Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Stand Back, She's Gonna Blow

Alrighty everyone, hold on to your hats, because Cupcake needs to vent.

I went home last night and and had a nice little evening. I baked some cappucino cupcakes with mocha buttercream icing (more on the cupcakes to follow) that turned out just mediocre. Then I watched The Tao of Steve, a nice Indie romantic comedy from 2000. And of course, the whole time I wasn't frosting or washing dishes, I was occupying my fingers with my knitting, trying to get scads more hats, scarves and goodies done before Christmas.

When I finally went to bed around 11:30, I could not fall asleep. I was just so stressed out about work! I have so much to do and it is never going to get done. The hours I'm putting in at the office are beginning to get ridiculous. I fell asleep only to wake up at 3:45am and continue to be preocupied by all the stress I am facing at work. Now, I hate to get stressed out about work for several reasons. Firstly, I am not an on-call transplant surgeon; I am a secretary, perhaps a glorified and heavily put-upon secretary, but no one lives and dies by my actions. Secondly, I don't make enough money to spend my time outside of work obsessing about work. Thirdly, when it is 3:45 am and you're thinking about what's sitting on your desk, there is literally nothing you can do about it. Although, I did have a weak moment when I thought, I should just get up and go to work now! But then the idea of taking the subway by myself at 4:30am didn't sound so great.

I got a couple of hours sleep and came into the office ready to attack the day when by 9:06am I found myself in a totally shipping/order nightmare and kept getting bounced back between Office Depot and UPS. Now, I don't want to get into it, but after two calls to UPS I was on my third call with Office Depot when I not-so-subtley began to lose it. The interesting thing is, Office Depot has clearly outsourced the customer service jobs (I'm guessing to India) but they know enough to give the Reps a lot of conflict resolution training. As I kept getting angrier and more aggressive, the guy kept appologising and trying to calm me down. This actually worked, because by the end of the call I told him that I knew he was doing everything he could, and the problem wasn't his fault. But in the mean time, I got in a lot of angry, agressive behavior. So now I'm all hopped up ready to tear someone a new asshole. Let me paraphrase my side of the conversation, "This is my third time calling this morning. I'm having a problem and you're going to fix it for me. I want that package here now, I don't care what you have to do to get it here. I've already called UPS twice, if there are anymore calls to be made to UPS, you will be making them. You listen to me, this is the second time in two weeks I've had this problem, and I'm telling you if I don't receive delivery of that package this afternoon, we will find a new provider who can handle our needs and you will lose this account. A delivery tomorrow is not acceptable. Someone better contact me to make this right."

So my complaint has been assigned to a "special team". Anyone want to take bets on if my package will arrive today? Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.

So sorry I haven't had time to return emails to people, especially Mondo, SuperSkater, MuppetLover and VBeta. VBeta, to answer the question you posed, Josh is not a schmuck. Although I have not met him, he is a dear blog friend and a nice guy, an assumption I am basing on the fact htat if you read his blog, he doesn't once mention ripping the heads off babies and feeding them to ferral raccoons. Don't worry, we gave Joshy a nickname and now this matter has been resolved. He will henceforth be known as JoshedPotatoes. He loves that nickname.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear about the stress Nancy. If I wasn't planning on making vegetables for dinner, I would invite you over to knit at my place. This way you wouldn't have to worry about dinner. Sometimes a change in scenery can help, you know? If this actually seems like it would help, let me know and I will put off the vegetables until later in the week - it won't be a great tragedy.

-MuppetLover

Anonymous said...

Ah! Sorry to JoshedPotatoes if you're reading this. Cupcake outed me w/r/t a comment I purposely didn't put on the blog. Of course I don't think you're a schmuck. I couldn't tell if your comment about our random nicknames was facetious. Now I feel like I've made a blog enemy both because you think I called you a schmuck and because that lead to a nickname for you. I don't believe Cupcake when she says that you like it. Although, if your nickname has potato in it and if you happen to work at a dry cleaners, that would be awesome.

Cupcake said...

No worries, Beta. JP is cool. Your email was so funny, I had to share it. I told JoshedPotatoes it was extra funny because you are not a bitchy person, but I loved the lines, "Who is this schmuck? Is this his first time reading a blog?"

I'm sure JP won't hold it against you, but if you want some penence, you can check out his blog and leave a nice comment. He has a great post about the Narnia movie.

J said...

I do not love that nickname, but thanks for standing up for me Cupcake and all is forgiven Vbeta.