Ok, I know I just wrote that thing about not complaining about your job on your blog, but I’m running out of NaBloPoMo topics, so here’s some work stuff, which will hopefully not be controversial enough to get me fired.

* I’ve just finished my 2nd project, and I already have a third lined up that I’m starting on now. W00t! Money! And just in time for Christmas shopping.

* I don’t know if I mentioned that I’m working for this company through an agency? It’s sort of a temp-to-perm situation – I work through the agency for six months, and at the end of that, if the company likes what I’m doing, they can hire me as one of their employees, or we can call it quits. It’s nice because it also gives me an easy out if I decide that I don’t like the job (which I do, so far).

Anyway, have you ever had those conversations with your boss where you think you’re about to get in major trouble and then you realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with you at all? My manager called me and said he was a little concerned, because they had gotten their first bill from the agency, and apparently I was billing way more hours than they had allotted for these projects. I was kind of confused because he had given me an estimate of how much time I had for each one, and I knew that I was keeping it within that range.

Turns out? My hours were totally fine, but the agency was billing the company for a full 40-hour workweek every week, even though I’ve never once put in more than 30 hours. Heck, one week when I was between projects, I only billed thirteen hours. And yet they still got a bill for forty hours. The hell? So the problem was with the agency’s accounting department, it had nothing to do with me. It was a big relief, but it also made me wonder if the agency did that on purpose. You know, overbill the company and see if they notice or if they just pay it and move on. I’ve never worked with this agency before, and I don’t really know any of the people there, so I have no idea if they’re a shifty bunch or not. I’d like to think it was just an honest mistake, but it seems really odd since they did it for several weeks in a row. They had my timesheets that clearly stated how many hours I had put in. How hard is to read the number off the timesheet and enter that into their little billing column? What do you think, incompetence or fraud?

* My first project came back from the copy editor, and y’all, she is killing me. I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but I am obsessive about grammar and punctuation, and some of my stuff that she’s correcting is just flat-out wrong. For example, say you have a series of three things. I’d write it like this:

thing1, thing2 and thing3.

She turns it into: thing1, thing2, and thing3.

That 2nd comma before the “and” just eats at my soul because it is wrong, wrong, WRONG. But she’s the editor, so I have to make the corrections the way that she wants them, and oh, I just can’t even begin to tell you how much it bothers me. I know my spelling and punctuation isn’t always perfect, and a few of the things that she spotted were genuine goofs on my part, but some of the stuff that she’s changing makes me want to claw my eyeballs out.

And now, I’m going to go back to work and meditate to the glorious sounds of the cement truck in my driveway pouring the asphalt for my new driveway. Oohhhmmm…