On today sucking

I know this is a knitting blog, but sometimes, we all need to vent, right?

Today is Not A Good Day.

On the minor-annoyance end of the spectrum, we have the fact that CP left the house this morning with the keyring that holds the one key that opens the side door to the building, so after my run (ok, walk/jog; mostly jog), instead of re-entering the building through the close side door, I had to trek around to the main entrance; and then my breakfast waffle tasted like toasted, sugar-coated styrofoam.  Also, I just had to try to spell styrofoam 3 times--that's going on the list too.

Then we get to the moderately-irritating middle of the spectrum, where we find that my office computer had some sort of brain aneurysm overnight, leading it to proceed through a ridiculous series of checks and crosschecks and internal repairs this morning that took 1.5 hours. The blue screen of not-quite-death-but-you-never-know looked something like this:

Phase 1 of 487.2, .0000005% complete, fixing error in completely non-essential file XPRQgobbledegook
Deleting file XPQblah-that-you'd-better-hope-isn't-important
Deleting file XIDblah-that-you'd-better-hope-isn't-important

Deleting file X17blah-that-you'd-better-hope-isn't-important

Deleting file P7$blah-that-you'd-better-hope-isn't-important

Deleting file R@1blah-that-you'd-better-hope-isn't-important
Phase 2 of 487.2, .00000008% complete . . .

And once that finally cleared up and the computer decided to more-or-less function, it became apparent that Outlook somehow got screwed up in the repair process, and had to be re-repaired, which took another hour. Did I mention that our tech guy was nowhere to be found during this entire mess?

Finally, we get to the righteous anger end of the spectrum, the truly rage-inducing event that everything else is just piled on top of, like lima bean frosting on a cake made of . . . poo.

Back story: Fresh out of my graduate program with a Master's degree in Latin American and Hemispheric Studies, I started this job 4.5 years ago at the P1 level, which is understandably meaningless to readers, but it's basically the bottom rung of the Professional salary scale (as opposed to the Administrative scale).

And 4.5 years later, I'm still here. At the P1 level. Despite the fact that after a coworker (at the P2 level) left, I took on most of her responsibilities.

I finally worked up the courage to talk to my boss about moving up to the P2 level early last year and the short version of her response was, "You do 90% of your job well, but you don't spew out half-baked ideas just because you like to hear yourself talk, and you don't kiss political a$$, so no. But I'll keep it in mind." And then she shipped me off to freaking GUYANA, presumably to see if I could handle doing missions on my own (How she would evaluate this without being present or READING THE REPORT I WROTE, I have no idea).

In July, another coworker left, and his post has remained vacant. Until about a month ago, when boss announced that she'd interviewed candidates and hired someone to fill it without ever mentioning it to the rest of the team--or opening it up to competition, which as far as I know, isn't "legal" in our organization.

Today, I was asked to reformat the job description for New Person--lo and behold, guess who's being brought onto our team at the P2 level?
Has she worked elsewhere in the organization? No.
Does she have a Master's degree? No.
Has she worked on drug control policy before? No.


Needless to say, I am livid. I'm frustrated and insulted and I'd be lacing my shoes to dash out the front door if we weren't currently working to secure financing to buy a home. Each day it becomes increasingly clear that my job is futile and meaningless, but apparently I'm not even any good at it. Random people off the street are presumed to be better at it than I am.

That hurts.