...and that's why half my pay has been spent on Malibu rum (rev 1.1)

Oh boy, where do I start? It's been one helluva long time since I wrote anything. A lot can and has happened in that time, and it has. So bear with me while I try to figure out what's relevant to my current state of mind, and what's worth commiting to digital format.

Alright... So, mid March I got hired on with a company south of the city I should have never left and on the 26th I headed out alone to trek across the country. The road trip was fairly uneventful - boring, lonely, depressing, and frustrating through Ontario when I realized my 4 cylinder has the get-up-and-go of a chain smoking overweight sloth with a heart problem when faced with accellerating up hills. Made excellent time - did the trip in 2.75 days. Heck, made it to Thunder Bay in one day which is something the hubby was quite proud of. I arrived at a friends house at around 7:30 local time and that's where I stayed until the beginning of July.

I started my job 1 day after getting to the city I should have never left, and found myself in the employ of what originally came off as an amazing company. Here I was to be working as an IT professional/administrator for a construction company that works in the oil/gas/mining sectors. The place is quite laid back, and my dress pants and business formal sweater was horribly over doing the jeans and t-shirt wear of just about everyone else. The place sounded, from all angles, like a dream with big asperations and the belief that family comes first. People brought their dogs to work and let them wander around the building and people would take them out for walks or toss a ball down the hall for them. If you had a doctor's appointment, your pay didn't get docked for missing time. I was hired to enact policies and create efficency in the department. Within the first week I shocked everyone and it was sounding like this role was merely a place holder for something bigger.

It was a plus to have a decent job for a change, cause being away from my family and living in my friend's basement where until late May I had no choice but to sleep in a sleeping bag while wearing jogging pants, a hoodie and socks and spending time with people I didn't mind visiting when I lived in this city but certainly didn't much care for spending that much time with wasn't a plus at all. I spent much of my free time sitting in my truck listening to the radio and knitting or reading a book (couldn't smoke in the house, so I used my habit as an excuse for some "me" time). Friends took pity on me I guess. Between BDJ and others, I was full of Timmies, which later became booze, and kept relatively entertained and able to keep my mind off the fact that my youngest had waited until I left to say his first word and my oldest was finishing his first year of school and I wasn't there to take pictures or celebrate.

But as time progressed, things changed. The house sold (yay!) for less than what we paid for it (boo!) but at least covered the mortgage (yay, I guess). The hubby packed and cleaned and took care of the kids, which was a hard job, and I am forever grateful for it. But if he or anyone thought my time out here without them was easy, they were horribly mistaken. Aside from logistically - trying to set things up out here so they would be ready for when my family came without money or a timeline is difficult enough - it was lonely, even in the company of others. But as much as the idea of sleeping when I wanted to, or being able to go to the bathroom without company, or having a meal without having to share it with a snot-nosed toddler is nice, I longed for their company. To watch my kids wave at me over the webcam was wonderful and heartbreaking. To be unable to cuddle with my husband and talk was horrible. And the things I missed... A lot can happen in 4.5 months.

Like your wonderful job position being shown for what it really is - an underpaid and misguided frontman who doubles as the department scapegoat.

I am the company's help desk front line. My desk is in front of what everone calls the "burger window" - a roll shutter hole in the wall. While we don't want people walking up and "jumping the queue" for help as it were, we provide them a way to do so and we entertain it anyways. But let me introduce you to the cast of characters first, and explain a few things so you can get a full understanding of the reason I've drank more in the last 4 months than I have since turning 19.

The department initially started out as one individual, a bald headed redneck who works as a consultant under the lamest name for a computer company I've heard to date. He's creepy, in a pedifile-in-a-dark-alley kind of way. He's overly friendly and ALWAYS smiling this cheesy grin, no matter what the mood. Either he's on some pretty powerful meds, or someone screwed up a botox injection. And his way of doing things is bandaid and force fit. So, when the company was small, it was fine. But it got bigger. And so the company hired on a full time guy.

The full time guy... He's the son of some guy who worked in the upper eschalon of the company for a bit and has since retired, but because of that rank, this hunk of flesh that makes tits on fish look not only useful but necessary will never be fired. This example that the gods are for sure into practical, evil jokes is the first person I have ever wanted to set fire to - running him over, punching him out, blowing him up... all don't seem to do enough damage and provide enough joy. This guy I want to see burn. I want to see his flesh crisp and his innard liquify. Thanks to morality and laws, all that I'll be able to do is envision it and grin, until the thought police take me away. But it's this fucktard that, in cooperation with the bald headed redneck, that have made the IT department the festering black spot on a computer professional's career that it is today.

And then we have the fugly, scrawny bayman who regularly contradicts himself in one breath, which is quite a feat given that he will spend 30 minutes talking at a shot when you ask him a yes or no question. This embarassment to professional certification holders around the world was hired to replace the bald headed redneck, yet nearly a year after the guy was hired, the redneck is still here and it doesn't look like we're getting rid of him and his freakish smile any time soon. This twerp has never been a manager before (and it's more obvious than a 4 foot tumor on someone's forehead), yet reads books on managment like they're going out of style and every other week comes out with a new set of buzzwords and a new management style to use on his only subordinant - me. Cause the asshat I want to see burn took a hissy fit and reports to the scrawny bayman's boss - a dude who's got a gap between his teeth that makes the grand canyon look like a scratch, and a personality to match.

The first week should have been an eye opener for how this whole gong show was going to progress. For instance, this company has no concept of efficency, especially when it comes to computer hardware and software, or financial responsibility. How do I know this? Well, nearly every individual in the company who has a computer has a laptop that costs between $1800 and $2200. And maybe %20 (and I'm being very generous) of them will ever remove their computers from their desk and work from home or another location. Desktops cost what, $500 nowadays? And if that isn't an indicator of stupid overspending, how about how all of these laptop users having between a 17 and 22" secondary monitor, a $115 wireless keyboard and mouse combo and the grand majority having a $200 local laser printer on top of it (despite the fact we have 14 large network printers for an employee base of 125 people in the head office alone)? Then there's the software aspect of things, where I'm sure if we ever got audited, I'd be forced to recind any future career in computers thanks to the stain it would leave. All the software until I came on was individual retail licenses! Our pittiful storage room (I've seen powder rooms bigger than this thing) is crammed with boxes of software cause without the license and key, those things are illegal. And each and every one of them are registered TO THE MACHINE THEY'RE INSTALLED ON! So my first month, I delivered a laptop computer that was "redone" (read: asshat created a new profile and killed the old one) to someone in finance that had the $6000 AutoCAD package the guy in Project Services who originally had the laptop used! AND! That $6000 AutoCAD package was then installed onto the guy from Project Services' new laptop!

Plus, on top of these over priced laptops being used by people who really don't need laptops, there's over 600 Blackberry phones being used in the company. And these are my responsibility. It was supposed to be asshat's job until I ramped up, yet not 2 days after I started, he dumped it on my plate with a flourish in an attempt to make it sound like he was doing me a favor. So, not too long into my job, I decided to do an audit of the phones. Our phone plan is divided by division in the company and project. So on the head office alone, I fiddled with a few of the plans, removed some premium messages, and in the end saved the company $10,000 a month! Just on one of 8 divisions of the bill! And there was a lot more I could do, but still, for a first level change, a savings of $10K is pretty good. You'd think at the very least I would have got a "Wow!" right? Well, would you believe I GOT IN SHIT????? Why? Cause I didn't ask permission to make those changes.

*I* am the only one in the company authorized to make changes on the account.

*I* am the only person who is supposed to add or remove devices or phone numbers on the account.

Who the fuck should I have asked???!!???

And since then, cause I'm sure this made asshat look bad somehow, I've been treated somewhere between an imbicile and a dog by the fucker, the level of which has increased daily. The bayman, who said for me to worry about getting the base of the job down and didn't expect me to have it in 3 months (which is service calls, handling their piece of shit ticketing system, ordering/shipping stuff, and the phones, which were supposed to become my job a month, not 2 days, after I started, all of which was never documented or explained to me by anyone and I had to figure it all out on the fly) is pissed off that I haven't written training material on top of my job and has increased my "probation", and then tells me I'm not to provide training when I'm told that I have to teach classes, that it's a "walkthrough" when I fight back over the fact that if I'm teaching high level Outlook tricks that it would be stupid for these people who all have laptops not to bring them with them for training... Like calling it a "walkthrough" makes it any less relevant for them to not have computers with them!

More than once a day over the last 2 months have I wanted to just turn around when one of them treats me like a scapegoat and barks commands (cause although I'm supposed to answer to the bayman, the redneck and asshat both treat me like a lowly private and heaven forbid I don't jump when they say to) and just say "And that's it. I'm done. Bye." Cause although I've increased the effiency of the departmet... Although I've improved service levels greatly... Although I'm the only one in the 4 of us that can honestly say they've done anything properly (we're so not going to go into the fiasco of the third party hosted email system which currently will not allow any new activations, web access, or Blackberry services to units that have been registered a week ago or sooner, and that's just ONE of at least 12 tales I can think of off the top of my head), I'm the one walking a tightrope. The redneck who was supposed to be replaced by the bayman remains, the bayman who's network and server certified out the ass apparently doesn't seem to think it's a priority to fix any of the bullshit issues with our storage system (like, oh, I don't know, provide personal storage!!! WTF is the point of having everyone on the domain if the only thing it's saving is mapping a goddamned drive that folder access can be modified by nearly anyone?), and the asshat who sits in the back lab playing on either the computers or the xbox back there unless someone of an impressive paycheck asks for help and I'm left sitting in the front by the "burger window" explaining that the dipshit is STILL working on their computer, although the fix would have taken any compitent person ONE FUCKING HOUR to fix and we're on day 3?????

Yeah, my "extended probation" is up Monday. We'll see how things go... I don't have a good feeling about it. They fucking need me, but I don't need a perscription of antipsychotics.