Humble pie, please, hold the whipped cream
4January 21, 2008 by 8junebugs
I’ve been unusually silent for reasons about which I’m going to be unusually vague, because I take to heart Heather B. Armstong’s advice re: blogging about work: BE YE NOT SO STUPID.
I flamingo-ed up. (Red Dwarf fans will recognize that as a cock-up, only much, much bigger.) I made a huge work mistake, an expensive mistake, a mistake the likes of which I would like to avoid for the rest of my working years. The kind of mistake that makes you swallow your tongue, after recommending your own dismissal and offering to swig hemlock on your lunch hour.
Instead of opting for suicide or unemployment, my supervisors and colleagues, including the one whose budget I decimated, protectively looked for ways that it was not entirely on my shoulders. Should so-and-so have caught it? Yes, but no more so than I. Shouldn’t that person have done this another way? Certainly, but that was six months ago and not at the heart of the problem. I’m not an expert on this kind of project…but none of us is, and I’m closest, I guess.
This error came during a week when my dance card looked like the town tramp’s. I had projects coming out of my ears, and none with a deadline past today. In addition to choking on my pride in copping to my screw up, I had to face some pretty vocal unhappy folks who, frankly, didn’t take kindly to being switched to the back burner. These are respected and beloved colleagues under tremendous…albeit, annual…strain.
And I think I held up okay. This is not the first time I have screwed up on the job. This is just epic. My pride, a delicate violet of a thing, is buried under a load of cowshit mortification, but, in the end, one will nourish the other.
I am a very, very fortunate girl.
eightjunebugs.com 
Oh. My. God. You read dooce too? I’m a total Heather B. Armstrong groopie. I need help. When I first found out about her…only about a month ago, I literally couldn’t stop reading her blog. Now I’ve calmed down again since I have now read her whole life story…
Anyway, don’t stress too much about the mistake at work. I’m in the middle of W-2’s and 1099’s for all my clients and there’s bound to be one that I will give a W-2 to that says they made $1M dollars last year, when it was actually $10K….happens every year when you’re at work at 7….6 days a week and staying till 6-ish…7 each night…staring at numbers….and your eyes have been crossed for the last 5 hrs…..
Sweetie, dooce is my one and only “I knew them before they were cool” story. I think I got directed to her blog in…summer 2001? Something like that. Pre-Leta, anyway. It was actually an early bond with a friend of mine — we read all the same blogs before we met, so we had plenty to talk about.
I’m way behind the times on dooce…but I now know everything there is to know about Leta and Jon and Chuck and Coco (and how they all poop!) 😉
And p.s….I’m so loving your new blog. Blogging at MySpace has caused a little drama lately, so I’m taking mine off there. Just don’t know if I wanna go to a blog site or get my own domain….still thinking on that. I’m not a good writer…but I’m a great drama queen!
Awww…thanks, chica. I’m not sure if I could have migrated the MySpace blog to this site…probably. But I wanted a fresh start.
Plain old blogs are easy and generally free. You can have a designer trick a free one out for you, too–you don’t need a domain name for that. And you don’t have to be Hemingway to blog. (He’d have been pretty good at web writing, though.)