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Jibralta

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Work has been pretty good. Some frustrations, but overall a pleasant place to work.

 

After my last job, I've become unaccustomed to being treated with a normal level of respect. Last week, the principal architect (Alan) thanked me for sending over some questions and I was totally freaked out.

 

I forwarded the email to my boyfriend and said, "These people are so normal and I'm flinching at shadows. I'm thinking, "What does he mean, 'thank you'??? Is this an ambush??" Clearly I have shell-shock from working at my last job, lol!"

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I smashed the everliving sh*t out of my knee on Tuesday morning. I didn't just fall to my knee, I landed directly on my knee from a raised surface.

 

I'm not really even sure how I managed to physically do it. I had been walking on a low, marble retaining wall. On the sidewalk was some loudmouth on a bicycle yelling back and forth with a loudmouth on foot. I didn't know if they were friends or enemies (in NJ, "go f*ck yourself" is often a term of endearment). So as soon as I got off of the light rail, I hopped onto the retaining wall in order to give them a wide berth. At that point, the wall was only a couple inches off the ground.

 

I walked along for about 50 feet until I came to the turn I wanted to take. The retaining wall made the turn as well. I saw that the ground had dropped away a bit, and that I was now standing maybe 12 inches above the ground. I decided to take the turn on the retaining wall instead of jumping off.

 

Then my foot slipped, and I couldn't recover. Wet marble--it's the worst, I already know. It wasn't really raining, but it was misting and that was just enough to make it slick.

 

I chose to come down on my knee. I have no idea what the alternative landing would have been, but that little voice inside of me said, "Knee is better." That little voice is right a lot. So, I listened.

 

How I accomplished the knee-landing, I'll never know. It certainly involved some amount of ridiculous flailing around. I was aware of the loud dude behind me on his bike, his exclamation as I started to flail, and his subsequent exclamation as I finally lost it and my knee cracked down on the pavement. I was aware of the light rail train beside me, just starting to pull away, passengers perhaps steeped in schadenfreude from my spasmotic crash landing.

 

I heard bicycle dude say, "I got you." I turned and looked up at him, sat back on my butt on the sidewalk, ironic smile on my face. He said, "I'll help you up." It was almost a question. I reached out my hand and he pulled me up. Man, my knee HURT. I think the guy asked if I was ok. I think I said yes.

 

I thanked him, dusted myself off, and limped the half mile to work. I could tell that I also pulled something in my hip/groin area. But about a quarter mile in, my limp started to smooth out.

 

Two days later, and I'm pretty much ok. My knee is a little stiff, but I can put weight on it just fine. No broken bone. I was worried about that. The swelling was really bad about an hour after I got to the office, and I worried that I may have fractured my knee. My dad broke his knee once and didn't know it until it woke him up at 3AM!

 

I told my boyfriend what happened and he brought me ice packs, advil, big bandaids, and bacitracin. He identifies as a Jewish Mother, lol.

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I actually had a sleepless night last night due to job-related stress. I tried to deny it for hours. I don't want to be stressed about a job again.

 

I'm stressed because this first project has a really tight deadline, and I don't think I can meet that deadline. I hate that.

 

While I was lying in bed last night, my thoughts were getting all confused. I would try to think down one line of reasoning but then the conclusion would somehow come out of left field and make no sense. It's kind of like what sometimes happens to my thoughts when I have a high fever and experience delirium. But I didn't have a fever. Maybe I was just very tired.

 

By 4AM, after hours of tossing and turning and worrying and not sleeping, I finally gave up on sleep and got up out of bed. I wrote Simon an email, in part to help me order my own mind about what was still outstanding. When I was done with the list, I sent the email. Then I went back to bed for about 45 minutes and actually did sleep a tiny bit.

 

Here is what I wrote (names have been changed, of course):

 

Byram-to-Wassim.png

 

When I got into the office, I had a reply from Simon:

 

Byram-from-Wassim.png

 

Once again, Holy sht. Normal response. Better than normal, actually. He didn't ease up any of the pressure and he basically said that he expects me to work over the weekend. But he gave me clear direction and expectations. And not only did he not insult me, he complimented me.

 

If this was Frank, the response would have been, "This is happening because you suck."

 

I'm wondering if my thinking felt confused last night because I was trying to initiate a blame-deflection strategy: why isn't this my fault? That's what worked in my last job. But I just couldn't get that line of reasoning to gain any traction in this situation. Perhaps subconsciously I know that the blame game doesn't pay off here. What a relief.

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And on your old boss :eek: thank goodness you're not there anymore!

 

He was terrible!!!!!! He's not the only one, either. The place was infested with people like him.

 

this boss sounds nice and easy to communicate with. Good luck!

 

Yes, reasonable and makes an effort to be kind!

 

Thanks!

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A lot better. I was able to do squats on Saturday without any issue.

 

This was my knee on the fist day, about an hour after I smashed it. It was very swollen, and I was pretty worried:

 

62488791536-14223-A8-D-9-B3-E-4-FE3-B8-C8-3-B015-F46-BFCF.jpg

 

This was my knee yesterday. The swelling is mostly gone. I find the bruising to be very interesting. I managed to bruise my shin, and the whole side of my calf is discolored. But those areas are not painful. My kneecap is still warm to the touch, and it hurts if I push on the abrasions (duh). But otherwise, it feels fine.

 

IMG-7489.jpg

 

IMG-7490.jpg

 

Thanks for asking :)

 

Glad your foot feels better.

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I worked much of the weekend, probably in excess of ten hours, but I still don't know if I will make the deadline. Something really irritating happened on Friday, which is the truss manufacturer came back with a truss that was smaller than what we specified for the roof of my building. Since this is just a pricing set, my boss said we should adjust our drawings to reflect the truss. If I was using Revit, this change could happen pretty fast, but I am using AutoCAD, plain AutoCAD, not even AutoCAD Architecture, so every change needs to be redrawn. These are the things that keep setting me back time-wise.

 

Nevertheless, I slept well and feel ok this morning. Stress will probably kick back in when I hit the office.

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