the venting effect

I'm not one to usually toot my own horn {TooooT} but sometimes it's essential to the story.

My two month time off/rehire process is over and I've been back to work now for about a month. In that time I've come to realize I am DAMN good at what I do and that my workplace suffered without me. And I mean suffered. My desk looked like it had upchucked after some really sketchy oysters and a round of tequila at a shady dive bar. That's not to say that nothing had been done. Some things had. But only the barest minimum. So minimum that you couldn't see it with the naked eye but needed a microscope to find it. For the first two weeks I was just focusing on what I had to do to catch us up.

Don't talk to me! Don't look at me! Can't you see I'm looking for that one specific, extremely important invoice from July 17th that HAS to be around here somewhere? Where is it? Have you seen it? Why are the gods messing with me?

Those were my days. For two straight weeks. But now that I'm caught up (that's right bi-atch, I caught up with two months worth of work in two weeks!) I'm beginning to see where the limited time I had to prepare my co-worker wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. And wouldn't have been enough if I had had a year to try. I don't say this to make what my workmate did while I was gone seem insignificant. She tried. She really did. It's hard when you go from two to one. Without me there, she was basically plugging the hole with her finger while the dam crumbled around her.

Her fatal flaw was thinking she knew what she was doing. She could have called me. Could have asked what was most urgent. Could have consulted those notes she took when I thought she was listening to me jabber on about why we do certain steps that might look redundant but are the LIFEBLOOD of my job! She chose to do it her way instead.

And now it's falling to me. Calls, emails, memos, requests.......they've begun to haunt my dreams. Some things weren't done correctly. Some were done only halfway. Some weren't done at all.

And this is why I vent.

Because if I couldn't, my office mate would need medical attention after I'd shaken her about by her eyeballs.