrow approaches and I have been faithfully working at my desk but I noticed the boss bugged out early. I think in an effort to save her sanity. Sometimes leaving is all one can do with 7th graders.