I tried to chill a bit since the last opening volley of the war but some little things keep the war ongoing.
For one thing the whole obfuscation game both Maddie and Mike have been playing for many months now, it's not only Kathleen that's starting to wake up and smell the coffee.
Last Friday, Mike and I attended a Zoom meeting with the school board, one of the regularly scheduled Zoom meetings we have with them, and during Mike's part of the presentation of the agencies activities, Mike jokingly asked Lindsay, a VR counselor, if Ridge could get more referrals. To say Lindsey gave him the cold shoulder is an understatement, she outright freaking ignored him. I knew right there and then VR is on to this and they're not happy. I figured as much, I mean if I could deduce the lack of any real work being done with clients and I'm brand new, of course somebody with more experience, and having also a partial responsibility for the support of the client, they have got to be between a rock and a hard place.
So with Kathleen snooping around, asking tough questions, and Mike and Maddie's verbal obfuscation tactics only working so far, coupled with a potential VR investigation into the on goings here, well, can you see my consternation? So if this comes to a head, which we know it will, most likely, it's every man for himself. But my guess would be Mike and Maddie would team up against me. So what would Kathleen be looking at? Firing them and leaving me with the whole department to myself? Or just letting me go?
I'm deleting my cozmorio Google credentials on the green computer and making sure all client files are back in place in the office, you know, just in case...
Despite the friction between Maddie and I, and my knowledge that Mike has been leaking info to her basically flagging his allegiances, I was feeling good over the past week about my job in general. Not necessarily the Costanza aspect, although that has its certain benefits, but the actual job itself, especially in regards to working with folks. I conducted my first 2-hour training session with Abi and it went better than expected and he seemed to really get something out of it which really was satisfying. I attended and manned one of the stations at the skills assessment day we conducted for the Project Search folks and it was really a lot of fun and very uplifting, it reminded me of many of the reasons I got into this field in the first place.
But there was Maddie sneering at me from across the room. Either this chick is psychic and she senses with her powers how much I dislike her, or I'm actually giving off signals relaying my disdain, or Mike is feeding her everything I'm saying about her. I can't see how she's this pissed off at me just because I cut her off during a phone conversation.
During the skills assessment day yesterday, everybody took a 1 hour lunch, I joined Kathleen and the other administrators in the cafeteria of the hospital (yes the project search stuff takes place at the host business which is the big hospital in town, ie: the Jesus Hospital), of course, since I see myself as their peer, but Maddie made her way out of the building. When she returned to the meeting, Kathleen asked her if she had a good lunch, and Maddie said in true altruistic martyrdom form, " Oh I went to work with one of my clients." I literally did an eyeroll right there, kind of not giving a shit who the fuck saw me. Bitch, please!
So today Mike calls me and says he's on his way to Wendy's (the fast food joint) for a 2:00 meeting with Maddie. What's the meeting about? It's not about the June job camp, it's something else. Oh brother, I didn't ask any further. Here we are at the secret junta meetings again.
Mike asks me when we were going to schedule the meeting for Thursday so we could plan the June job camp and he's like "How about in the morning?" I tell him that's not good for me since we're doing that parent awareness fair or whatever it is for the school board and will probably be working near to 8:00 p.m. I suggest noon.
Minutes later, none other than Maddie calls me, from the Cabal Headquarters AKA Wendy's, no doubt. She puts on her "boss voice" and says she wants to have a meeting in the morning on Thursday for APD, VR, job camp... I tell her no, morning isn't good, since I'm working well into the evening attending that fair (that she is skipping out on by the way due to her kid's appointment... Really? She knew about this HITT fair for months!) I throw her a tiny bone suggesting 11:30, she asks Mike who is sitting across the Situation Room table AKA a dining room table at Wendy's, that's fine. But then she implies she wants to get this over quick and hopefully less than an hour. And I'm all like resisting since I know it should take a bit more than an hour to hammer out all the issues we have with this job camp. I'm also not knowing why she wants to cover APD and VR stuff, but then I realize of course she's taking Friday off, since it's her birthday, and with her new title I guess she's going to want to see us put in our monthly reports? IDK? If that's the case, then screw fucking her, I am really not down with that! I'm a big boy and I can do this shit all on my own and it only takes me 5 minutes to do that task. Based on what I've seen how she is so computer scared it takes her a good hour. Well sucks to be her but I'll do my APD and VR monthlies on Friday, within minutes of clocking in, and it will be done before I even shit, shower, and shave.
Getting more and more pissed off at her especially when she was pushing back that I wanted the meeting to extend more than an hour and her excuse to not continue it would be that she had to "work with her clients." Again with this fucking bullshit!
I tersely and firmly started pushing back. I said "WHAT CLIENT?" she said that doesn't matter, I said "FROM WHEN TO WHEN ARE YOU WORKING WITH THEM, HOW LONG? AND IS THIS TRUE OR IS IT ALL PART OF YOUR OBFUSCATION?
Then without waiting for her reply, the next thing I said to Maddie was, and I quote, "DO YOU KNOW THE MEANING OF THE WORD OBFUSCATION?"
Oh yeah, oh yeah, we're at that place now.
I quickly thought about it and kind of regretted it because that is kind of douchey. Well, not kind of, it's out right being a dick! But I may have lucked out since the conversation was over my cell phone and the reception is spotty here at Shamrock Shack, I heard Maddie saying "Hello, hello, hello..." so she may not have heard the childish belittlement on my part.
Or maybe she did? I tried calling back on the Google Voice line, she ignored it. I tried calling Mike on the Google Voice line, he ignored it. I tried calling back on the cell phone to Maddie, she ignored it again. I called Mike on my cell phone, he picked up. His excuse for not picking up the Google Voice line call to him is that he didn't recognize it because even though he had changed my profile from my cell phone number to the Google Voice number when last I called him with it, I had called back on my cell phone number and he thought I was back on that and not on the Google Voice so he deleted that.
This guy is a fucking moron. I seriously, without any condescension because I don't think he's fucking with me (on this) I think he really is that ignorant as to how contacts work on a phone. I told him how to add multiple numbers to one contact so that whichever number I call it would come up as me and he said "oh thank you."
You see, this is what I'm dealing with, either these guys are total fucking morons, and I say that with all due respect and love because that's the clientele we work with right? They may have a birth defect, they may have a genetic makeup when they were born like down syndrome or fragile X, they have a valid excuse for being the way they are, but these two bozos have fucking graduate degrees from colleges! How did they make it through their lessons? How did they get that sheepskin? It just, once again, proves to me that the fucking system that we have where people have these degrees, it's bullshit because they must either cheat their way through school or they learn shit by rote memory, cram before exams and then, as is the case of course, they proceed to forget everything they learned within a few months. By the time of their graduation, they probably have no idea how to do anything they supposedly "learned." But I fucking digress, of course, back to the war.
So I get an email from Kathleen.
It's to me, Mike, Maddie, and the head of HR. Oh fuck, that can't be good. Maddie and Mike have no doubt ganged up on me and called Kathleen and perhaps we'll "have a talking to."
So in response I emailed Mike and Maddie "helpful" copies of all of their April client notes called MPRS. These are the documentation to VR verifying the steps we're taking with each of our clients. Every step should be documented even 5 minute phone calls or a quick email. There should be an MPR for everything. Guess how many MPR notes Mike and Maddie have on their caseloads? Oh it's a bit up from before I started and began my questioning of the outright lack of notations over the previous six to eight months for all caseloads, but a lot of them are just "tried to call and no answer" or "call and left a voicemail" How much of an eight hour day does that take up? I blind cc'd Kathleen on this. Hopefully Kathleen will see that I added her as a BCC, and has enough business experience with emails to know what that means. Yep I was divulging information to her that was outright incriminating. And for Tuesday's meeting, I'll have the MPR notes for all of Mike and Maddie's shell game-a-thon over the past 6 months.
We'll see who gets fired.