(no subject)

I have a pal in Human Resources at my office, which is good, because our HR department other than her sucks. Even she thinks so, but she's the youngest and most junior staff member, so her opinion counts for zero (because it's that kind of department).

Gosh, I sound so corporate.

Anyway, she stopped by my desk yesterday and asked if I was going for BossBoss's job, and I said yeah and showed her my resume, which she promptly shredded and rearranged, much to my delight.

What's weird is -- everyone likes BossBoss. He's done a good job holding our department together with, as far as I can tell, chewing gum and binder rings. We function. Very few people complain. And yet everyone I talk to, including my HR pal, says, "Yeah, you're much more organised and levelheaded than he is, you'll be better at this."

No pressure!

It's not the first time I've found my image of the company deeply skewed by my position within it. Not that it's a bad company, but the individual parts aren't always what I think they are. I'm really the only person who talks to everyone who works here, but my interactions are superficial and everyone's nice to me because I have something they want. So I think, oh, Admin J's a sweetheart and really efficient, and someone says "God, Admin J has no idea how to do her job" and then show me proof of it and I double-take. A couple of the people who were laid off recently were targeted because they were mean, angry people. So I'm told. They were always pleasant when they talked to me.

So here I am with this image of BossBoss as a nice guy, a good boss, someone who brought me muffins for breakfast and never micromanaged me, someone who made his department work. And I'm confronted with the generalised opinion that he was a likeable but excitable flake, and that I could do his job in my sleep. Meanwhile I've been investigating some of his processes and discovered that information I was trying to glean from gossip and helpdesk tickets is information he was getting weekly in organised fashion from HR, and wasn't passing on to me for reasons I don't fully understand. I don't think it was malicious, I think he just never figured out how much easier he could make my job.

It's a sharp shock, and I'm not sure what to do with any of it. Except, I guess, to make sure I get his job and fix the broken parts. I do, at least, have experience fixing what's broken in this company. And I quite like organising things, so that's all right.

If/when I take over his job, I may have to honourably retire Ninja Office Boy as an icon. I'll have graduated to Middle Management Samurai or maybe Pirate Captain Of Industry.

(no subject)

I've been a little messed up lately, with regards to writing -- it's not really a block, because there are several projects going where I actually know what I need to write next, I just don't want to write it.

It's possible it's depression. I don't anymore get the crushing misery that used to signal depressive episodes when I was younger, but depression can also manifest as apathy and exhaustion, which I've definitely been feeling. Unfortunately these are also my general responses to intense heat, so it's difficult to tell. :D

I don't say this to get sympathy -- I am doing fine, for the most part, and I am genuinely not unhappy or in pain -- but because I was diagnosed at seventeen and yet wasn't aware that you could be clinically depressed without being sad until I was about twenty-five. So I feel it's information I should share at every given opportunity.

The main problem is the writing, which is why there hasn't been any fanfic from me in a while. I open Google Docs and stare at my "current work" folder and my head starts to hurt. Part of it is that I've been trying to aim my energy more at original work, and thus been discarding ideas for fanfic or even writing stories and then not posting them because I know they're bullshit since I half-assed the writing of them to begin with.

It's been a bit better today. I went out this morning to Chinatown to see the Dragon Boat Races (cancelled, but I got a pork bun, so it was not totally futile) and because I've finished all my library books I grabbed Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel for train reading. It's one of those books where I want to underline about two thirds of what he says, and his prose is so lyrical it always makes me want to write; the journal is also a first-person account of a writer at his most vulnerable, which makes me feel better about myself. So I came home and did some good writing, both original and fanfictional, and hopefully that has broken the cycle.

On that note, I did a weird, self-indulgent little fic that I don't really want to post at Storyteller, per se, but I put in comments -- you can find the genesis and the fic here: The Only Easy Day Is Yesterday. It's G-rated genfic about Peter Burke's life before the FBI. Catchy title, huh?