It’s been a week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. I’m done.
The winter storm covering most of the country east of the Mississippi has mostly dumped a bunch of rain on the RVA parade; somewhere between two and three inches if I’m reading the charts right. It was enough, when combined with the winds the storm brought, to close down schools in the area early yesterday, and a delay this morning, even though the temperatures have been flirting with the low 60°s.
After a pretty awful work day (more on that in a bit), I spent some time rehearsing for this weekend’s gigs, making some good progress (as I haven’t played with the band in about seven months and I’m a little rusty on the bottom-end), I was just settling in to relax and close things down for the weekend when I was made aware that all that rain had started to wander into our nicely finished basement.
Many towels and a couple of runs to the hardware store for a wet/dry vac and appropriate filters, and dozens of suck/dump cycles later, we’d gotten ahead of it and stopped the water from pouring down the stairs from outside. It looks relatively okay this morning, thanks to all that work and the dehumidifier living in the Cupboard-Under-The-Stairs™, though there’s still a bunch of moisture under the laminate floor and, I suspect, a few gaps in the watertight seal between the basement and the non-basement under-house space on the west side of the building.
I suspect I’ll be making use of my home warranty in the coming weeks to get somebody to come in and investigate and ideally fill those chinks in the basement’s armor.
But that was the evening.
Early in the workday yesterday I got a couple of questions I’m relatively sure I’d answered multiple times already from the PM who took over the project I’d finally extricated myself from managing the middle of last year, after having it be my job, officially for six or seven years, then an “other duty as assigned” for the last three or so since the business unit reorganized and hadn’t bothered to back-fill me.
I answered them to the best of my ability; although I hadn’t been able to devote my full attention to that project recently, I kept it running relatively smoothly while it wasn’t officially my job, and as I’ve said in the past, it’s running better and with more attention now. That said, the interaction flicked a couple of warning lights in the back of my mind, and sure enough, as I was shutting down for the day, I got word that the contract supporting that effort is getting audited.
This means that for the next little while, I’m going to have a bunch of people asking me to explain things over and over, answer innumerable questions and dig up all kinds of documents when I’m trying to do my regular job to satisfy the auditors, who won’t feel like they’ve done their job unless they find something to write up and ding someone or other for.
The worst bit is that I know exactly why this is happening, and it’s due not to a deficiency in satisfying the requirements or fraud or waste or anything, but because someone elsewhere in the organization has a general beef with some of the folks involved and kicked this business off because they’re kind of an asshole, prone to late-night unprofessional passive-aggressive messages and over-the-top gestures rather than simply addressing concerns in a responsible manner.
Oh, and I just stopped one of the cats from chewing on a long piece of narrow gift ribbon he found someplace, which, if I hadn’t caught him, would’ve gotten swallowed and torn him up insides until they looked like what’s left over after running old documents through a paper shredder.
Keep on coming, new year, keep on coming…
