I'm hoping today isn't going to be one of those days. I've already spilled my tea while I was driving down my nice newish white sweater I put on this morning. I've used soap and water to get rid of the worst of it but there are still yellowish patches that I'm hoping won't be too visible unless people know they're there.Also, I had a bad moment while driving and I don't think it was my fault. It was a four-way stop and it was one of those slightly awkward moments when you get there almost the same time as another car. There's a moment of waiting while you both figure out who's going to go. Since it wasn't terribly light out there, it wasn't possible to do the universal wave of 'you go ahead' and have the other driver see it. So, deciding to take the lead, I started to go. Then, the other driver started to go. As we both moved, I thought, "oh, he's going straight, anyway" because there was no turn signal. Since I was also going straight, it didn't seem to really matter who went first. Except it seems that the other driver wasn't going straight, he was going to turn. Only as he pulled forward to the middle of the intersection did he put on his turn signal and then proceed to honk and give me the finger. I'm very sorry but where I learned to drive, the turn signal is intended to indicate that you're turning. If it's not on, how am I supposed to know where another driver is going? Since I'm sadly not psychic, I can't predict these things.
Then, when I get in, I see there are doughnuts in the conference room. I have a feeling this is to accompany our benefits enrollment session that's scheduled bright and early at 9 a.m. today. I wish I was a doughnut person but I'm not. I just don't get excited about doughnuts. My taste buds tend to veer towards savory and salty, not so much the sweet. Also, I find, if I do partake in the morning doughnut ritual, I end up wishing I hadn't because even though I was hungry, that's an awful lot of fat and calories that I just wasted on something I don't like that much anyway.
Still, I do appreciate the effort of our president to sweeten up the enrollments session. I'm not big on these. Working for a small company is very different from working in a the large university environment because it's harder to find affordable benefit packages. So far, this year, I've paid a lot of out-of-pocket costs because our insurance had a fairly high deductible. We were told yesterday that the deductible for the new plan would be a little higher. I'm trying to be excited and hope that it has better coverage but the idea of a higher deductible is a little worrisome.
Yesterday, during our benefits meeting, we also got a very nice pep talk from our CEO about our fantastic new office space to which we'll be moving next week. Maybe. No one quite knows when we'll actually be able to move in; at the very latest, it'll be the Monday following Thanksgiving. I didn't mind this until I found out yesterday that my plans for what I do when I had to work at home were foiled because they're going to be taking down the servers on which I access almost 98% of my workload. So, now I have to find out what, actually, I should be doing when I work from home since I adamently refuse to waste any of my precious remaining PTO days because my company forgot to tell me that they hadn't planned very well.
Still, according to our CEO, our new building is going to be spectacular. She's spared no expense. We will have a colour scheme matching our product suite which, for your information, is purple, a turquoise blue, a butterscotch yellow and red. The mental picture of that colour combination is probably much harsher in my mind than it'll be in reality....right? Even our countertops in our kitchen are speckled with those colours.
Also, we're going to have a workout room with a Wii, a Foosball table and bathrooms with nice showers. Also, the bathroom stalls are floor-to-ceiling for privacy. We may even get a yoga instructor to come and teach classes!
Now, I want to be a bright glow of sunshiny excitement about this. However, one thing I've learned from my company is if you're in the office, you need to be working. If you take time out to do something like, oh, go to lunch, you make up the time by working later. So, I'm having a hard time believing that our President is going to completely change and let us go play a rousing game of Foosball during work hours on a regular basis or that he's going to let us go take a break to run on the treadmill and shower. No, I think it's more likely that we're going to have to stay late to make up any fun time we spend at work.
Now, call me crazy and I know this is because I'm not experiencing 100% job satisfaction but, at the end of the day, I want to go home. I do not want to go play Wii with my coworkers. I do not want to do yoga with them. I want to go home. It's not that I don't like my coworkers. I do. It's just that I'd rather be home, doing something I actually want to do like writing, watching TV, making dinner. We're a company with about 22 employees who actually work in the office and not working remotely. By any standards, that's small. Our new building is the type of place you'd expect from Google, Microsoft....big companies that can afford to rotate work breaks and let people decompress at work. We're too small to really be able to do that.
I'm being negative and I know this. I, for one, like the idea of having a meeting while playing Foosball or running on the treadmill. Yet that means you have to find someone else who is capable of talking work while doing something else: Multitasking. Not everyone likes to do that. Still, on bad days, a game of Foosball is quite therapeutic. I like to play dirty.
Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe it's not such a good idea to have meetings while playing Foosball.
Still, I can't wait to see the new building. It's something to see, according to our CEO. She likes it so much, she's literally getting them to build her an apartment on the first floor so that when she comes in to visit (she's based in California), she has somewhere to stay. You might remember that my CEO likes some, uh, noisy extracurricular activities, things that involve a little spanking and squealing. I can't help but wonder if she's going to invite her boyfriend to her new place during work hours. That might be...entertaining.
I work in an odd place. I am incredibly lucky to work for a company that is trying so hard to make us happy and I really, really wish I could stop seeing the glass as half-empty. I try to be a half-full person mostly but there are times when that pesky sense of rational reality kicks in and says, do we really need custom-made bathroom dividers? Can't we, you know, use that money to increase the wages of the people who are going to paying a lot more to get to work because they now have to commute?
But, for now, I have our benefits enrollment to look forward to and the doughnuts that lie ahead. As long as I don't spill the doughnut on my shirt, if I decide to eat one, my day will already be better. Again, it's the small things in life., right?
Happy Tuesday!
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