Hearing the music of the chairs...

Post Reply New Topic

Just wanted to chime in and mention that my contract terminated today.

The good news at least is that I got a lot of positive feedback. To make a long story short this was a very challenging post in that I had scant training, the accounting entries were loaded with policy caveats (I wasn't allowed to do much), the purchasing group was bad enough to let invoices go two, three, even four months unprocessed and their entries of new vendors were equally bad, all the while I had one or two people nipping at my heels and working in AP I was full-time traffic cop charged with beating a dead horse, ie. the buyers, all day long to do their job.

It was supposed to be a temp to hire - lots of changes happened within a few months; one retirement, the manager was supposedly moved to a special project (which I still wonder if it's a cover for her to train the new supervisor before they ask her to leave also), the new supervisor brought in one of her own people and I and another temp were just let go. I think this was most telling when my bosses boss introduced me a month or so back to the new supervisor a someone who was 'helping them get caught up'.

I have mixed feelings about bait and switch getting pulled on me, truthfully it happened also on the last contract - a six month temp-to-hire that saw massive changes in leadership at the top two months in to my employment and from then on it wandered from temp-to-hire over to temp-to-temp-some-more.

I'm really looking forward to having a couple months off now, or at least most optimistically a few weeks. I'm living at home, caught my savings up at least a little, and was getting freaked out a bit my something I was noticing with my own body. I was getting a lot of stress complaints, not even anxiety (although I had that in spades) so much as a whole variety of digestive issues that seemed to be one to one with the stress and additionally a kind of pain and fatigue that would almost be reminiscent of how fibromialgia is described if I actually had it. All of that told me that my body was getting overtaxed by what I was doing to it.

Rest will be critical - that's for sure.

Other than that; whether I get another accounting job or whether I end up going more for professional warehouse type stuff or even just a high end retail job, I don't know. My concern has been that the human element of work takes a job that I could do at my own pace and makes it the kind of thing where I'd have to put a significant portion of my after-work life up on the shelf not to net negative on energy continuously and drive my health into ruin. So that does make me wonder whether this will get better, whether my job was legitimately a nightmare scenario or particularly bad even against the normative reality of the corporate world, and really my true north is this - I want to financially take care of myself and look after the overall physical, emotional, endocrine, and neurological health to make sure I'm not financially making ends meet at the expense of my mind and body (for certain reasons that's critical to me and I could get into that later).

As for why I called this thread 'hearing the music of the chairs' - it's a joke I thought up today, thinking of Pythagoras' music of the spheres and the constant corporate shuffling of departments, responsibilities, etc.. that I feel like I see often - almost like the higher ups in these companies think their in congress and need to fix things till they're broke in order to show the people around them that they're occupied with something. The writing on the wall was illegible from so many angles and self-contradicted but I think it was the music of the chairs that cleared it up for me and let me know that this job would be letting go of me. I dearly hope that it's letting go of me in the direction of brighter times and places of significantly less gridlock and convolution.

I hope you are able to get sufficient rest....then another job in just a few weeks.

the reference to Pythagoras and "the music of the spheres" is witty.