Three weeks and two days later…

Good afternoon my dear people,

It is with great shame that I greet you all…

I can’t believe it’s been exactly 3 weeks and 2 days since my last post. I remember when people used to say that I wouldn’t be able to blog anymore once I get a job… I thought they were telling lies from the pit of hell, trying to destroy my blogging career. Here I am now, almost a month later and I can’t explain why I’ve been away for so long.

How’s the job going you ask?

I have two answers… there’s the Nigerian/Christian answer; “I thank God. God is awesome. I bless his holy name and I praise him for my misery.”

Then there’s the truth; “I hate my job.”

I know I sound ungrateful and I feel bad saying that I despise my job, but it is what it is. And the strange part is that it started out so well… initially, there was nothing to do. We had a few days of training and induction. I used to carry a jotter around and I wrote down every single thing anyone had to say. I honestly thought I was learning HR shit…

After that, I became bored out of my skull… there was literally nothing to do. I was everywhere, bugging people for stuff to do. Everybody kept telling me to relax and enjoy my freedom. They said that a time would come when I would be begging for breathing space… but I didn’t listen. Those days, I felt I had more than enough breathing space… too much breathing space in fact. I had so much breathing space I thought my nostrils had become like OBJ’s own.

But then people started to take advantage of my over-eagerness to work. One lady put me to work addressing envelopes for almost a whole day. Another one left me in a room full of files stacked from floor to ceiling. I had to look for one file… it was like searching for dignity in Miley Cyrus. Needless to say, I didn’t find it. Then I started spending time in another department, but those ones had me doing manual labor as well. I realized that people had heard my gist and they knew me as that girl who was hungry for work… I might as well have been going around with a sign that said, “WILL WORK FOR WORK”.

So I went into my Spider Solitaire phase. I would sit in my office for hours, trying to beat my own high score. I learned how to pull the perfect frown in front of my laptop screen… it was a frown that said, “Leave me the fuck alone… I’m not playing Solitaire, I’m attending to serious company HR tinz n’ shii” so whenever my boss checked on me, I looked like I was indeed attending to serious company HR tinz n’ shii.

I love my boss. I have many bosses but I really like this one. He’s so nice, and very soft spoken and I like that he treats me like a child, even though I suspect that the age difference between us isn’t so much. He’s just the way I imagined Jesus would look if Jesus was black and balding.

Speaking of age, my colleagues think I’m much younger than I really am. I don’t mind, but the problem is that I’ve got Yoruba women who are almost my age expecting me to refer to them as Ma’m, not because they are above me in rank, but because they THINK they are older than me. And we all know how respectful Yoruba people can be…

smh…

Anyway, after loafing around for a while, things changed and all of a sudden, work started… and I’ve been miserable ever since. My friend said that I’ve become a shadow of my former self. I went from being a bored-yet-content Spider Solitaire champion to an over-worked, cranky, suicidal  bitch over night. My brother says the only difference , to him, is that I’m over-worked.

I’ve even changed location. I’m now in another office… I’m representing my company there and doing HR tinz. The people here refer to me as their Consultant. My first day here, I called my entire family to tell them that my name had changed along with my level… I wanted to kill a cow when I was called an “HR Analyst”. I almost shit in my pants when I was called “Consultant”. I was so excited because the only time anyone ever consults me is for XXX-rated jokes.

Little did I know that “Consultant” is just another way of saying “Shit-eating problem solverer”.

Work is hard, but I’m surviving. My second day here, two of the ladies here asked me to read their dress code. Of course, I didn’t have it, so one of them actually e-mailed it to me. It had a list of things I can and cannot wear, and they are very particular about colors; strictly grey, black, blue and white.

I el-o-eld (LOLed) when I read it… and I’ve decided that when I get paid, just to spite them, I’m going to invest in a few bright pink and neon green shirts. And strappy sandals… and huge metal earrings that will spark whenever I’m near their transformer. Then, just for fun, I might get an ankle tattoo… of a snake with their company’s logo in it’s mouth. That should teach them to not tell me what to wear.

The worst part is that there’s no free lunch in this new office… I don’t want to make a big deal out of it really. It seems like such a petty thing to complain about. Besides, it’s not like I enjoyed the free lunch at headquarters. I don’t know what culinary school the chef attended… cos someone didn’t teach him that beef is supposed to be cooked. The meat used to be so tough and raw-looking that if you listened to it, you could actually hear it “Moo”. And I figured that, if I collect all the oil in his stew, by early 2014 I should own an oil block…

I’m done with stuff I’ve been working on for the past 5 days. That’s why I had some time to relax so I decided to spend it gisting with you guys. And I’m sorry for being away for so long 🙁 I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again ok?

God bless.

xo