If you want something really, really bad...

I jammed my thumb in the car door today. Ooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!!

Normally I'm not this clumsy, must have caught it from some of my colleagues who manage to hurt and maim themselves almost daily.

Or do hilariously crazy shit. Like today when we were looking at a picture of our agency's soccer team online. We were debating if that was colleague A in the picture since he wasn't wearing glasses and looked kind of strange. Well, a co-worker of mine grabbed a pen and scribbled a pair of glasses on his face, right onto the computer screen. With permanent marker. :D

First week of work in 2012 done. Uff.

A co-worker has been on sick leave since last October so we've been doing her work on the side for months now already. This week, we had to split the workload previously done by our two collegues who had to go because their fixed-term employment contract had run its course. The co-worker, I'm sharing my office with, will be off next for maternity leave in the middle of February so we will then "re-asign" the work anew.

Also, that means many, many more having to go to court sessions for the rest of us. Sigh.

And the new colleague we've gotten beginning of this year has never worked in our field and will require extensive legal training before even beginning to be of help. My guess is maybe summer this year before she can be allowed to draft up documents unsupervised.

Not to mention the department we're absolutely and utterly depending on for our work has been cannibalized again. And they were understaffed and completely overworked to begin with.

Yup, this year is going to be interesting. I kinda wanna hide under my blanket and not come out till next Christmas. Eek. :/

Am still determined not to get swallowed up in it all. There are already a couple of colleagues in treatment for depression and burn-out who ran themselves ragged in the past. I still like my job and my team and I'll do my best to keep the boat afloat but I won't let it squeeze my life's blood out of me.

We have this one client at work who has started pressing charges against anybody working their case (not working it to her liking that is). She pressed charges - for "perversion of justice" which is a major crime here no less and totally not applicable to the work we do because we're not judges or anything - against my boss. She pressed charges against my colleague. Now the case was handed down to me and I wrote up some documents on it today. Guess, I'm next. *groan*

And soon enough, probably anyone who just walks by that casefile is gonna get it.

It would be funny if it weren't so obnoxious.

At work we get kind of a monthly newscast/newsletter which covers all kind of stuff. Usually there is a health-related topic in each edition, like "exercising in the office" or "sleeping trouble" or stuff like that.

The newest one covered the topic of stress. So, like I said there is a live feed and a written transcript of such. I usually only read the transcript to save time and today I found this wonderful gem, a quote from a doctor on stress - of course, it was in German, but the translation works even better: "you are stressed out, you go home and feel listless and not motivated to do anything but after two hours on the coach, do you really feel better?"

Don't know, dude, depends entirely on the coach. I just might. *g*

I checked the live action feed and of course, the word said was "couch". So either the transcriber didn't know how to spell "couch" or it was a Freudian slip - FNL fan, perhaps? Teehee. Cracked me up.

At the end of this year, about 35 people will be let go at my workplace. Not exactly fired but their contracts won't be renewed. Some of them have been working there for six years. Wow.

My department alone will lose 4 people, that is HALF of us. And we are already understaffed now. Then again, everybody is understaffed and in total we will lose 25 % of the entire staff. I have no idea how the "upstairs" folks think we are supposed to manage. I can already tell you, we won't. And we're social services, basically, if we don't manage, people in need won't get their money. Guess that doesn't matter.

Also, I can already predict what is going to happen: step 1) we will fall even further behind on our cases - step 2) evil layers from hell will sue the skins of our backs - step 3) after having lost twice the money they would have needed to pay all these 35 people for a year in a couple of months, they will scramble like mad to rehire - step 4) since most of the well-trained but let go personnel has found other jobs, they will rehire newbies which take intensive training which will cost more time and money - step 5) rinse and repeat.

Seriously, the above scenario took place at other branches already and yet they still never, ever learn. Ever.

Sometimes, I think I'm working for the Cylons "all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again." Indeed, my Cylon employers, indeed.

If by sheer dumb luck my contract hadn't been remade into a permanent one back in July, I, too, would once again be jobless next year. So, on the one hand, I'm one of the lucky ones, on the other, I distinctly feel a noose tightening around my neck right now. *gurgle*

Drat. I ordered a new wall unit as well as a couch, TV chair and table for my living room last week since my old furniture is only kept together by force of habit. And ever since I ordered, I've been all revved and ready to install and fill the new wall unit with all my books and DVDs, I even keep making plans in my mind where I'll put what. The mere thought makes my little OCD-heart go pitter-patter with glee.

And if you think that's freaky, I also love packing suitcases. :D

Unfortunately, everything will take 8 to 12 weeks to be delivered. *makes grabby hands* I can hold out on the couch pretty easily, even though my old one keeps biting me (loose spring poking me whenever I slide in a certain spot). But, shelves and shelves to fill... Not that I expect there to be room to spare when I'm done. While I do plan on throwing a few things out, space-wise, it won't be much different to my old ones, just a different arrangement. Though that alone could solve a couple of current shelving problems I'm having.

Of course before all that I'll need new carpeting - the old one bears proud scars from our dear Rolli. And walls will need repainting as well. Behind my couch you can see a phantom shape of basically me, embedded in the wall. Ahem.

Sigh, so much to do. At least the long delivery date gives me a bit more time to save up on the money for the whole project.

The one thing, though, I'll be really missing from my old wall unit? A build-in little safe. I used to think that was so cool when I was little. And yup, that should tell you how old that thing is. And a hand-me-down to boot. :)

In other news, starting on Friday, I'm off work for two glorious weeks. Hooray. Still have a ton to get done tomorrow, of course. Expect to actually get done maybe half. At least I nearly worked my way through all the court-related documents today. Yuck.

The Social Court that has jurisdiction in our area is the buisiest in all.of.Germany. And it damn well shows. The judges are getting grumpier by the second. Today I got a court order, or better saying a "reminder" to follow said court order in three weeks, threatening an official complaint if we wouldn't comply. The complaint would probably go against our whole department but since it's my assigned case, it would ultimately fall on me. Yippie. And of course they had to send this via our big boss' office so she saw it before it landed on my desk. Double Yippie.

Nevermind the fact that I explained that we needed time to comply and asked for overtime. Oh well, I send in a 50 pages! notice (normally they are around 5-10) in, containing three of the five months they wanted us to basically "re-do". I have asked my colleague to send in the "other half" when it's done.

Now, I actually like my work. I don't mind it containing a lot of number crunching - in fact, that is easy compared to the "wonky" cases, I don't even (half)-mind having to read through huge stacks of files to solve basically one case. But I hate, hate, HATE the lawsuits. Which is deeply ironic considering I studied law but damn, do I not wanna handle any stuff related to the court-side of things. Sigh.

Gah, you are the Federal Labour Agency, you are supposed to have some inkling of labour law. *headdesk*

In October they offered up a job position at my work-place, you know in-house. It is the same position I'm already in, just on a permanent basis instead of for a limited period. I (and my other colleagues) applied, there was a round of interviews with us all and one of my colleagues got it. So far, so good - well, so okay since I didn't get it.

Now, they have offered up another permanent position (again same job I'm doing already). And since they told us over and over and over and over again nothing matters but the job interview, how you present yourself there. Your work? Your investment in the job? Nobody cares in terms of those permanent jobs. It's those twenty interview minutes that do count. So the advice was: sell yourself.

Which I was all pumped and ready to do after applying for the new position. However, while one of my other colleagues got HIS invite for the interview, I got...nothing. (So did other colleagues, or didn't as the case may be). Finally, after asking, I was informed that I wouldn't get to DO an interview, they would just take their notes from the one I did in October. And all they can take is notes because the person doing it back then is NOT the one deciding about the job now. Of course, they will also not tell me the content of those notes, how I did or my fucking spot in the ranking formed after said interview in October. So, basically, I could be in eleventh place and if ranks two to ten have re-applied now for this second position? I'm already out. Correction, I have been out before I was ever in.

Why did my colleague get in interview then? He didn't apply for the position in October but applied for another one (in-house) recently. Of course, they could never take THAT interview into consideration because it was a different position (that of our boss to be exact).

So, to sum it up, I was graciously offered to apply for a permanent position but not to participate in the one deciding criteria they have stressed. Sounds peachy, right?

Well, work-place, we shall let the Labour Courts decide on that, shall we? *headdesks again*

To add to that recently little arguments to outright power struggles have begun in our team. Now, we still get along well enough as a whole but some stuff, I really do find petty. If I'm asking someone to go to court for me and present four or five of MY cases there AND I give them the casefiles "clean", that is without any pre-preparation on my part which means they will have to spend a couple days prepping themselves for so many cases, I don't think it's unseemly for them to expect ME to do one or two of their appeal cases in return. But nope, when we discussed it today it was a lot of "why? reaaaaaaally? I'm sure it will even out sometime on its own".

You know just yesterday when I drove home from work - for the last few weeks I have to take a by-pass because of road construction and parts of it are extremely narrow with parked cars left and right - I mused that sooner or later I'm going to have an accident there.

Well, turned out it was sooner. Today, I went home and suddenly bam, my rightside mirror was torn off. And what do you know, those things are hella expensive. It only took five minutes to fix it but the mirror itself was a 100 Euro. Splendid.

The only good thing was that the driver of the parked car I skimmed, a young soldier, was there when it happened and very nice, too. He even handed me parts of my mirror. :) And told me his car was fine. Phew.

Still, after unpleasantness at work today - I actually kinda like the work and the environment is cool there but that constant drum-roll of "meet your quota, meet your quota, here are new quotas to meet" is getting tiresome, it was a "nice" way to end it. Our boss transferred, or shall I say got promoted, and he didn't do pretty much any work for the last six months so now we are left with the shambles. Today, I got a letter from the court ordering us to finally do x and x NOW or they'd file a formal complaint. And okay, I had that file sitting on my desk for two weeks without getting around to do it but he had it a couple months. Also sure, the complaint wouldn't be against me personally but since it is my case, it will become my responsibility to fix it, stat. And it will require doing extensive calculations for every month starting September 07 till now. Oy.

I have so much other urgent work that needs to be done. To meet our quota of course. Sigh. In the last few weeks I racked up about 20 hours of overtime.

First month of new job pretty much done. Yay.

Still don`t have a real work-place of my own, "legal" computer use or any definite statement on if I`m gonna stay in this department or not. Well, no hurry, right? I`m young, I still have a few good years on me. *rollseyes*

I DO hope I`ll stay, however, because the colleagues are very friendly and the work - as much as I can do right now - is fun.

Also today was the first day I went there by car instead of taking the bus since it took a bit of time for my Mom to get her new car so I could take her old one. Now I haven`t really driven for oh, about four to five years so was a bit apprehensive. Especially as there are some nasty "hurdles" along the way, like really, really steep bends and stuff. Still, I neither crashed the car, nor myself, nor anybody else so I consider it a win. Found a parking space for free - another win. Okay, it`s a little walk to the office but I`m not cruising around the city for 20 minutes so I can spare myself an 8 minute walk. Lots of colleagues do it, though, and during lunch break they even need to go and "re-park" their car because the spots nearer are either paid parking or time-limited parking. Pfft.

All in all, things could be worse in Me-land. :D

I checked back in with the job center because I still have no answer about the job and the woman I spoke to didn`t know for sure but it looks as I didn`t get it. There is a dim possibility I will get news tommorrow or Friday but she doesn`t think so.

I already kinda suspected when my "inside source" told me they were looking to hire older folks, 40 plus. When I did the IQ-test-thingie, apart from myself and one other girl everybody looked that age. Huh. Why invite me at all then? Could have spend my time better than waiting for them to get it together.
And I guess the no-car was an issue too. *sigh*

Back to searching again. :/