I’ve gone wireless and I’m happy

I love technology when it works.

I switched off my landline the other day and replaced it and my fixed line broadband with a wireless USB stick and a wireless phone.

The phone set up involved removing it from the packaging, inserting the SIM card, and plugging it in. It flashed as it was supposed to then settled down to a steady green light to say “I’m ready” and that was it. Done. That is technology as it should be. And reception is excellent.

The wireless USB was almost as simple: plug it in, say yes to install the software, wait for it to install, then hello world! I’m on the interwebs. Compared with the endless toing and froing involved in setting up my wireless router, this was a dream. And it’s about twice as fast as the old fixed line. I can actually watch videos now without spending more time watching the little circles chasing each other than the video itself.

I thought I might be buying myself a whole lot of grief committing myself so irrevocably to wireless, but so far, I have no regrets.

Why the silly season makes me miserable

Where to begin?

I’m worn out. Here in the southern hemisphere Christmas coincides with summer holidays. What this means is that we go 12 months between breaks instead of the 6 months in the northern hemisphere. We don’t have a nice wind-down period in the middle of June; we go straight through for one very long year. Come December, the stress is showing and everyone is not only tired, but racing to finish everything as though come 1 Jan coaches will turn back into pumpkins.  So there’s work pressure, Christmas shopping pressure, and getting-ready-for-summer-holiday pressure.

Christmas work parties are of course beyond awful, and more so for introverts. I went to ours, feeling that I couldn’t reasonably excuse myself. It is a requirement of sorts. Large groups of people I have little in common with, drinking copiously, making coarse and lewd jokes, playing silly games, and the men draping themselves around me to tell me to “have another drink and loosen up”, drove me to the brink. I was wound as tight as a watch spring, and utterly exhausted from the sheer hideousness of it. By the time I got home I was in tears and I spent Saturday in bed  recovering.

I  dislike Christmas. I find it an ordeal, and do my utmost to avoid it. I have decided this year to go away on Christmas Eve. Making a decision not to participate doesn’t make it any less stressful, I might add: it brings out the best manipulation techniques my narcissist mother can drum up. I am reassuring myself that it gives her an opportunity to feel like a martyr and she likes that, so in a perverse way I’m doing her a favour.

Christmas shopping is odious of course, but I no longer do it so it’s not really a contributor to my misery any more. However, the fact that it’s the season for it means that all forms of shopping are made twice as unbearable as usual.

Going on holiday with 1.5m of your closest friends is hell for an introvert. Everyone is on the move, on the road, often driving badly, drifting along taking their time and not paying a blind bit of attention to anything around them. They’re on holiday so everyone should just slow down etc. Well, I hate being around large crowds and just want to get out of them as soon as I can. I want to drive and get as much distance between me and the rest of the holiday crowds as quickly as I can. No, I don’t drive like an idiot, but I do just want to keep moving and not spend time rubber-necking. I’m on a mission to get to my beach house, my refuge, I need to get their while it’s still daylight, and I have to do my shopping before I leave the last supermarket behind. So, I have things to get done, and I’m on a timetable. So get out of my way. Please.

Jet skis are the watersport equivalent of a dentist drill. They ruin a perfectly quiet summer evening, and they are ridden by posers who fancy themselves as being in an episode of Baywatch. I loathe and detest these things and fail to understand why their right to enjoy the beautiful bay on their noisy machines should override my right to enjoy the beautiful bay in peace and quiet.

The final insult is that I have a birthday between Christmas and New Year. In general I think this is probably a poor time of year to have a birthday, but now that you know my mother is a narcissist you can perhaps understand why it was doubly bad. I rarely got a birthday present, as it was always “combined” with my Christmas present, which didn’t fool me then or now – they simply couldn’t be bothered. The day was largely ignored, a couple of times forgotten altogether, I was routinely told I was selfish for being upset that no-one took any notice. I was told it was just a “hassle” (which by extension I took to mean that I was a hassle). Interestingly, my parents’ wedding anniversary occurs the day after my birthday but apparently that wasn’t a hassle, and never were anniversary and Christmas presents combined. Nor was it ever forgotten. I struggle every year with what to do on my birthday: my tendency is to stay in bed all day and wait until it’s over. I recognise that this isn’t healthy. I’m a grown-up and probably need to act a bit more like it. I do feel a profound sense of paralysis though. It’s the nadir of my year, every year, a day that reminds me that I don’t matter.

So it’s a couple of weeks till Christmas. I feel miserable already. It’s a familiar kind of misery though. On some level I know that “this too shall pass”. Waiting for it to pass is the hard bit. All the Advent talk at mass only highlights that this should be a time of anticipation of joy, but instead for me it’s a time of dread.

Predictable responses

I shared the good news of those letters from the bosses with my parents the other night. I could have, or perhaps should have, anticipated the responses.

When I said I had received a handwritten letter from the CEO, my mother interrupted immediately saying,

Oh that’s just like my father receiving a letter from Professor Famous-Person

Then, when I ignored that and carried on, my mother’s next question was,

Can we tell our friends about this?

You’ll notice the complete absence of “Congratulations, that is wonderful, you must be so proud, we’re so proud” kinds of response.  This was apparently all about her, not me.

Was I surprised? No. Was I hurt?  A little, but less than I would have been before I realised she is a narcissist and unlikely to change.

Getting praise for work well done

In a complete turnaround from last week, I received the most extraordinary feedback from the Big Bosses on the work I presented to the exec. Okay, so it was 5 days after the fact, and in truth I suspect there was some tugging on sleeves that generated this but still: I got two personal messages from the Top Dogs thanking me for my work and extolling its virtues.

One of the messages was emailed, and was quite long. It’s the kind of thing I’ll quote in future job applications until I die probably. Well, seriously, how often do you get to say ‘The Second Most Important Person in the Organisation said my work is fantastic”?’

The other message was handwritten and was delivered to my desk. I was COMPLETELY blown away by this. That the CEO would take time to write a message like that was just incomprehensible to me. I was really stunned. I emailed him to say thank you and got a reply to my email. This just left my head spinning. We were rapidly approaching the “thank you for your thank you to my thank you” but it just boggled my mind really.

Which just goes to show.

Saying thank you is huge, and the higher up the hierarchy you are, the more that thank you means to the underlings. I was absolutely demoralised after that presentation, and yes, it would have been really great to hear those things said at the time, but hey, they got said, and in writing.

I’m going to frame that letter from the CEO

A kick in the teeth

This week was a huge week at work. For the last 18 months I’ve been working on a development programme, and on Wednesday we took it to the Executive committee to get approval to proceed. We’d done loads of groundwork and we were pretty confident that it would be okay, but still… no chicken counting was going on.

So we presented (I did half, my boss did half) and it all went fine, and we got to question time. Nothing untoward there, most of the members had fairly predictable questions, which we answered easily enough. I hadn’t been to the Exec Committee before so wasn’t 100% sure of the proceedings but figured at this point the CEO would wrap up, they’d vote and we’d be formally given a green light or not.

But no. There was some throat clearing, then finally the CEO said “ah, thank you, ah… yes, right… so we’ll take a 5 minute break now” and everyone got up and started heading for the toilets or their mobile phones. My boss and I packed up, a couple of people came up and said “good job”, and we walked out.

I went downstairs and ran into the other managers who excitedly asked “So did it pass?” and I replied, “I think so…”.

And then I returned to my desk and started working on the next project.

I was gutted. I wanted to cry. I suddenly understood why the employee engagement survey results are so appalling. I realised that no-one in that room cared about being good, they were all happy with mediocrity. I could have gone to them with a proposal half as well thought out, with a presentation covered in tedious bullet points (instead of the dynamic and visual explanation I had created to make sure they understood the proposal and its benefits) and the result would have been no different.

I felt like the stuffing had been kicked out of me. I really wondered why I bothered. And I realised how easy this would be to fix: say something nice. Recognise that I had put in months of work and it was a good job. Have a vote, get a definite result, say congratulations to us. In other words, take some notice, recognise good work when you see it, be professional and courteous, and treat the outcome of the massive amounts of work that appear in front of you with some dignity and formality. Acknowledge that this project has cost you several million already and it has been worth it.

I came home and considered quitting my job that night, because I truly didn’t see the point any longer. If they didn’t care, why should I?

 

Surviving the birthday party

I tried and failed to avoid the family birthday party on Saturday. It occurred to me at some point during the evening that there are no other circumstances under which I would subject myself to that kind of event. The only thing that made it tolerable was the presence of other people who I knew and liked.

My borderline sister gave a speech. Supposedly it was about the birthday boy but naturally enough the main topic was her and how she has grown into such a fabulous person. This happened at her son’s 21st too, where that speech turned into how great she was. Quite what her son was supposed to take from that I don’t know.

For so long I have assumed that this is normal: when around family, to feel constantly stressed, on guard and under attack; to come away feeling abused and manipulated; repeatedly having it pointed out in a million small ways just how “selfish” I am (for not agreeing with them about almost everything); and leaving wanting to break something.  Lots of things.

A narcissistic mother and a sister with borderline personality are, in combination, utterly toxic.

Photo book: it kind of worked

The photo book I made on  Snapfish arrived last week.

I didn’t find any hideous blanks where photos should be, and everything seemed to be where I put it. That was good.

What wasn’t good was the binding. The finish of it was pretty crude. I was disappointed. I would have done a better job myself. The corners were poorly formed, the inside stuck-down pages were wrinkled. It looks cheap. And it wasn’t – if I hadn’t had a coupon it would have cost close on $100. As it was, I got 40% off but I wouldn’t have paid $60 for a book with that kind of rubbish finish if I’d been browsing in a bookstore.

Five reasons I dislike my mother

Because she is a narcissist.

I only discovered this really recently. That is, I only recently put together the whole picture and finally made sense out of a raft of disparate behaviours that hurt, belittle, bewilder and enrage me.

Apparently, all of these are typical behaviours of a narcissist:

1. Denying reality: if it doesn’t fit with her version of how the world ought to be, it simply doesn’t exist. This means that if I feel something she doesn’t want me to feel, well, I simply don’t feel it. If I say I do, I am told that I don’t. Problem solved.
2. Jealousy: whatever I do cannot be as good as whatever she does or has done. So whatever I do is either criticised for not being good enough i.e. not meeting her expectations, or for being “too smart” i.e. meeting or exceeding them. Bottom line is, I can’t win. 99% means “what happened to the other 1%?” 100% means “obviously the test wasn’t very hard.”
3. Third party bragging: not to my face but about me. While I get the “can’t have been very difficult if you did it” to my face, her friends get the “oh my talented and clever daughter just got her PhD/cured cancer/solved world peace” etc. True story: I completed my PhD at a US university and my mother said, “well it’s only an American one, and it can’t be worth much if they gave you one”.
4. Manipulation: by involving herself in the relationships between her children, acting as go-between and passing on messages, she (thinks she) gets to control those relationships. In fact, she has generated so much mistrust through her deceit and manipulation there is no longer any relationship at all between us. Not that this stops her from insisting there is. See Denying reality, above. Guilt grenades are very common.
5. Lack of empathy: she is completely unable to understand that someone else might have a different view of a situation, feel differently or want different things. This simply doesn’t fit her world view and therefore doesn’t exist. She will turn around whatever I tell her to fit what she wants it to be, then insist she understands. She doesn’t.

Being a narcissist doesn’t mean she is completely full of herself. Most people think she is modest, to a fault even. Others think she is a wonderful listener, and of course all her friends insist she is “so proud of her children” because she brags about us to them. Of course they think that. She is constantly maintaining an image that matches what she wants reality to be. Here’s how it works: in her eyes, she is a good mother. Good mothers are proud of their children. Ergo, she is proud of her children because she is a good mother. It’s cart before horse reasoning.

I had a striking example of the difference between my father and mother (not that my father isn’t enmeshed in all this, he is, but he’s a subject for another post). Many years ago now I came home from uni and told them I wanted to talk to them about the way they responded when I told them about good things that happened to me. I gave some examples that pointed out they were often extremely negative and while apparently “making a joke” they said extremely hurtful things. I said I had no idea if they were proud of me, and wasn’t even sure they loved me.

My father’s reaction? Immediately he apologised, said he hadn’t realised the effect his words were having, but he could completely see how painful they would have been, he was terribly sorry, he loved me, he was deeply concerned that I felt unsure about that, and was very proud of me.

My mother’s reaction? She said “Of course I didn’t mean to hurt you. So why should I apologise for something I didn’t mean to do? And why would you even ask if I love you, I’m your mother.” In other words: “I’m never wrong, it’s clearly your problem not mine.”

Her narcissism probably explains why my sister has borderline personality disorder. I can’t abide being around my sister at all, she is a bully, incredibly invasive, pushy, aggressive and self-absorbed. She maintains a kind of dependent closeness my mother. Now I understand why: they both need to have a view of the world that makes them right and everyone else wrong.

So having realised all this, I am faced with a decision about how to proceed. I think I may have reached my limit in terms of how much more of this I am prepared to take.

In truth, I don’t think I can afford to take it any more.

Fixing the simple things

My manager got a new laptop this morning. She uses a dual screen setup and when the tech started everything up again, the screens were “back to front”.

In order to move from the laptop screen on her right, she had to keep moving the cursor to the right at which point it appeared on the left of the second screen, which was on her left.

The obvious solution was simply to switch over the monitor and laptop, but that didn’t suit her desk setup. The tech suggested she could just get used to it. When she rather firmly told him she could not and would not, he spent the best part of an hour fiddling with the setup, and on the phone to the help desk. Eventually he just gave up and left. About two hours later she came and told me the whole fiasco and asked if I could look at it.

In less than 10 seconds I had fixed the problem.

I’m not that technically savvy: the fix was simple and obvious. What bothers me about this story is that it’s really, really typical of our IT people. They don’t do their homework. They don’t come prepared. They don’t know their product from the user’s point of view. If they were in a commercial situation, they’d be out of a job. But because it’s public sector, they just keep on under delivering, and getting paid for it.

 

That’s really nice!

I read a very funny post today from Grace Smith’s blog. She’d asked the question on Twitter, “If you had to marry a browser… which one?”, which tickled me before I even read the responses. So I went to the post itself to read the comments, and left one myself.

And I got an email from Grace Smith:

I just wanted to say a quick thanks for checking out my blog, i appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment on If You Had To Marry A Browser…Which One? and i hope to see you around the blog more often.

Take care

Cheers,
Grace

How nice is that?! I don’t care that the email is (I’m assuming) auto-generated. The fact that she even has such an auto response is a really nice touch. I subscribe to the blog already, but somehow that made me feel like I’m welcome there.

Amazing how something so simple can have such an effect.