Mortaine’s Blog

Well, today is payday! That wonderful reason for actually going to work. Yippee! I’m really enjoying my job, although things are still very stressful and busy. Even though the exam is over, I’m still finishing up my certificate, and I started the last class in that last night. Whew! I want to finish *something* this spring, so I’m definitely going to go through and complete the certificate, even if it kills me. I kind of feel like that’s a refrain in my life right now– “even if it kills you.”

Well, today I went to take the second part of the MA exam. I failed. I know this because I couldn’t even finish the text. Two of the three sections were on poetry, my weakest area.

One of them seemed to expect you to know the authors and historical contexts of the poems themselves, without the exam question actually stating who those authors were. I hate tests like this– I’m pretty bad at remembering names and dates, so figuring out who wrote which poems would have been difficult, even if I was really strong in poetry. Which, as I’ve said, I’m not.

I walked out at 10:30, having only answered one question. I am going to have to re-take the exam in November. This sucks. It means I have to study– again. It means I won’t get my degree until December at the earliest. This might make teaching the science fiction class next Spring somewhat difficult. It may mean I have to take the Poetry seminar next Fall (this is the seminar that is unofficially required in order to pass Part II of the exam).

On the plus side, it also means that I will get to take the exam when I’ve had more time to prepare and feel more confident. I guess that’s a good thing.

I feel awful. After I left the exam, I started crying because I felt like such a complete and utter failure. It’s one thing to be prepared and to do the best you know you can do and to fail. It’s another thing entirely to know that you could have done better and didn’t.

Usually I have bad dreams. For the last week, though, I’ve been having bad sleep. Lots of tossing and turning, waking up in the middle of the night, etc. Weird dreams, more than bad ones, I guess. And, of course, this is frustrating because I need to sleep my full amount of rest at night, every night, because of my new schedule.

Come to think of it, this is probably just a schedule change thing anyway. Hopefully, I will settle into my new routine soon. My normal sleep routine is to have a nap in the afternoon. I know I’ve been missing that!

Well, you can tell that I started my new job on Monday– no entries since then, huh?

The job started on Monday, with a 90-minute (or so) orientation/training. Nifty. Learned all about the 401K, payroll, phone system, health insurance, yadda yadda yadda. Turns out, there are 2 other tech writers who started on Monday as well. They’re cool, but one of them seems kind of shy.

My cubicle is in the software department, which means I’m separated from the other tech writers, but not by much (a cube aisle).

Did I mention I work in a cubicle? Yeah– it’s driving me crazy. I don’t mind cube-land, although it means I am perpetually lost in the maze. I mind having my back to the door. When I go to restaurants, I sit with my back to a wall. I’m going to have to do something to re-orient my workspace a little, so at least the door is to my side, in my peripheral vision instead of behind me. Either that, or install a rear-view mirror.

I still don’t have Framemaker installed on my PC, which basically means I can get no work done yet (argh!) I’ve spent my time learning about the products, learning about the software and documentation, learning the new marketing strategy (ick), asking a bunch of questions and irritating everyone around me (probably), and doing whatever is needed in other programs (MS Word, or PowerPoint– had a presentation due tomorrow that I edited in PPT).

The commute is okay, but the last 15 minutes of it are a real bitch. Basically, they are doing construction starting just before the exit before the one I take to get to work. Three lanes cut down to two. At the same point where these cut down to two, there are a couple of onramps, so there’s additional commuter merge traffic as well.

There are a couple of ways around it, mostly involving surface streets. Today, I took one of these and it still took 15 minutes. But there was an accident up ahead, which was making traffic even worse than usual, so I decided to risk it. It probably saved me a few minutes here and there.

My commute time is averaging 1 hour exactly.

My boss is great. Even if I come in late, he’s not going to yell at me, just expect me to work later. I basically choose my hours, based on what time I want to brave the traffic, and what time I want to get home. Today and next week, I have classes at 6 on Tuesday and Thursday, so I want to leave here at 5:30. That means I have to get here at 9:00, counting in a short 30-minute lunch (which is what I’m on right now, btw).

James (my boss) is very supportive of the work I want to do, and since he doesn’t really know what to do with a technical writer, I have decided to demonstrate a lot of initiative and just go after the documentation projects that I think we need. If we have more to do, then that’s fine. If we have too much for me to handle, then I guess I will have to ask James to help me prioritize.

Oh, and a cool thing: They keep a basket of apples in the lobby. Not a plate of cookies– apples. Every day.

Next week, I will probably bring things to customize my workspace a bit– a photo of John, a plate or basket for visitor treats (and bribes for the IT guys), my “tech writer’s toolkit” of books that I need to have handy, etc.

Anyway, that’s the Week 1 update. I’ve got to get back to work, and probably should finish eating my lunch.

I probably work so much so that I can avoid stuff– usually other work commitments. I don’t generally avoid emotional stuff, though– I tend to charge right in and face up to my realities pretty well. Except the one which has me realizing that I have too much to do, and need to cut back.

I think I also do a lot because I really enjoy starting projects, and I like to envision them, but I don’t always see them through to the end. Or, I do see them through eventually, but not in the timeline that others would have preferred. I’ve always been that way, even in elementary school. I almost failed the 5th grade because I had to do book reports. My 5th grade teacher didn’t think I was much of a reader, and surprised my mom by suggesting that I didn’t read much. My mom was stunned, because of all the subjects in school that she thought I would do poorly at, reading was not one of them.

When I was a kid, I would turn off my bedside light when I heard my mom’s foot on the bottom step downstairs. She’d come upstairs and check on me (of course), and sometimes, she would put her hand over the lightbulb. Since the bulb was still hot, she could always tell that I wasn’t really asleep.

So finding out that I wasn’t handing in my book reports really ticked Mom off. She didn’t like the idea that I was having trouble in school because of reading. I finally handed in the last book report. . . . on the last day of school.

So, I’m a huge procrastinator. But I get things done eventually, and I work very quickly because I’m used to rushing to finish things at the last minute.

Oh, and another of my procrastination techniques– sleep. I tend to sleep a lot more when I am under a lot of stress and pressure. Strangely, sleeping does help me work quite a bit– I’ve actually solved a lot of work-related (writing) problems during a sleep session. When I was freelancing and writing my books, I would get into a pattern of sleeping for 6 hours in the morning, getting up and working for 4 hours, taking a nap from about 2 until 6, getting up, having dinner and some evening time with my husband, and then going back to work from 10 until 2 AM. It meant I slept 10 hours a day (but I was tired), sometimes more. But it also meant that I had a 4-hour time during which I was almost guaranteed to be undisturbed by phone calls and friends just dropping by (not because they think I’m bored, but because they are).

Of course, I’m thinking about sleep right now because it’s just after 10, I just got up, and I slept so much that I have a headache now. Eck. At least I won’t have to worry about getting too much sleep starting tomorrow– I have to be at work at 8:30 tomorrow morning! Yuck!