The Dark Side Shrouds Everything

This week has been a week of sithspawn! It is funny how some weeks, like Tevia noted some days, just seem to go bad. Work has been crazy this week with so many typical big corporation bureaucratic mishaps, unaccountable employees and mishaps. Luckily for me, I am an optimist and can get through the days without too much strife - and then come home to a wonderful family that can make me forget the woes of the day. This week for the third month in a row our accounting group messed up the invoice to one of my clients. The third month in a row! The client called me fuming because so many of the mistakes were the same as the last two months. He knows the errors are not my fault, but I am the one who gets the calls and hears the complaints. I am the one who has to elevate the issue to senior management only to have the issue thrown about as no one wants to take responsibility. So what is the solution? I will audit all invoices from now on. No, I am not an accountant, I do not work in billing, I do not get paid for it, but if I want the client to be satisfied the only person that can do it is me. And this is just a small example. Now, I know this attitude is one of the reasons I have been very successful in my career, but sometimes you just get tired of taking everything on. My job responsibilities become blurred and it gets more difficult to focus on things that are truly important.

I still like my job, and I understand that these things go on everywhere, but it is good to vent from time to time. When you deal with things like this and then have to deal with two employees who start an email war telling the other one how much they don't like them and makes one of them cry, you just start to wonder. I think I was able to handle that one pretty well, though, as the one guy agreed he was in the wrong and apologized today. He came to me afterwards and said it must be tough to be a manager and have to deal with such dumb things. I agreed. But I know none of us are perfect and some days some people just really tick us off. Even me, believe it or not. There is this one guy that we play basketball with and for some reason he just bugs me. He is rude, cocky, annoying...just like most of us. I don't know what it is that just puts him in a league of his own. I told this to Kipp, and he agreed. For some reason this guy just bugs. Maybe he has a really bad spirit or something. So I try to be nice to him - but it is hard. (Not that I am mean to him, I'm not really that type of person).

Two weeks until Episode III. I am reading the book Labyrinth of Evil, which is the novel that leads up to the start of the movie - a PREQUEL to the prequel you could say. It is getting me psyched, like I wasn't already. I've heard from some good sources that this movie will make you cry. So be prepared.