a very bad day

Oh, my day... it was awful. I know I've bitched very vaguely about my job before now, but today I need to vent, and I don't want to be vague. Besides, my boss thinks that the internet is magic, so I'm not too worried about her finding this.

I'm also not too worried about being fired, at this point.

Today I got yelled at for not being psychic. And I am serious.

Basically, my job is calling schools and teaching artists and setting up artistic programs between them. I've been calling one school for months now, leaving messages on a nondescript machine, “We are out of the office, please try again later.” I'd leave messages, and not hear back. Now, if my job were only about phone calls, I would have tried harder to get in touch with this school, and I can't make people call me. But I have had a ton of work to do, and only recently has it started to slow down.

Yesterday I found out that the number I've been calling – which had been provided by the school – was wrong. I found this out because someone finally answered the phone, and it was a manufactoring company. Again, the phone number, clearly written on the scheduling form, was provided by the school who wanted to book programs. But today I was yelled at, in front of other people at the office, for not having known beforehand that the number was wrong.

I got yelled at for not being psychic.

I got yelled at by a woman who sails in hours late every day, immediately takes a half-hour smoke break, regularly takes two-hour lunches along with several smoke breaks throughout the day, distracts us all from our work while she's in the office, and then sails out early every day. Oh, and she has no sense of office privacy – once she announced to the entire office that one of our coworkers was “having a nervous breakdown” and wouldn't be in the office for a while. I'm pretty sure that that's illegal. This is the woman who yelled at me.

She has yelled at me in the past (earlier in the spring she gave me a “talking to” at least every day for three weeks straight, before finally realizing that the fiasco I was dealing with wasn't my fault). Always for stupid reasons. For example: even though she told me to work exclusively on one project, she wanted to know why I wasn't working on another project.

I finally figured out that she yells at me for two reasons: 1) the administrative assistant who was her scapegoat quit in March, and 2) although boss lady manipulates everyone else in the office and likes to play people off of each other in bad ways, she's found that I'm not easily manipulated.

Yes, in an office of five people, there are ridiculous factions. I've been sick of it for a while (and I am NOT making enough money to deal with the stress of the job itself or the morbid infighting vibe of the office), and I've been job-searching since April. And yeah, my boss knows about it. But now I'm going to step up the job search, because I seriously cannot deal with this crap anymore.