Panic Room

No posting this week, I know. The daygig has been freaky with the hours, including one day where I started at 6:40 am and left at 11 pm, all in an effort to prep us for an internal audit. I ran through a test run and passed us, even though I was highly critical and cut points rather than granting mercy. The auditor flunked us two days later, citing a whole series of staff violations that literally happened right before his eyes. The salt on the wound? I found out that the list of corrections I'd passed on to the boss was ignored the day before the audit, making my sixteen-plus hour shift the day before pointless.

But, since I did my job (and more), I'm not worrying or taking it personally. I'll take the time to correct some of the more inexperienced staff (as the auditor was lurking to see who had access to a locked room that should not, a staffer with a master key not only walked up and entered the room but offered to let the auditor in as well) and clean some house. I was in danger of being in the wrong frame of mind to take the audit results the right way as I spent the previous few days railing against people I thought were getting up in my face. After I had three or four of these interactions, I still couldn't see a pattern until my wife pointed it out to me. Dealing with frustration when I'm still shackled to one of its major causes is like bailing out a lake with a bucket; I may get some water out, but you know it's just going to run back under my feet and into the lake anyway. The solution is to stop trying, grab a pole and start fishing the damn lake instead, but once I slap on my horse-blinders, such solutions don't always come easy.

One good thing came out of such an altercation this week: A colleague I've never met from another company location was trying to bully me over the phone to do a routine task for a customer his way instead of just trusting me to handle it as I saw fit. His attitude (he's in a high-falutin' Manhattan location while I'm elsewhere in NY posting higher per capita numbers) fits a character I was developing for the new script, a snooty obstacle to the hero's goal. I'll now have a model in mind and to keep the inspiration fresh, I'm naming the character after him.