talking about my uterus at work. again

I need you Dear Diary, because I’m doing it again. One of the best uses for this journal is that it is a place where I can dump all the idiotic shit that rattles around inside my head constantly without finding myself one bright Monday morning sitting in a meeting about capillary electrophoresis and slipping into a conversation with my boss that ends up with me describing what a contraction feels like. To my MALE boss. We were talking about donuts and of course that made me remember how I would eat a donut every day for lunch when I was pregnant and how for the next hour it would feel like Joey was going to rip out of my stomach straight through my belly button, only to find out when I gave birth that I was not actually hosting an alien fetus, but instead having perfectly normal Braxton hicks contractions.

I share those things with you.

Everything is fine with me. Everything is the same since I last wrote except that I am no longer the new girl at work, and Joey is talking in full sentences like a real person.

So it’s hard to start working in a new place, especially if the environment is ultra-conservative like the one I work in. It took months but I am finally at a point where I can work independently once again and schedule my own time and workload without everyone freaking out and hoping I’m not some kind of loose cannon who could bring the entire corporation crashing to its knees. I know how it works. Everyone wonders what the hell the new girl is doing with all her filthy new ideas and experiments. What if she uses one of them and ruins everything!!! She’s new! She doesn’t know how we do things! What will the FDA think????

A lot of my time at work is spent pondering the question, WWTFDAD (What Would The FDA Do). When I scribble a comment in my lab notebook, I try to imagine how an auditor would interpret my message and I end up clarifying so much that I run out of room for all my explaining. I actually had to attach a formal memo to a data sheet about a simple instrument calibration when my comments went too long and I ran out of space. When I have to recalculate an area because I decided to move my baseline slightly to the left, I write an entire paragraph into the audit trail in my computer explaining why. My motto has become No Red Flags, and so I am always thinking: WWTFDAD?

I have a recurring nightmare that I am not following correct protocol for doing normal things that I don’t even do at work like taking a shower or eating dinner or setting my alarm, and I get busted in an audit and they take away all my patents. It’s absurd but then sometimes so is my job.

At least I don’t have to worry about Joey ever having work-related stress. At school today they traced an outline of each of the children’s bodies onto a huge piece of art paper and hung it on the wall. And at the top of each child’s body outline they listed the occupation that the child hopes to someday pursue. One kid wants to be a truck driver. Another kid wants to be a mailman. One of the little freaks wants to grow up to be a princess. But they’re two and three years old, so it all makes perfect sense. So when I look to my child’s outline to see which occupation he thinks would make a great career, I half expect to see something like garbage man or guy who drives a plow. Imagine my surprise when I look at the words above my child’s outline and it says: “The letter O”.

I guess from watching Eli and I run around here high on work stress all week long, we've ruined engineering and science for him. I guess I'd want to grow up to be a vowel too.

 

Comments

[hubs]

somtimes why?

[sherry]

1. I am SO frickin' glad to see you back!
2. I think he will make a wonderful letter O.