work rant no. 10573

Yes, I'll admit it. I'm a little bit of a workaholic.

Most days, I just get carried away with what I'm doing that I lose track of time and don't end up going home until way everyone else in the office has gone home. Lately, because of the multitude of things that I've been working on surrounding the launch of our new catalogue, getting ready to leave on a month-long project off-site, plus training someone to take on the reins while I'm gone, I've been putting in noticably more hours of overtime.

My manager spoke with me briefly this afternoon about it. Apparently the capital M capital G Management Group has gotten wind of it and is concerned about "this issue"...about my whole work-life balance thing a little, but mostly about the amount of money it's costing the company to pay me time-and-a-half when I go beyond my required forty hours a week. Everytime this comes up, they try to make it seem like they're genuinely looking out for my well-being ("We care about you and want you to have a healthy balance between your work life and your personal life"), which, I guess they do, to a certain extent. However, I can't help but feel that it's really all about the latter ("This is costing us way too much money! Money that we don't have to spend!")

Each time, my response is the same: I'm expected to perform at a certain level and carry out certain responsibilities. If they want me to scale back, that just means they won't be getting as much out of me as they expect. As it is, I don't even declare all the hours that I work. In fact, if they were to do an actual analysis, they'd find that I'm pretty much cheap labour.

These days, my job description has been extended to a point where I'm responsible for regional advertising and a small handful of national projects on top of my daily responsibilities (largely my own doing - or undoing, as the case may be). I'm not complaining though. These are the parts of my job that I actually enjoy. But now that I've taken these things on, it's become expected that I'm to carry out the job of two (or more) people at any given time without any discussion of additional compensation. There simply isn't room for it, apparently. Well, in that case, don't rag on me for having to pay me overtime! Would they rather pay an external ad agency heaps and heaps of cash to do the creative for the ads and media kits that we churn out (like they do out east), or can they just shut up and pay me my comparitively measly little salary without any griping or nagging?

Days like this, I want to slash my wrists and pour toxic substances into the gaping wounds. But then I remember how much of a wuss I am and decide that I probably wouldn't be able to go through with it anyway, so just shrug my shoulders and say, "to hell with it."

A potential employer is calling me from Sweden tomorrow. Maybe she'll take pity on me and offer me a job. Or at least send me a nice bottle of Vodka to ease my pain? Toes and fingers crossed.