duck-shaped pain

Regular visitors here are aware of the discontent that lies between my job and me. [1] It's sort of reached new depths in the last few weeks, and I'm having to struggle to keep myself from going into I've Already Quit In My Mind mode. Two more weeks, I keep thinking to myself. Two more weeks. [2]

Yesterday was okay. He hired a new person to help out while I'm gone, and I started training her, trying to explain what exactly it is we do here (after two years, I'm still not really sure) and how the flow of data moves around the office until it finally peters out somewhere near the top, ultimately never getting done. (Actually, I didn't mention the last part �EI don't want to scare her off).

But today has been different, and needlessly so, thanks to The Pen Incident.

I have a nice pen that I like very much. This weekend, my cousin J. got married, [3] and I lent my pen to him so that he could sign his marriage license during the ceremony. Things got busy, dinner was eaten, people drank, and I forgot to get my pen back. No big deal, really �EI'll get it back eventually, or I can always just buy a new one.

But in the meantime, I have nothing to write with at work. I'm so used to the smooth gel-ink roller-ball action of Favorite Pen that everything else writes like I'm scratching important messages in the dirt with a stick. Making it worse is that the only pens around the office are those that my boss can get for free. He swipes them from banks and stores, and occasionally one of the big office supply stores in town will offer free boxes of the cheapest, nastiest ballpoint pens possible to get people like him in the door. I avoid these like the plague.

However, tucked away in one of the cabinets is an open box of some semi-decent roller-ball pens that only found their way to our office because they were free with rebate. The Employer bought a bunch of them, and my task a few months back was to fill out umpteen rebate forms, all with different names and the various addresses of his friends and family about town, trying to get around the "one rebate per household" rule. Fun.

So there are plenty of these pens to go around. Since one of the packages was open, and it was in the supply cabinet along with other supplies I use daily, I figured I�d use one of these pens until I could retrieve or replace Favorite Pen. Big mistake.

I used it yesterday without comment, and part of today, but then, when I was writing an important note, the employer comes over and looks at my writing hand strangely.

"Where the hell did you get that pen? That's my pen!" he said.

"I got it out of the supply cabinet. I didn�t know it was your pen." I replied.

"Well, those pens are not for you. Those are my pens!" he said, and snatched the pen in question out of my hand. Then he went over to the supply cabinet, took the rest of the roller-ball pens out of the cabinet, and stormed off to his office, where he locked them in his top desk drawer.

Hello? Overreaction?

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the "my pens" comment. He has a couple of nice pens that he uses constantly, and no one ever uses those out of fear of reprisal. I have never seen him write with the pen I was using or with any of its brethren. And there was about 25 of them �Enot a shortage.

I am completely baffled. This seems so pointless. I'm sure there's something else behind it, but I don't even want to contemplate that right now. Two more weeks.

[1] To summarize: the tasks themselves are okay, the pay is decent for this area, and it seems on the surface like a good job (and it was, for a while). But The Employer's insistence on treating us all like contractors, even though none of us fit any sort of legal definition of "contractor" (and expensive, what with the extra taxes and all), and his inability to communicate whatever the hell it is that he wants us to do gets wearisome.

[1] Am I going to come back after my six weeks off. Dunno. We'll see how I feel about it when the time comes. I have enough money saved up that I can not work for a very, very long time, and since I'm going back to school full-time in January, working might not be my highest priority for a while.

[3] Report forthcoming.

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