Eek!

What a day.

This morning, I'm washing the dishes, as I do every morning, and Ms PA comes in and starts talking. She's saying how I won't have to do the dishes very soon. Nothing too major. But then she asks me if I've bought my tickets to HK yet or not. While it's a generally harmless question, constantly being asked it can feel rather pressuring. So, after answering no, I ask "do you mind not asking me that question?" She says "excuse me for [didn't catch the word, sounded like screaming]". She didn't sound too upset, but I did wonder. I'm so used to her grumpiness that I can't really tell. I watched her as she left, but she wasn't acting out of the ordinary, so I couldn't tell if she was upset or not. Then she came back to get some water onto a napkin, cos she'd spilt coffee on herself, I think. Someone else who was making their cup of coffee greets her and must have asked her how she was doing cos she blurted out that it wasn't that great being put in your place first thing in the morning. She disappears and the lady that greeted her is rather stunned so I explain what happened. We start getting into discussions about my leaving to teach English in HK and someone else walks in. I'm more familiar with this person, and I feel the need to get it off my chest, so I explain what happened earlier to her too. I think it was good to do that, cos I was starting to get rather upset about it, and she did a good job of making me feel better.

I tried asking in the nicest way. And I tried to sound as polite as possible.

I've done something similar once before, but I don't think I upset them. Two of the ladies in Finance (not sure if it's coincidence that they're Chinese) keep yelling "Smile!" whenever they walk past me. I have the unfortunate feature of looking grumpy when I relax my face, so people think I'm unhappy if I don't smile. Anyways, one day I couldn't take it anymore, and asked one of them (after they said "smile, Sarah") to stop saying that. She didn't take offense. Instead, she must have told the other lady not to do it too, cos the other lady stopped doing it. Yeah, they probably talked behind my back about it, but at least I don't have to sit next to them. Then again, one of those ladies still considers me her "sister", so I don't think there can have been too much backstabbing, if there had been any in the first place.

Anyways, the real disaster of the day is that my phone extension somehow managed to get switched last night or this morning. I was sitting at my desk, waiting patiently for a call from reception to tell me that my boss' visitor had arrived. The visitor was an applicant for my current job, which they're interviewing for. Anyways, around 11:10am, one of the ladies at reception comes up the lift and asks me if I just got back to my desk. It turns out the applicant had arrived around 10:45, and they'd been ringing me since then, with no answer. So we grab Ms PA's phone and call my phone. It's ringing on the line, but my phone's still silent. After picking up the applicant and taking her to the interview room (15 minutes late), I call reception, as requested by the lady from reception. They've got caller ID, so they can see the extension number of the phone calling them. She tells me the extension showing up is the one for one of the faxes. Say what?! But it's all good, and I've got my extension back. The technician thinks that when another technician was working with the cables yesterday, he might have bumped one loose and put it in the wrong place.

We had to push back all the other interviews because of it.

And I've been overloaded with work because one of the other PAs had to get her tooth extracted yesterday because she was experiencing a huge headache because of it. So she'd passed on some work to me. Right before I was to go to lunch (already late due to the interviews being pushed back) I got asked to print 60 copies of a document. I opted to just grab a sandwich from the cafe downstairs and skip lunch. My boss did tell me to go to lunch, but I still skipped it. I just decided to pop on here after finishing one of the tasks, so I should get back to work now.