Personal

I’m sitting at the Kinko’s on Broadway checking up on some oddities with my bank account (I’m a lot lower than I think I should be, which concerns me, especially when I’ve been doing a pretty good job at tracking my money lately). I thought I’d put up one key bit of information, though — my monitors are here! It’s still going to be a few days before I’m online more regularly from the looks of it — I’m trying to get ahold of a modem until I know whether or not it’s worth signing up for DSL access — but at least they’re here. Hopefully, pretty soon things will be more or less back to normal as far as my ‘puter access goes…woohoo!

6/17/05 Update: My lord…Microsoft canned me for a photo, but this post slipped right by Xerox? I got really lucky. In retrospect, a really stupid thing to post publicly.

In other news…well, my job is starting to get on my nerves a bit, unfortunately. The job itself isn’t really all that bad — while copying isn’t what I want to do forever, I know what I’m doing, and I like the actual place I’m working — I just feel like I’m caught in the middle of a power struggle, and it’s not the greatest place to be.

I think Xerox may have made a bit of a mistake by hiring for this position from a temp agency. Basically, as the XBS Account Representative, I’m supposed to be the resident Xerox person here. However, from my point of view, I feel much more like an Andersen employee than I do a Xerox employee — I work at, for, and with Andersen at all times, and Xerox is little more to me than another level of beaurocracy that as yet, has done little more than interfere with how I get paid, where and how quickly my supplies come from, and such. I even like the people I deal with at Andersen more than most of the Xerox people I’ve dealt with — admittedly, though, I do have much more contact with the Andersen people, so that’s likely to give me some amount of bias to start with. So in the end, I almost feel like a double agent from a bad spy movie — technically, my loyalties are supposed to be with Xerox, but they end up being much more with Andersen.

Aside from crossing my fingers on the Carnival Cruise Lines position, I’m not actively looking for another job anywhere just yet, though. When I first got tagged for this spot, I was asked to make a one year commitmentment to the position, and even though there is nothing signed and I’m still a temp worker, I don’t like backing out on something like that. However, the situation here is somewhat frustrating, and I can’t say as I’d complain if something worthwhile (such as Carnival Cruise Lines, or maybe a decent job somewhere in the tech sector) fell into my lap. Just this morning, I had to tell Shelley (my Xerox supervisor) that I’d watch what I said around the office here, as Lee (my Andersen supervisor) had slightly mis-interpreted something I said and gotten the impression that I was actively looking for another position somewhere. Since Lee had asked Xerox for someone willing to make a commitment, she wasn’t too excited about that, and asked Shelley about it — who then got miffed that she was hearing news like this from her client rather than her employee. I suppose I can understand where both Shelley and Lee are coming from — I just don’t like being in the middle of it.

This is kind of why I think Xerox shouldn’t have hired me for this spot straight out of a temp agency. If they’d brought in someone from Xerox instead, then not only would that person know more about the Xerox policies, procedures, and corporate atmosphere, then they’d probably see themselves much more as a Xerox employee than I do.

Ah, well, I suppose it’ll all get resolved one way or another eventually. At this point, I’m just keeping my fingers (and toes) crossed for the cruise lines. Since they said they’ll be hiring in the October/November range, I figure if I haven’t heard from them by Nov. 1^st I should be okay with giving a call or e-mail to see what the situation is, and whether or not I have a chance. Hopefully it comes through…but if not…well, I’ll figure something out.