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