I'm Fine

An online contact messaged me one time and asked how I was.

Without missing a beat, I replied:  "aside from frustrations over mounting work and the need to revisit 2009 and 2010 computations and the nagging thought that the 1st Qtr reporting is looming and I haven't even touched 2011 figures, I'm fine. :-)"

Yeah, I guess you can call me passive-aggressive.  And a bit naive, for after I left the Great Place, I thought I any job I take would be comparatively boring.  It was that toxic.

But what do you know... I'm in another toxic job once again, and I'm loving it.  Honestly, I love it still.  I just hope the toxicity tapers off in the coming weeks, because I no longer have the well of patience I once had.  And I don't want a repeat of the work-induced hiatus of prior years.



       Hello Alphalist… Again!

Due to time constraints and the author’s lack of available gray matter, this blog has been temporarily postponed.


Tune in again after the author has finished with the Alphalist.


And the PNL.

And the PNL Analysis.

And the Cost Analysis.

And the Monthly Financial Statements.

And the Audit.

And the Letters of Authority from the BIR, for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.


… so hopefully, around August, I think…



published in friendster blog March 19th, 2008

The Alphalist Series

I started blogging while I was still a slave at the Great Place, with each of my entries advertised as notifications in friendster.  The alphalist series was one of the last few entries I made exclusively for that site.  After the brouhaha one officemate experienced, I searched for other venues to vent out my thoughts.

The alphalist, by the way, is the shortened term for Employees' Alphabetical Listing.  A summary schedule prepared by HR and Payroll annually for submission to the BIR, and consequently, the bane of us accountants during that audit year.  One month before its filing, and well in the middle of that audit season, Payroll gave up its attempts at recon and gave us the work.

We loved it, of course. 

  Goodbye Alphalist, hello PNL, for now…

It’s amazing how much load one can carry without complaining. But sometimes, even the workhorse need to be unloaded if you want it to function effectively.


Lately, it seems that too much work have been piled up to us that it is starting to get irksome, at the very least. The work itself is not a problem, though, but rather the manner on how the "work" came to be passed on to us. I mean, here we are, up to our elbows with our workload, and lo and behold!– more work, courtesy of another department. It just boils my entrails to be knee-deep in thought, trying to analyze a year’s muck just so I can come up with the accurate reports I need.


But why am I posting this here, on this blog containing my full name and the company I work for, fully aware that some listed friends are officemates? Because (1) I can, and (2) I am resting on the fact that my verbosity put people off enough NOT to read whatever trash I write. Basically, I’m hiding behind my words and my thoughts. Even though this way of writing is all but normal to me, most people I know tend to shy away from it, cursing its length and its polysyllabic entries. Thus, I feel that somehow, this venting is safe from the prying eyes of officemates.


But now, I wander. I am here to vent after all, and not to explain myself nor expound on my vocabulary.


I love working. I love the sense of fulfillment I get after finishing off a report, or after unraveling some profound reportorial quagmire. What I don’t like is the monotony of it; of doing the same things day in and day out, slaving away on your computer screen, waiting for your computer to process what you are thinking fast enough before it slips our mind. I love the analysis portion of it, but I am starting to loathe the boring manual side to it. And thank the heavens my store is large enough to merit an assistant to "train" and to do the work I have started to detest.


But just when I have started to unload myself with the non-analytical aspects of work, here comes more work, more slavish pursuits, to eat up my time away from my analysis.


Complaining is fun. This is a mantra from one of my favorite essayists that I’ve adopted for my own. But I daresay there are limits to the "fun-ness" of complaining. Complaining about work with officemates is okay, and is healthy, but once you complain to friends about your work, then I think you now have a problem. Your friends, not being in the same office as yourself, does not know the full extent of what you do, and therefore is not privy to your suffering; fictional or otherwise. It is therefore useless to complain to them for they do not understand the extent of your burdens. They should thus be exempted from random bickering regarding your job. Besides, they can only give you one logical piece of advise — if you don’t like your job, resign.


But I don’t hate my job, and I don’t want to resign… or at least not yet. Having been dangled a promotion, and then for it to be surreptitiously forgotten is reason enough to lose morale (and maybe to find it somewhere else) but I feel that there are more things here to be explored. And somehow, there seems to be a silver lining for me. I now have two offers; one a change of work; the other a change of approach, but in conjunction to the same work. One rather serious and possibly executable; the other rather flippant, and maybe more talk than deed. I don’t want to talk about it yet in fear of either (or both) fizzling, but the idea of being able to do a different work rather tickles my fancy. I fervently hope that it does push through…




published in friendster blog February 1st, 2008

To Do Lists

 

This is what occupies most of my waking moments for the past few months.  We've yet to finalize everything, but I am hopeful we'll make it through.  It isn't like we're still in square one after all; we've pushed through a long long way, and for that I am proud of our accomplishments.  

But one more season like this and I'll probably loose my mind.  And I almost have, for a spell.  I've gone through anxiety attacks the likes of which I have not suffered before, and all because of my work.  

When it comes to that, I make lists.  Somehow, the act of committing into paper the number of tasks you need to accomplish eases the panic in my mind.  It doesn't matter that I wouldn't be able to even hope to finish everything written, it doesn't even matter how many reams of paper is used to list down all the tasks at hand.  What matters is that all the tasks are written; concrete; defined.  

It's infinitely easier tackling an opponent you can see and define; rather than the monster your mind whispers you should kill.

End of An Era

Finally, after years of struggle, Friendster finally hangs its towel.


It was one of the pioneers of social networking and took the country by storm.  Suddenly, not only were people cam-whoring to death, they were posting pictures everywhere.

I got into the bandwagon because a friend urged me to it.  And like the multitude before me, and indeed after me, I was hooked; not only on the prospect of committing my life online, but on the perverse joys of peeking on other people's lives.  Suddenly stalking became the vogue.


Then, one day, they introduced the blogging feature, and I was intrigued.  Now they did not pioneer the blog phenomenon, but then the prospect of writing my thoughts did appeal to me.  And the idea of it's being secure, with only my contacts being privy to my thoughts gave me the needed push to give it a try.


Unfortunately, Friendster got so popular that everyone I worked with at the time already had an account and everyone had added me as a friend.  Suddenly my thoughts weren't so private anymore.  So when I got wind of this little-known site called Facebook, I latched on to it willingly to avoid the rush and crush of unwanted eyes looking onto my pictures and my activities outside of the office.  Around the same time, I heard of Blogspot and Multiply, and the idea of blogging anonymously then appealed to me, hiding my thoughts on plain sight, so to speak.


And when an officemate was called in by HR due to a blog she posted on her Friendster account, I knew I was correct in moving my thoughts to a different venue.  Although I still opine that I wasn't called in as well because of my penchant for writing in English, which most officemates had an aversion to.


And now, Friendster is closing, announcing to its (former) users to get their data off the site or forever loose it.


Finally, an ultimatum to once and for all migrate all my posts here.