Insomnia

Ah yes, my favorite time of night. Insomnia has struck again.

I swear that it’s inherited. It is not uncommon, especially during the school year, for me to get up in the morning, or even the middle of the night, and find my mom reading or sleeping on the couch because she woke up in the middle of the night. My big brother also has a hard time falling asleep at night. I guess we all have too much going on in our minds to sleep.

I usually try several things to help me go back to sleep. I hit the bathroom, in case it is my bladder keeping me awake and I’m not aware of it. I’ll get a drink of water or even a slice a bread to put something in my body to get me back to sleep. I’ll open a window to change the temperature in my room.

I’m most successful with the trip to the bathroom or eating the slice of bread. Some nights however, I get to watch the clock change until my alarm goes off. That would be tonight.

Sometimes I read until the alarm goes off. I keep a couple books on my headboard. (It’s a built in, so there is a shelf all the way across the top of my bed rather than a traditional flat vertical headboard.) And if those two books aren’t my cup of tea, I have plenty of other books in my room that can keep me busy.

I have even gone down to the living room and popped in a DVD from time to time.

Tonight though – or rather this morning – I am not in the mood to do any of those even though I would really like to go back to sleep or at least make the night pass faster. This morning, I am trying to figure out what my brain is lingering on that is not allowing me to sleep.

It’s the job. I’ve been frustrated before with the job, been spoken to about my attitude, figured out a way to not take it so seriously and gotten over myself so I can do my job. I’ve managed to find ways to keep myself busy so the inane nature of my job won’t get to me. I’m cycling back again though. I’m cycling back to being frustrated that my position is being ignored by my manager.

I don’t even take it personally. Really, I don’t. I mean, I joke that I’m the "red headed step child of accounting” and that “nobody likes me, which is why I am left off of the group emails” by my department. But really, it isn’t personal. I don't take it personally any more. There is just no one else in my department who concentrates on IS like I do. All the other people that hold the same position and title as I do, work on both IS and OS. And my manger came from OS, it’s her baby. She won a big award last year for her work with OS.

Little footnote, there is this legislature that pasted since the Enron scandal called the Sarbanes Oxley Act, or SOX for short. The SOX Act governs financial and accounting disclosures for businesses. And this is audited by an outside source, not just internally. My manager won the award for bringing OS into SOX compliance. 2006 is supposed to be the year that IS becomes compliant. It's July and not much has changed. I digress.

Its logical that OS gets more attention. One office pulls in more money through OS than all of the offices for IS combined. This is a business, you take care of your money makers.

What is frustrating to me is that there is no one that does my job besides me. I am expected to trouble shoot any and everything that pops up for IS. And I don’t mean to brag or sound conceded but I am very good at what I do. I take care of IS. And I have a reputation of being the person to go to for everything. And I mean everything, even office supplies.

Um, hello? I’m an accountant, not an office manager…

I could try to look at it as flattering. I’m competent and my manager knows she can ignore IS because I am taking care of it.

Except that there are problems that I don’t know how to solve. Or perhaps it is better to say, I know better than to try to solve on my own. See, here again there is this strange dichotomy in which I try to handle IS in house, not bother my boss, she finds out about it and asks why I did what I did and why she wasn’t contacted about it.

Maybe because you ignore my emails and I have to ask you three times for an answer and even then there is no guarantee that I will get one.

And you would think, that after I was gone for ONE WEEK on vacation and my onsite manager failed utterly to take care of any of my duties while I was gone, you would want to train someone to do my job. Nope, on Friday, my onsite manager, on instructions from our manager, started training me on OS duties. Yeah, ‘cuz like there is no one else to take care of OS if the other accountant gets sick.

Isn’t this counterintuitive? Yes, I see why they want me cross trained on OS. I get it, OS is very important at my company. In every other office, the accountant does OS and IS. My office is the only one that has two accountants, one for IS and one for OS. Wouldn’t to make sense, isn’t t logical that if you only have one person who concentrates on IS, you should train a second person to back that person up?

The irony about how my onsite manager failed to complete my duties while I was gone, I left him written instructions for much of it. On top of it, I ‘trained’ him for about two weeks before I left (around his other duties for OS, of course), so he had all sorts of notes written on the tasks he was to undertake. Grade: F

I know I am being vague, I don’t know if this post has made any sense. I need another vacation from work, that’s all there is to it.

It just sucks that when I take time off from work, I know that there will be double the amount of work for me to do upon my return. That doesn’t make for a very relaxing vacation. What the hell would they do if I actually took my two weeks vacation all at once?

I need a raise.