You know they are taking you for granted when…

So, funny thing happened this week workwise…

Things have been slow kinda as I prep for another shitstorm about to come my way. In the meantime there are a couple of things I’ve been helping out on and one thing in particular that I just can’t seem to get a straight answer from people on and that I have to make go away.

There’s a whole process to this job and for the most part, I’m not involved in a lot of it but that’s been changing slowly over the last few months as the nature of the things I’ve worked on and their scope has changed as well.

It means suddenly I need to understand the ‘why’ of things which is not always so clear and it also means that I have to rely on a lot of other people to get the work out. The problem here is that I really don’t have power in any form, I can’t MAKE someone do something. As a matter of fact, I’m a vendor so really there’s a limit to how dictatorial I can be with things.

You know, ‘The client is always right’ and all that.

It’s a dance to be sure.

There are certain things that are in my wheelhouse and that I feel comfortable in doing because I do keep track of my work. The one thing I really don’t like is being dumped into the middle of someone else’s mess with the expectation that I’ll be the ‘last one’ in other words the person holding the back and the easy target for blame if something goes wrong.

There are two other people on the account and the woman I work with, while she is harsh at times, I give her a lot of credit because she is really, really buttoned up. She works WAY too much and she treats her job as if it’s her company and that she’s not a vendor. There are even times when she knows more than the client and they defer to here because she has that much cred.

It took awhile to get used to her but now over time, I’ve grown comfortable to a point and know the things that set her off and the things that don’t. She provides me with an inordinate amount of support and guidance as well, I can only ascribe being successful because of that support.

Now this week she took off for a trip, she took two weeks off a bit of time ago and it was right in the middle of a big crunch on the project I was working on but I was okay because it was my project and surprisingly I’m pretty buttoned up on things so I was able to keep the train moving and it may well be that people were surprised by how much I got accomplished over the time she was out.

This week the other person on the account was supposed to be support for her while she was out. He’s my pal, he hooked me up with the gig originally so I can’t say anything bad but the problem here is he decided to take days off this week at the same time she was out and they both have crisis items… things that are coming due and need attention.

And so, I became a bit of a dumping ground.

Which would be okay but I have those few things I NEED TO FINISH and tomorrow, I will be getting briefed on another shitstorm project - they have me going from crisis to crisis and this one involves a massive amount of items across several brands. It’s not going to be an easy lift but then I have this other stuff dumped in my lap too.

 I’ll be honest… ummm no.

I’m not someone else’s dumping ground anymore. I made that clear a few months ago. I’ll help out where I can and I have but don’t dump your shit on me. Tomorrow there are a bunch of things I have to keep up on but to be frank they may simply not happen. I have limited bandwidth and I’m just beyond the point of killing myself over a job anymore.

I don’t know… I can’t say I’m stressed about it because honestly, I don’t care. I mean I care about my job and I care about doing a good job and all that but I don’t care when someone dumps something in my lap. My friend was telling me I need to be on these calls and the truth is, I have limited bandwidth and if something doesn’t directly involve me, I really don’t want or need to know.

One person is in California, the other person is in the Dominican Republic and here I am in front of my computer struggling to make ends meet. Umm no, that stops. I’ve got too little time left to me in terms of the overall amount of time that has been allotted to me on the planet to waste it worrying about things that really aren’t all that important in the overall scheme of life.

Besides… I can’t remember the last time I actually took a trip somewhere. That must be nice.