lessons learned

I read a post on one of the boards about things learned in 2004.

I learned:

1. Cats are truly crazy.
2. Life can come to a crashing halt in the blink of an eye.
3. Life can quickly change your mind about having children someday.
4. Someday plans can be cut off without warning.
5. I can live with a lot more physical pain that I thought.
6. You can lose almost half of your liver and it can still regenerate.
7. It only takes 2 months for the liver to regenerate.
8. Work can not survive without me.

I included # 8 here but I guess that I didn't actually learn that lesson until today. I missed 3 full weeks plus a couple days of work during the end of september and beginning of october. I didn't think this would be a problem at the time for my employer. He's been doing his job for 34 years so I didn't really think that my services would be missed. I was wrong. Very very wrong.

Not only did he recieve several complaints about himself while I was gone, he had several customers tell him that they were transferring their business elsewhere if I didn't come back. I'm also STILL fixing mistakes that he made while I was out. I have hopefully finally fixed the worst of them today. I spent a total of 2 hours on the phone today and I have no idea how many hours in the last month fixing this poor client's policy. I feel aweful for this man. The boss entered a wrong number when writing an application for him and messed up his entire household account in one fell swoop. Then to make matters worse, no one caught the mistake. The mistake should have been caught right away, when the policy came in to be checked but apparently while I was out, he just mailed the policies without checking them because that took too much time. :O

I have been unhappy with my job for about 6 months now. I want to change jobs. I don't like the new girl (his sister) that he hired. I don't like his "you can handle everything while I talk to my family all day" attitude. I don't like dealing with the lying abusive customers anymore. There just aren't enough nice clients to make up for all the nasty junk that I have to deal with on a daily basis anymore. After my surgery, I truly lost all loyatly to this job. The boss told me to take as much time as I needed to recover and he'd take care of everything. Not only did he not pay me for the time off like he implied but he didn't take care of the office or my work either. He talked me out of a hospital income policy and out of a disability policy both of which would have paid for my time off while I was recovering and then he didn't pay me either. I knew that at the beginning of the year, I had made an agreement that I would work for him through 2004 for a large pay raise. I knew I had to stay through 2004.

It's now 2005 though and my contract is up. I don't have to stay. I have started working on my resume and putting feelers out for a new job. I feel no guilt about leaving this boss at this point. I do however feel bad for the clients that are going to lose me as their representative cause I am apparently the only one in the office that knows what I'm doing.

I have had a job offer to go to another agent and do the exact same thing that I'm doing here but I don't know if that's what I want. I'm tired of the general public at this point. I think I'm going to hold out and try to find a job behind the scenes right now. A job where I don't deal directly with the general public. A job where I can sit in a cubicle or office and do my work to the best of my ability without being hassled about other peoples mistakes. I know this might be an impossible goal but I would at least get a little closer to it than I am now.

Well, there is my rant for the day :)

Now I'm going to wait till 5pm so that I'm free of work and head to the grocery store for some food so we have something to eat in the house.