As I think I’ve discussed previously, for the past year and almost a half, since October 2008, I’ve been doing my job as well as a goodly amount of the subrogation responsibilities. I was given these responsibilities as a stop-gap measure until other arrangements could be made for this work. However, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I find it hard to squeak. And frankly, the OT bucks were very nice, coming in handy to pay off my Discover card bill. But things couldn’t continue in this vein forever.
So beginning a month or so ago, the cracks began to show. I should have recognized the signs. I’ve been struggling with Kelly Bundy Syndrome for a couple of months, but I just chalked that up to extended senior moments and vitamin D deficiency. But last week, I lost it. There was this big project that I was working on for Steve, even working 9 hours on a Sunday. He was being very needy, and I found myself not being myself anymore, snarking at him, or anyone, really, and crying at the drop of a hat. Fortunately it would appear that even when I think I’m being a completely unreasonable bitch, other people just think I’m "off" from my usual. So obviously it’s not as bad to others as it appears to me. Which I suppose is good. That week I drove home more than one night in tears.
Then a week ago Monday, I lost it. I was working on an Excel spreadsheet (another project of Steve’s) and had a question about it, so I went to Shawn (our HR person)’s office. I know, I know, we have an IT Department, but don’t get me started on that or we’ll never get to the end of this story. In the process of discussing my question in Excel, I broke down in tears and blubbered out my story. It hadn’t come as a shock, as she’d been watching it slowly happen. Ok, that sounds bad, but I don’t think she was waiting with glee or anything, just she expected it sometime. Plus she’d been helping with the big project for Steve.
As it turned out, Steve was in the office next to her office talking to the attorney in there and she saw him leaving and asked me if I wanted her to get him. In a moment of weakness, I nodded my head yes. Now, if I had not been blind with snot and tears, I probably would have laughed at what I can only imagine Steve’s reaction to walking into a room and seeing me there blubbering was. He gets this uneasy grin on his face when he’s not sure what’s going on – I can see it in my head now.
Anyway, I managed to blubber my woes out again. Basically everyone - Steve, Carrie (who was not in the meeting, but would have been happy that it happened, as I’d broken down in her office the previous week), and Shawn – all agreed that I’d been doing the work of at least 2, if not 3, people for a year and more, and it was time to remove some of that responsibility from my shoulders. Now I, being a control freak, hate the idea of not being able to do something, and I just know that if the job goes from me to someone else (it doesn’t matter who), that person will NOT be able to do it as well as I did it, so the client’ll suffer and the whole world will go to heck in a handbasket. Now, rationally, I realize that isn’t the case, but I’m saying what my irrational self goes through.
Steve, Lord love him, jumps at the chance to remove subro from my life (with, according to my mother, more than just a little self-interest). Subro is a beast and it needs continual feeding. There were several parts of subro that I was responsible for: the filing of suits, monthly reports and disbursal to the client, and dealing with the files in settlement status. After all of the fallout, the parts of subro that I was doing are being doled out to three different people. Something that makes me feel sort of proud that I was doing so much, but also sort of pisses me off that it’s so much work that it gets divided amongst three people, but that while I was doing it all and not complaining, "we" didn’t have a problem letting me do it all. Sigh. I guess that’s why I earn the big bucks…. and the OT was nice.
Long story short, the pain in my lower back disappeared THE DAY that I broke down in Shawn’s office, it was obviously psychosomatic, and I’m not dreading coming to work like I had been. I’ve planned my vacation… but that’ll be another blog. And I’m going through separation anxiety while doling out the subro work I was doing. Not all of it, mind you. I had really got to the point where I was hating having to file the suits.. mostly, though, because I was having to obtain copies of the forms that each piddly county in Indiana uses for their small claims cases and then make that document into a merge form. Note to our elected officials: couldn’t you find one form and make it the official small claims form for the entire state??
No comments:
Post a Comment