I’m a hybrid between girl next door and progressive …

I’m a hybrid of progressive and girl next door lookie!

http://www.cookingtohookup.com/girls/

Imagine that the Girl Next Door moved to the big city. Think of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally. She’s America’s sweetheart with an urban sensibility. She’s a post-Christian spiritualist, a pre-Monica Clintonite, and a dues-paying member of at least one social-change organization like NOW, Planned Parenthood, or the Sierra Club. You won’t find her at an Earth First or PETA meeting, though. Those are the Granola Girl’s stomping grounds. Progressive Girls want the world to be a better place, but they live out their politics in a moderate, left-of-center way.

If you are going to date a Progressive Girl, the one sin you can commit is to be a chameleon. Molding your opinions to fit hers will lose her respect. One very positive thing you can do is offer her new experiences — the Progressive Girl is fearless about trying new things. Whether it’s pluralism, skydiving, Asian peanut sauce, or this book, the Progressive Girl is always looking for new ideas.

She Might Be a Progressive Girl if:

She drives: a small SUV but really wishes it got better mileage; once she can get a good hybrid, she will.
She can talk for more than ten minutes about: just about anything.
She begins her sentences with: “Susan Sarandon says…”
She’d never: pass up the chance for a new experience.
She owns any of the following: a water filter, a tabletop fountain, an acre of rain forest, a mutt from the pound.

The Girl Next Door is from a small town, a large family, or both. She still has a healthy dose of what people ’round these parts call “family values.” She calls her grandparents every Sunday and she’s got her mom on speed dial. The Girl Next Door likes an uncomplicated life filled with the simple pleasures of family, home, kids, and food. She may not actually live on a farm, but she tends to keep a menagerie. Asked to choose between a dog and a cat, she generally won’t. What’s a good guard dog without a mouser to keep it company? She is caring and warm, welcoming and friendly. Anybody in your office ever bring in chocolate chip cookies? You got yourself a Girl Next Door.

The defining characteristics of the Girl Next Door are simplicity and tradition. Simplicity means that, unlike the Academic Girl, she’s really not that interested in the great questions that keep philosophers up at night. When she can sit in the kitchen, drinking coffee, eating shortbread cookies with a friend, and listening to the cat purr on top of the radiator, what else is there to life? What else, indeed.

She Might Be a Girl Next Door if:

She drives: a good, solid American car — a Ford Taurus, Chevy Cavalier, or Dodge Stratus.
She can talk for more than ten minutes about: her family’s holiday traditions.
She begins her sentences with: “my mother says…”
She’d never: go to a rave.
She owns any of the following: scrapbooks, heirloom quilts, a Bible, family recipes, her grandmother’s engagement ring

Work feels oddly different today and also a bit hectic. No Mr. D around, no Mrs. L around and pretty just wierd. I’ve been taking on Mrs. L’s duties for sales coordinator along with my current job duties. Everyone keeps saying they hope they can transition me to that position and i’m crossing my fingers so I can get myself somewhat out of accounting. The owner will be here tomorrow for a big office meeting, i’m sure to discuss the new changes and reassure everyone. I’m hoping that at some point my salary is addressed but i’m remaining patient while we transition and let dust settle some from the latest changes. In the past 2 weeks, we’ve lost (whether fired or moved on) our controller in San Jose, a receptionist/admin. assist in San Jose, our sales manager here, our sales coordinator here and nearly loss one of our sales guy but he came back today after all. I’m a bit overwhelmed by work and school and just the madness surrounding both. We have midterms starting shortly.

I’m trying to figure out what to cook for the housewarming party and need to kind of find out who all is coming. I know we invited a ton of people between the 2 of us from work and friends. I mailed off a present to my friend, Sarah, who’s getting married this weekend. I honestly hope she can understand why i’m missing her wedding. I never heard back from my last email about why I couldn’t make it. At first, I was pretty hurt but I guess so was she. The thing is, that’s not the reason for me not going and I hope she can see that in her heart. It has more to do with my finances between school, new house etc. We are also having family here for Thanksgiving and then flying to Oregon for Xmas so lots of money flooding out over the next few weeks. *sighs*

Been trying to write this while being drug up and downstairs for things. Miss Q was talking to me about her date this evening and we got talking about when the last time she dated and about love etc. It’s always interesting to here different viewpoints. We got into the conversation of loves lost and ex’s. How many times do you think of your ex or lost love? Even if you are happy in a relationship or married I never try to let myself regret anything in my life because it’s happened for a reason but I do think about the events that changed things in the course of my life. Anyhow, just one of those talks that make you think.

back to work! god the day has flown by, amazing when you are swamped what happens to time.

~heather

Little update ~

Mr. D was fired on Monday (not a suprise) and Mrs. L was offered Office Mgr position (which i’ve basically been doing for the last year, hell I trained her on the office stuff minus her sales side of things). It included a gas card and a higher salary. Good news is, from her meeting at lunch, the Owner brought up the turmoil with the office staff and said he thought it was bullshit about my salary and could understand why now that things have been such a mess around here between some of us. (damn that’s a run on sentence but i’m not fixing it – lazy, yes!) Basically Mr. D came on, hired all his new techs, sales coordinator, receptionist for way more then long standing employees such my project mgr, other hardworking techs and of course myself. I don’t know what the guy was thinking. Mrs. L told me today she doesn’t think she’ll take their offer /shrugs. What this means for me now, I have no clue. I know that if she leaves, my work load is drastically increasing and we need a new person to work full time or something of that sort because it would be just Mrs. Q who is part – time and well I only work until 5 on Fridays. Ideally, i’d like to get a new person to do my accounting billing side and let me step over to sales side of things but who knows. They also need to DRASTICALLY change my salary since i’m still being screwed with our receptionist making more. The upcoming weeks sure will provide for some interesting journal entries.

On the school side of things, I got an A on my Management Quiz last week (which was more like a teaser of the exam). In 2 weeks I have my midterm YUCK. He pushed it back some due to the poor quiz results but hey I did good on it! I turned in my Business Plan Proposal last night and am hoping he likes my ideas. The other classes are going great. I really am starting to love working in Illustrator. I had a good conversation with my professor the other night and talked about Paintshop Pro (which is what I used at Trane and am VERY used to for design, mainly due to the building design work vs. photos / art) vs. Photoshop and Illustrator. I’m in love with the Adobe Creative Suite! Now to just get a Powerbook with it fully loaded with all this fun stuff and i’m set. *dreams*

In a more newsworthy note: FLU VACCINE SHORTAGE!

Now, this hits my family a bit hard because my parents own a company that provides flu shots. If you didn’t hear by now (do you live in a cave?) British government pulled the license from Chiron (a flu vaccine manufacturing company). This was after some contaminated batches. Originally they were supposed to be able to correct the problem, get new batches out and be ok by November. I definitely think it’s good that we don’t have bad batches of flu vaccine but what a blow this is. Aventis and Chiron are respectively the top 2 flu vaccine manufacturers in the world. There are basically no other companies that are involved in the flu vaccine, except those that do the nasal (which can’t be adminstrated to certain people due to it being a live virus). My parents run a company that does Flu Vaccines in the Kansas and Missouri areas. They provide flu shots at locations such as grocery stores, clinics, schools and even the Kansas City Chiefs football game. Originally they had all their flu vaccine ordered from Chiron but they managed to get some in from Aventis recently but had to pay a much steeper price for it. This has been really stressful on my parents and my thoughts have been with them.

On a more worldly note, my worries lie with those that are in desperate need of these shots. They are saying now that elderly, young children and those with health problems should be the first priority in receiving a shot. I just hope that this year isn’t a bad flu year. Please everyone be careful, wash your hands often etc this winter.

~heather (would write more on this matter, god knows I did a term paper on their business last year for a management class but I have to get back to work!)

This was an article from a few weeks ago after they had found out the delays of vaccine
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/local/9518450.htm

A lil quote from the paper:
“The delay in getting the vaccine probably will mean that flu vaccination clinics at Kansas City area supermarkets and other locations will start a week or two later, said Rick Murphy, president of Healthy Solutions.

The Overland Park company is one of the region’s largest providers of flu shots.”

Here’s an article from this morning with the new information but also my parents company mentioned and my dad quoted
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/9845059.htm

The one thing that truely makes me happy lately (besides of course the hubby) is the house! Yesterday to get my mind off the thought of going back to work, I proceeded to go blow money on decorating our house.

We are having a housewarming party October 23rd for anyone in the area or within decent driving distance. Think we have a few friends coming from Bay Area along with friends and co-workers. To be honest, not sure who all is coming yet as I need to officially send an invite / get the word out.

Anyhow, back to my decorating day! I went to Bed Bath & Beyond, Michaels and Cost Plus – World Market for things and lots of things I might add!!! Eventually I’ll paint our guest bathroom a blue or green to go with the Starry Nite etc paintings. I’m debating whether to paint our kitchen green as that’s how I originally was going to do it with a dark green accent wall (wall with stove / refrig). The kitchen we are going for the wine / tuscan type of theme since we love wine. It’s easy to decorate for also and found lots of cool buys!

Here’s the new pictures of the house – yards, kitchen/dining (best project) and then the guestbath.

Getting Screwed ~
Yes, that’s right I was royally screwed over by my job. Let me go back a few months!(too lazy to find the posts in my lj about all of this so i’ll try to do a shortened version if possible).

Mr. D gets hired as our new sales manager and given free reign to do what he wants to improve our company (we are part of a company based out of San Jose, CA). He brings on a new sales guy, new sales coordinator and some service techs. We fire a few old techs. At the time our dispatcher/receptionist gives notice. The new sales coordinator is doing the job the dispatcher is doing until we get a new dispatcher hired. It ends up the sales coordinator and I are doing the dispatcher job (mainly me because she isn’t fully trained and learning on the job.) We are both frustrated, not dealing well with each other etc but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Mr. D finds us a new dispatcher but the catch is – she can only work part-time. He thinks she’s a great asset and asks us how we feel about it and at this point we both are just looking for relief and trust Mr. D’s judgement.

Miss Q (i’ll call her) is hired on and I start the training process with her. She’s a small blonde woman that dresses like she should be stuck in an 80′s video and is very vocal about her gold digging habits and her lust for rich men. Space cadet would be a nice word for this lady but hey she seemed nice enough. Throughout the summer we’ve been muddling through and i’ve been training her more as we go. Some things she screws up I take on myself to fix, others I give back so she can see her mistakes. To say she can handle that job is would be a fat lie. She basically has to answer the phones and tell service techs. where to go. Easy right? Anyhow, i’ve had my share of problems with her. Basically everything she does ends up on my desk so if it’s done wrong i’m screwed and have to fix it or if I don’t catch her mistake it bites me in the arse and creates major headaches.

So there’s a brief update on the staff – events and now onto the main story!

Right about the time Mr. D was hired on, I was getting frustrated due to what little pay I did receive and the amount of work I do around here. Especially since I was trying to train and do more then just my job. In a meeting with him and Mr. E they approached me about a raise, among other issues. I was asked “what would you want to be making if we could?”. I thought for a minute and replied back with an amount equal to my starting salary at my job in Colorado even though I thought I deserved even more then that. 2 weeks later I was pulled into the office and told they couldn’t give me what I was asking for but could give me a raise. I thought, hey that’s better then nothing so away I went somewhat happy. A few weeks later Miss Q was hired on and I have been doing the ongoing training etc. Miss Q had the lucky schedule of Thurs. 8:45-2:30 and Fridays off plus she’s supposed to work only 32 hours but manages to put 11-12 hour days on her timesheet everyday so she pulls a 40 hr week afterall. They also gave her full benefits, paid days off etc despite her “part-time” hiring.

Now for the screwing, hey f you heather..we got you good part of the story.
Last Friday we (Miss L – sales coordinator and I) found out how much Miss Q makes. This was completely by chance as we were looking for some papers I needed in order to do a job billing. Basically, she was hired on for WAY more then me and then at her 90 day they gave her a nice raise that even hiked it up more. I’m thinking hey, i’ve been here for a year and 1/2 more then her and Miss L. I trained them both. One answers phones and dispatches techs, one types up letters and handles the sales guys calls yet they both make quite a few $k’s more then me a year. It’s amazing how they think that can be right. I also had to change my schedule of the last year to work with theirs screwing me up some but hey i’m flexible. I’m so shocked, pissed and just wanting out. I love who I work for, love who I work with so if they could just fix this mess i’d probably be ok but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

~shuts her office door, think today is going to be a quiet time needed day~
Heather