Ugh. in Diary

So just when I decide to finally break my silence of over a year without writing, the bloody server is down. I can’t even check my last entry to see what was even happening the last time I wrote.
Pretty sure I was being given grief by that shit employee and waiting for the contract to be over.
He went for unfair dismissal and then randomly got someone to tell people that he’d committed suicide. We thought he’d died until he came up in my Facebook feed as a suggested contact (probably coz I’d had his number in my phone) alive and well and living in New Zealand (where his bitch missus is from). What the actual fuck?

ANYWAY!

The big (old) news is that Eli and I broke up. One day we’re setting up house inspections and the next… no wait, it was the same day, we break up.
I knew something was up and I had known for a while so I spoke to him and asked him what was wrong and I was hit with “I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore”.
Cue months of being drunk and smoking too much and wanting to hide away from everything unless it involved drinking wine and smoking. We lived together for a month and then he got his own place and I moved back to Mum’s. Which also gave me the chance to quit my job that I was HATING. So that was good I guess haha.
He said he still wanted to be my friend and was afraid of losing me altogether but his actions were telling me otherwise which made my depression over the whole thing worse. I actually have a private entry on here (okay so I suppose I have written in here in the past year) which was a letter to him that I’d never give him but all the things I wanted to get off my chest. It was therapeutic and seeing all the ways he was making me feel like shit written out helped me get over it temporarily. As did a young tattoo artist rebound I found at a pub one night after having another drunk meltdown over Eli.
I ended up seeing Scott for a couple of months which took my mind off Eli. Again, that worked for a while and I thought I was actually getting somewhere (the acceptance part of the grief process) but then I had friends over for drinks one night, including Eli, and we ended up getting hammered and sleeping together (at this point it had been about 6 or 7 months since we broke up and 4 months since we last slept together). So I felt like I was back at square one.

About a month after that one of our mutual mates was going beach camping for his birthday. Eli was invited but he said he wasn’t going. However he randomly showed up unannounced on the second day which made me drink a little quicker than I had been throughout the day.
After the sun had set I was talking to this older guy who started to let his hands wander a bit. I just chose not to react to it so he might get the hint that I was not at all interested. At one point Eli was within close range so I stood up and told him I had no agenda but that I was about to cuddle up to him in some way so old mate would get the hint and keep his hands to himself. So Eli stood close to me and I put my arm around his leg (I was sitting, he was standing). It worked. It also somehow set the stage for Eli to sit and have a chat with me which started with small talk and led to a 6 hour long D&M about the months and feelings pre break up and post break up. And I’m pretty sure I told him everything that was in the letter that I wrote on here that I said I would never give him. It was probably the most honest and open conversation we’ve had with each other. Ever.

So that put us in a good place. We’re not tense and awkward around each other anymore which is a fucking huge relief for me.

However, by the end of the year we’d started sleeping together again. Sober. Sometimes it fucks with me, other times it doesn’t. He is leaving the country in less than 2 months to go travelling so there is an end date to it all which is good, but even that fucks with me as well because then its really all over.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on there. I don’t really want to write about it at the moment…

After I quit my job and moved back home the company Mum sold (the one the fuckwit worked for) were desperate for help after the knob they sent from America to run it fucked the whole thing up. They told me to set my price for me to work for them, which I did, and they accepted. So for 6 months I was working minimal hours being able to support myself and still get ahead in my savings. However after a while I was growing sick of it because it went from me taking care of the basic admin functions and reporting to managing the whole bloody show for them. The second American they sent out was only a temp solution until they sent someone else out who was going to permanently run it so he was promising everyone all these things and then toward the end of his visa just stopped giving a shit really so I was copping all the complaints and problems from the employees and having to fix everything myself.
Then he left and it was about a month until the new director came out from England. So I was pretty much running it alone and the new director must have thought “fantastic, I don’t have to do anything” because he never bothered to ask me much about how everything was run. The only thing he was concerned about was buying new equipment and making sure invoices were paid on time. So I stopped coming to the office as frequently and when asked why I basically told him that I didn’t sign up for anything else other than to keep the day to day processes running and that he should be taking care of the management side of things…. Being a manager and all.

It also occurred to me that although I was able to be making and saving a lot of money it probably wouldn’t look great applying for a home loan with a job where I pick and choose my hours so I started casually looking for full time work.
For the last 5 months I have been working full time at one job while also still doing contracting work for the old one. It sucks balls but luckily I’ve kept at it because having both of them is the only way I am going to look good for a mortgage application. For a house anyway. I could borrow enough for an apartment with just the full time job but strata fees are just ridiculous. You end up paying around an extra $10K per year ON TOP of your rates, utility bills and mortgage repayments. I’d rather spend an extra $10K on having a house, thank you.
But I detest my full time job. I’ve been here for five months and in no way do I see this as a long term thing. But apparently you can’t get a home loan when you’re on probation at your new job, which is usually six months. So even if I found another job tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to apply for another six months. So I either need to find one now or suck it up here for a while longer. Or put the whole home loan thing on hold totally until I find a job I’m happy in that pays well and I’ve been there for six months.

This job seriously does my head in though. It’s for a small manufacturing/engineering company and it’s the worst example of management I think I ever come across. I have had to try and restrict my boss (the owner) from spending money on unnecessary things because the company isn’t making enough money to cover expenses. Not that he listens. He came back after Christmas having spent $8K on his credit card which gets paid off by the company account and owing his brother $35K …. Which gets paid out of the company account. This is while I had to be uber careful with cost allocations because we needed to pay a $30K tax bill in full because the tax department won’t allow any more extensions or variations to the extension we already have on a previous tax debt.
But if he has to put $20 of his own money in the company ute he’ll give me the receipt and ask me to reimburse him. Yesterday he left work early to go to the bank because an account from his old business partnership was overdrawn by $7 and he wanted to get on top of it before the next service fee of $13 came out so he didn’t have to pay for it. EYE ROLL

We do a lot of manufacturing on site, but we also get a lot of work subcontracted out to other companies or to China. But we tell everyone everything is made on site.
When he quoting a job which involves subcontracting the work out, he’ll get a quote from our supplier and ask how long it will be. You will hear him repeat the rough due date. “Two weeks”. And then in the next breath he calls our customer to say we can do their urgent job in a week. Then I’M the one who has to deal with a shitty customer who is pissed off that their job is late. And chase up the subcontractor and ask them to do the work quicker, even though they were quite clear in the first place that it would take as long as its taking.
We had one customer want to come in from time to time to check in on their job but it was being subcontracted out so we had to tell him he couldn’t come otherwise he’d get charged double because by him being there the job would take more time than the original quote. You can bet your ass I fobbed all of those calls off to the supervisor.
I’m shit at lying about these kinds of things. When customers call asking when their order will be ready (which is already late by this time) and its not being done on site, I ask my boss if he wants me to tell him we’re short staffed or something, which has been the genuine case before, but he tells me not to lie too much to them and to tell them it’s being done at the moment and will be ready by whatever day he pulls out of his ass (and then tells me to call the supplier and tell them to have it done by that date). How is that not a lie?! I mean, I guess its on a machine… just not our machine.

I’m constantly given the shit jobs that he or the supervisor can’t be bothered with or don’t want to do themselves. And usually if those jobs are phone calls I get asked questions that I don’t know the answers to and have to get them to call back anyway.
Writing that actually prompted me to make a call I’d meaning to make (before I got asked whether I’d done it or not). Boss wanted to be a preferred supplier for a company and apparently it was going to be a shit-show to get that process going (which I would have had to take care of). I called them to get the ball rolling and she flat out said there was no point in us being a preferred supplier because they wouldn’t use us for a continuous product as they get most of their work done cheap in India. I relayed this information back to my boss and his attitude on the situation is that she’s being lazy because she doesn’t want to have to set us up in the system. So he’s going to call and try get his way and then probably sub the work out to China anyway.

Everyone here gets away with so much shit because he’s too much of a pussy to stand up for his company. He was having a discussion with the supervisor yesterday about making changes to the way the warehouse operates because mistakes keep happening and urgent jobs aren’t being prioritized and how he (supervisor) needs to take charge of these situations. But he did it while laughing about it. How are you meant to take something like that seriously when there is no assertiveness or demand in his tone? Pretty sure he was the one fucking up production anyway by making one thing urgent and then another thing urgent and then when urgent job 1 got stopped for urgent job 2, urgent job 1 client came in to find it still not completed so he flipped out about urgent job 2 being done instead of urgent job 1.
He’s constantly wanking on about how we need to prioritize work for regular customers so we don’t lose them but when they stop using us so much his attitude is to charge them more. They’re probably using us less because they’ve found someone who can do the work cheaper so why put the prices up on the remaining products they still get from us?!

One of the guys that works here doesn’t have a car. He was allowed to borrow the company ute to get to and from work as long as he paid for the petrol. But he also has a tendency to call in sick which means the ute isn’t here when we need it to make/pick up deliveries sometimes. And now one of the other guys is doing offsite work and needs the ute so the other guy has to catch the train to work. Sometimes he can’t be bothered doing that so he calls in sick. So instead of a warning about the amount of time he’s taking off he asks me if we have enough money in the account to loan him money for a car. How does he expect to have any authority if they get rewarded for being a flake? Call-in-sick-guy also uses all of his accrued leave on his constant days off so more than not he takes a bit of leave without pay, but he doesn’t worry about that because the boss always approves company loans to him; and he knows this so he usually budgets for these loans too. Way to have the upper hand, mate!

I could keep going but this entry is getting rather long and full of bitching and moaning but you get the jist of why I feel like impaling myself on a blunt object every morning before work and why I check job sites more than Facebook.