First Week in January in Retrograde and a Full Moon

That is what this past week has felt like! To kick it off, I was a huge asshole to Awesome Roommate over the weekend when I interpreted her wanting to spend time with me as her using me for my car. I apologized to her Monday because I knew snapping at someone and fuming silence isn't deserved. It took my brother and my therapist to clue me into the whole maybe she likes me and wanted to hang. That made me feel like I had kicked a puppy.

I cried in my office almost every day this week. Just a general feeling overwhelmed and that I am screwing everything up wave of emotions. Super Boss cried in my office too. I did not know how little he has told his wife about our work. When he told her about screaming employee, during their holiday vacation, he got angry and upset all over again. I have gotten past being upset because I have told the story to so many people and the story I tell is not focused on how much work and emotionally difficult he was. It's more about how here's the asshole who broke our system but our system is mean so as long as we get our money, it's all good. I get to not cancel health insurance. Super Boss was also upset that he hasn't had time to properly train the new hire analysts, Prince Analyst and Worker Bee Analyst. I tried to point out that both he and I started the job being thrown in the deep end and yes it wasn't optimal but we learned. Sometimes when we have these talks, it feels like we are basically saying, "We don't want to raise our kids the way we're raised" - ha!

Our IT department has built a billing automation process that I had no time to properly run through the paces in the test environment but now the deadline has passed and it is in production. A lot of the new features I like but the week between Xmas and New Years I had to ask for bug fixes every single day. This week in an hour meeting that stretched into four hours, Super Boss and I discovered the process built into the automation is not the process we have developed over nine months. We discovered this a week before I had planned to run our monthly billing so we flipped the fuck out in a meeting. I made an impassioned speech about all the work I have done for months and the trust I built with employee now the system would force me to produce crap. Our reaction was so strong, IT decided to allow us to use our monthly process. The meeting had Super Boss yelling then ending with hysterical laughter as we talked in circles enough that we got back to square one. Worker Bee Analyst tried to be helpful suggesting that we needed to list out the pros and cons. God bless him for not running screaming from that mess of a meeting!

Friday we discovered another group of employees that need to be exceptions to our billing process. It made sense to me and we needed to get our director's approval. Cut to me listening to Super Boss list out all the new steps I need to do from now on and I wound up exploding at him,"It isn't that easy!" I took a beat and apologized. The rest of the quick drop into director's office, I was blinking back tears. I am the only person who reconciles accounts, calculate bills, answers phone calls, and terminates benefits. Sometimes I feel like the only thing keeping the whole process together is my will and the hundreds of little checks in my brain that only I know about. Adding to that burden felt initially overwhelming so I had a good cry in my office and with a co-worker. When I broke it down by steps for this month, I got everything done in an hour. Worker Bee Analyst got to see me cry and he was really, really great saying that he and Prince are here to lift the burden. Aw!

I also asked Super Boss about the progress on the Senior Analyst hiring. I pointed out that position is my only hope of getting away from billing. They are at the end of reviewing resumes. So, I think I could be interviewing in the next couple of months. Obviously, if I get the job, I would have to train someone else to do the billing. If I don't get the job, someone else will be my boss.