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I have been working alot lately… I mean alot alot and dealing with extremely unhappy campers which is making me more and more irritable. Normally, my days off every week are just enough to allow me to relax and get all rejuvenated and ready to start all over again. But this week, on my first day off, I agreed to relocate a van to Te Anau. They pay $70.00 cash in hand and while its not a ton of money for the 4 to 4 and a half hours the return trip takes, it is an amazingly beautiful drive and I don’t have a car so it was a great excuse to get out of town for my day off. All was going so well until on the way back the van broke down and I was stuck on the side of the road for two hours waiting for the tow truck to arrive. It was so cold that I had to bundle up in the used duvet from the back of the van to keep warm while I waited. The poor hitchhiker that I had picked up earlier had to stand out in the rain and wind for more than 20 minutes before someone else stopped to pick him up. But on the bright side, while I waited there was the most beautiful rainbow in the field just next to where my van was perched precariously close to a 5 foot ditch. I just snuggled up in the drivers seat with the duvet and put in my ipod and watched the rainbow. They even paid me an extra relocation fee because of all of the break down drama so it could have been so much worse.
But, needless to say, it wasn’t exactly the relaxing day that I have come to need to be able to tolerate the increasingly impatient vacationers that come to pick up these giant camper vans. So because of that “lost” day, I decided to call in sick on Thursday so that I would have two full days to chill before I went back to work. This shouldn’t have been an issue because we were unseasonably quiet and there were two other people working on the desk. The problem was that I had completely forgotten that our regional director was coming down from Auckland that day to assess our branch. Well, why on earth would he care about me and what I do there? I have only been working for the company for about 2 months and while I do have my fair share of screw ups, I have yet to cause any major hassle to the corporation. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided that he would still like to meet me and had my supervisor call me to see if I would go out to dinner with this man and all of my co-workers. Not feeling like I had much of a choice, I reluctantly agreed and got all dressed and showed up to dinner with the intention of pretending to play sick.
This man is ridiculous. He is one of those people that wants you to think that he has way more power than he actually does. He spent the entire night belittling everything that we do in our office and trying to tell us how to make things work better which would not be so obnoxious if he had spent any time in our branch and had any understanding of how things work down here. He is one of those corporate types that cant deal in the real world. He needs to stay cooped up in some office somewhere and keep crunching numbers and leave the actual branch management to someone who has a clue.
So here is what you should not do at a work dinner: 1. don’t call your boss a moron (either directly or impliedly) they don’t appreciate that 2. Pick a fight over how often commercial vehicles should checked by a mechanic (suggesting that it is irresponsible to only have them checked every 22,000 kms doesn’t go over too well) 3. offhandedly mention that it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if there were more lawsuits in New Zealand in order to keep large corporations from taking advantage of consumers 4. Lean your head up against the wall at the restaurant and sigh loudly and role your eyes each time he says anything, reasonable or not.
Surprisingly, I did not get fired immediately. He did come in to the office the next day but he didn’t really say much else to me. Weird. I wonder what my manager will say about the whole thing when he gets back on Monday.