I am deeply satisfied over a little thing I just did in Excel. I have almost no business using Excel, because I don’t know how. A friend talked me thru making a spreadsheet to use with my bosses. I can’t do any operations without her telling me what to do, but I can do some minor editing.
Today I’d googled how to change the name of a file. That was a tough thing to find, not least because Excel doesn’t call them files, it calls them workbooks. I spent probably 15 minutes being dogged about it but not figuring it out, and getting that hopeless and frustrated feeling I am so familiar with. I kept trying though, and all of a sudden I figured out what I needed to do, even tho it wasn’t actually spelled out anywhere. I just kept noodling around until somehow, I figured it out. I tell ya, that felt good. Not confident and triumphant good, because I have no expectation that I’ll solve my next Excel/tech problem that way, nor that I’ll have the time to. But a deep and solid kind of good, unattached to any expectation of a repeat.
And now I can call my FILES heh heh heh exactly what I want to!
I was in a meeting with my two bosses today, discussing the info in said workbook. The bosses are on me all the time about being too detail oriented and inflexible. They’re really obnoxious and insulting about it. During the meeting, one of them commented that I’m the only one of the staff who color-codes her schedule. He said “your schedule is so detail-oriented and so organized;” he meant that I can tell at a glance exactly what type of session I will have and how long it will last. Other people have to go into their individual appointments to find that out (altho they may know by heart and not need to). I know that boss meant it as a compliment, but there is such a history of them slamming me for being too much that way, that I couldn’t quite trust it as a compliment. (If he hadn’t said ‘detail-oriented,’ I think I would have trusted it.) I responded by smiling and shrugging and saying “that’s me.” But it didn’t feel clean. It felt like I was zinging him a tiny bit, which I was, tho I hadn’t planned to. But it didn’t feel GOOD. I wish I could have simply said “thanks. It works for me.”
I do not trust these bosses, 5.5 years into my tenure at this practice. They’re judgmental and inconsistent. Every now and then they do something fantastically kind and helpful, but it can be long stretches in between, and I kindof have my guard up most of the time. There is another practice I could apply to. It’s been hard to gather up the ooomph though. I don’t remember if I wrote in this blog, in May 2016, that I got 3 job offers in two weeks. I’d done well at job-hunting and at my interviews, and I was flying high. I’d love to find that energy and harness it right up.
PS I looked up mistrust and distrust; they’re synonyms. According to my collegiate dictionary, anyway. The OED may have something else to say.
