A tad bit resentful

Our printer emailed my office today to offer us a tour of their facility. More than happy to get an extra hour off of work to play, I let Mavvy & Sharpie know of the invitation and then go ask Stepzilla if it's okay.

Colormist: "Hi, Stepzilla! The printer invited Mavvy, Sharpie, & I all to tour his facility, is it okay if we go tomorrow?"

Stepzilla (shocked): "Actually, no. Mavvy is FAR too busy this week to go there. There's lots of work to be done. I don't mind if you go tomorrow--but then Mavvy isn't here tomorrow. So next week maybe. Well, no. Actually. Mavvy shouldn't go at all. She doesn't know anything about the design process and really couldn't learn anything from the tour. I don't care if you and Sharpie go tomorrow, but not Mavvy."

Colormist: "Okay, well thanks! Here's the brochure."

Wow, if that wasn't a clearly obvious "I'm-pissed-off-at-Mavvy-for-telling-me-off-a-week-ago" I don't know what it was! Stepzilla doesn't even know what we're doing 90% of the time, so she wouldn't know what kind of workload Mavvy has or how long it would take to finish said workload. She's just pissed at Mavvy and will take it out in any way possible.

I then told Mavvy, if she just-so-happens to take her lunch break at the same time Sharpie and I go on the tour, I don't think anyone would know the difference.

I think I’m being bribed

My none-too-subtle attempts at finding a new job must have finally been overheard by Stepzilla.

Phrases like:

• “I heard back about that interview!”

• “Oh! You want to see pictures of that house I’m looking at in Ohio?”

• “I met with my realtor yesterday.”

• “Hey! I found a job for a Graphic Designer in Columbus!”

And subtle hints like:

• Leaving my resume and cover letter on my desk,

• Having Careerbuilder on my screen while I go for lunch,

• Printing job postings and accidentally leaving them on the printer,

have finally made their way through the deafening shrieks of Stepzilla’s own personal praise to herself and into her tiny little reservoir of panic.

I was expecting my annual increase to be comparable to last year’s. What I got was an increase smaller than last years, a 2k salary adjustment, and a 1.5k bonus.

I’m sure that ICE didn’t WANT to give me a 2k salary adjustment (so that I’d actually be in the market average for the position) and they surely wouldn’t have given me the bonus if they knew about the adjustment.

So, Stepzilla has finally realized that my looks of dire hate, annoyance, and finger-gun to the head are not going away any time soon. Not that this will keep me around much longer. I still can’t stand my boss and all the money in the world won’t make her disappear. Well, maybe some money would make her disappear—into a lake.

ICE Hero Award

I would like to nominate Mavvy for an ICE Hero Award for bitching out Stepzilla during a private meeting while I was at a week-long sanctuary. Mavvy makes the third person that has verbally lashed Stepzilla for her idiosyncrasies, and she managed to gather enough information to have a successful scolding within two months! Yay Mavvy! Here is an excerpt from the very descriptive blog* of the events that transpired:

“So I'm in her office (Hell, Hades, Gehenna, whatever). She goes into some spiel about training BLAH BLAH BLAH. I tuned out for a while there. She really likes to listen to herself talk. Then she says, "I sense you've been frustrated lately." Well, it's about goddamn time. I've only been sending you I hate you, don't look at me, and don’t talk to me vibes for four months now. Here's my chance, as Bon Jovi would say, it's now or never. Oh this is going to feel good...

“I start off by addressing her negativity. You see, she really enjoys making caustic remarks about the rest of the people in the office. Usually it just pertains to how dumb or incompetent some other employee is. Or perhaps how ridiculous their requests are, and ALWAYS that they are nowhere near as good at their job as she is at hers. But occasionally she likes to psychoanalyze people, people like our CEO. It was art fair time. Stepzilla comes in and hears us talking about some lovely vases that the CEO had purchased. Her contribution to the conversation? "Well god it has to be better than that hideous jewelry she bought last year. I mean, when will she realize that she can buy all she wants, but it's not going to make her happy?" Ah, we should all be so wise as Stepzilla.

“So I tell her the fact that she says horrible things about everyone in the building is really bringing down morale. I mean, she even says things about members of the department when they're not there. So surely she is saying shit about you when you have the misfortune to be absent. Now get ready for her justification of the constant derogatory remarks. You see, Stepzilla is the master of excuses and turning things around so she is not at fault. At least in her mind she is. To the rest of us she is pathetic and desperate. She tells me, "Well, not that this has happened too much since you've been here, but in the past, we've had people come into the marketing office and tell us that they don't like the pieces the designers have done. And so when I say those things I'm trying to let you guys know that hey, those people aren't perfect either. I'm just trying to be a buffer. You know, just to make you guys feel better." WHAT A LOAD OF BULLSHIT! She must have had to reach pretty far up her ass to come up with that one. So I laughed. It was all I could do. And then I told her I found that to be really hard to believe. Her response, "fine."

“My next point of contention is the fact that she loudly voices her disdain for Christianity whenever she feels like it. She's an atheist, or so she says. We all know who she really is. But I digress. I mean, who does that? You're a fucking manager and you're going to spout off about what a bunch of dolts Christians are in front of people whose religious convictions are completely unknown to you? Unknown because you don't give a shit about anybody unless it relates directly to you. Sharpie put it best when she said, "She wouldn't give a shit if we were on FIRE, unless it somehow affected her." So I tell her that I am a Christian and I find it incredibly offensive and disrespectful that she is bashing my religion. Ok, so I’m not exactly Ned Flanders. But I used to go to church when I was a kid, that should count for something right? The point is that I made her feel like an ass. Mission accomplished.

“Other things happened during the meeting too. Things like me bitch slapping her and then impaling the side of her head with an ink pen. Ok, so those things only happened in my head. The rest of what really went down I'm either too tired to remember or I've already blocked from my memory…”

They grow up so quickly, don’t they? I’m so proud of Mavvy. I would just post a link directly to her blog, but true identities aren’t that secret there. All words quoted above are taken directly from her blog.*

*names have been changed to protect the innocent and for clarity to my loyal readers.