I’ve been fucking emotional the past couple days and anxious for a few days before that. I want to blame hormones for the mood swings but Yaz is supposed to minimize PMS symptoms and it’s a full week until my little white pills.
Anxiety is just my normal annoying hypervigilance at night mixed with a couple scary dreams.
Work isn’t helping either. Things are starting to get back to normal after the sleepy holiday season. The agency pretty much did nothing for a month, first preparing for the big audit/survey and then everyone going on vacation during the holidays. Now, for some reason, they are surprised that there is a money shortage. I went to a meeting that’s purpose was to blame clinical staff for the money shortage. Staff were told they could not use the audit or holidays as an excuse. So they blamed their funders. They haven’t been reimbursed for services by outside agencies quick enough. Sure, passing the buck sounds good to me!
Then there were small annoyances today with an Admin Assistant doing duplicate work as me and everyone coming to me about her mistakes. I don’t think that should have bothered me as much as it did.
The big thing that bothered me today was during my grant hunting process. My boss keeps telling me to look for these grants for new researchers. I find a conference for new researchers and grant. I don’t qualify for the grant because it’s for people with doctorates. I tell my boss I don’t qualify and in passing mention that she does. Even though she has been with the agency a long time, she got her doctorate recently. She looks at me like I’m dumb and says “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you to look for. Grants for me.”
What? She’s the new researcher? I guess I never thought of her as the new researcher because she’s so established at the agency. I thought of myself as the new researcher. So I pretend to know that she meant I should be looking up stuff for her and go print out info on this new researcher grant for her. The grant can only be hers, no co-investigators. And if she gets it, she can’t be on any other grants of the same type until the deadline for this grant (in the fall.) Great, so I will be working on a grant that my name can’t even be on and it will be holding up applications to other grants we can co-PI on.
The whole thing took me down a notch because I really saw this job as a way for me to start my own research, or at least co-investigate. Oh, and my boss’ insistence that I learn SPSS? That’s to work on her stats because she doesn’t want to relearn the program. So I get to do data analysis which is pretty much the same thing I was doing in undergrad and is something an intern should be doing. But we don’t have any new interns because we are so slow replying to them that they find other placements!
This agency needs to get it the fuck together.