My life is a Dilbert cartoon

     Normally I would start this story in the middle, but since this is a new blog I’ll preface with a little background.

     I work in marketing. My degree? Not in marketing. I work for a niche biotech preclinical research company. My degree? Not in biotechnology or research. I majored in English and got a minor in Biology. What this really means is that I couldn’t hack it in the pre-med program so I switched to something I was good at. I am good at B.S. Normally this would be a precursor into the wide and exciting world of politics, but I don’t really like to argue with people so that was out. On top of that my college was a small, holiness tradition, private Christian school, so you can imagine the type of yahoos in our poli-sci department.

     I got my job about two weeks before graduation through a staffing agency I had been working with throughout college. I graduated on a Saturday and by Monday I was working. I don’t know what these people were expecting when they were looking for a new hire, but obviously their perceptions were way screwed up.

Yes, I majored in English. No, I am not amazing with grammar and spelling (if you’d had my prof. you wouldn’t be either). Yes, I majored in English. No, I am not a good sales writer.Yes, I have a minor in Biology. No, I do not understand the complex toxicological reasoning for drug-drug interactions. I don't know how you mix up "minor" and "PhD" but there it is.

     I will admit that some of my skills are teasingly diverse. I can tell you how many bricks are on the side of the building next door or how many people are wearing sneakers in a room. I can tell you what page of a book a certain picture was on. And on a good day I can even figure out that the license plate on a dodge charger I saw on the way to work yesterday, ANL1924, is probably a veiled reference to anal sex (ANL+(19=S)+(24=X) = ANLSX = Anal Sex). But I cannot come up with a quippy title for your email blast promoting your skewed discounting structure no matter how much cajoling you put in your voice.

     Like most college grads in their first “real” job after college I am a gofer (i.e. go for this, go for that). While there are both positives and negatives with this existence it provides me with an income slightly below market value, a tiny apartment of my very own, and enough cash for cute boots.

     Normally my day goes a little like this: Arrive at office, check email, delete majority of emails, respond to email questions that people probably could have answered on their own, respond to emails that have nothing to do with my regular job duties, doddle, update the company’s Twitter and Facebook, go back to my apartment for lunch (I only live about 3 minutes from work – a genius move in my opinion, less travel, less gas wasted, more money for aforementioned cute boots), arrive back at office and sort through emails again, do some work, send something FedEx, stalk our competitors, doddle for the last 5 minutes before leaving for the day. Some days there is less doddling and more working, but for the most part it’s doddling. Exhibit A: This blog.

So, the story…

     My biggest pet peeve in the workplace is doing something twice. I would much rather spend 15 minutes going over a project in the beginning so that I can complete it and move on to the next thing than having something tossed off to me with little to no explanation, complete it the way that makes the most sense, then having to redo it because I did it wrong.

     My boss is the boss from the Dilbert cartoons, except that she’s a woman and works in marketing instead of IT. The problem is that she doesn’t really know what she wants until she figures out what she doesn’t want. What I mean is that she hands you a project and says, “Oh just work something up. You’ll be fine.” Then after the work up is complete she decides that she doesn’t like it that way, she figures out what she really does want, and then you go back and redo your project. Raise your hand if you’ve had a boss like that. If you didn’t raise your hand breathe a sigh of relief and pray to whatever entity you worship that you never have to.

     On a somewhat related note, she likes to have all her data represented in a percent and then that percent put into a bar graph, a BAR graph. Perhaps you don’t understand my annoyance, let me explain. Bar graph = count representation, pie graph = percentage representation. PIE GRAPH FOR PERCENTS! 

     She just doesn’t get it, but what are you gonna do? Tell you what I’m gonna do – nothin’. I’m going to sit in our office, face my computer screens and make some freakin’ pie graphs because this is America, land of the free, home of the brave where people do what their told and fade into the fabric of their ugly grey cubicles.