Okay, forgive me, crowd. I haven't posted in an age and a half, but there's a good reason. In fact, the majority of this post will be about it, for the simple reason that it's most on my mind. Other things will follow... and I'll put the ranting in a spoiler tag so you can skip my bitching if you like.
I'm stressed the fuck out about work.
SPOILERS! (Click to view)My job description:
The Associate Director reports to the Director and is responsible for the technical component of the service, upkeep and maintenance of equipment, providing supplemental training for dispatch volunteers. The Associate Director is also responsible for scheduling volunteers, and assists in planning training sessions and appreciation events for volunteers.
Pretty vague, eh? I must note that every other position with this organisation appears to have explicit duties and responsibilities. Mine, not so much. However, I don't see the part where it says that I become the bitch of the Director, forced to do whatever random crap she decides is super-important, including randomly changing display boards to fit in with our advertising campaign of this year. Nor that when I fail to get all the random crap done in the completely ludicrously short time frame she gives me, I get called up on the red carpet in front of the person above her who is technically my boss but in effect only gets called in when something's gone horribly wrong and threatened with firing if I don't get my act together.
It also says that I should be working 20 hours a week for my pay of $670/month. This works out to just under $8/hr before taxes. It says nothing about working an average of 30.4 hours a week this month, nor does it say anything about any kind of incentive to do so. This incentive, of course, doesn't exist.
The entire organisation appears to have been built around the idea that whoever comes into my position would have been watching the previous AD for the entire year preceding their application with the idea in mind that they'd be applying, and thus it's sort of an apprenticeship. When they decided this year to replace both Director and AD with people who'd been sort of on the edges of the hardcore group of the organisation to combat a big problem they'd been having with a large clique of people who were sort of excluding the other volunteers from the social atmosphere (we were both on the advisory team but not in this clique), they didn't take this usual apprenticeship style of training into account. For this reason, I went into this job nearly blind, because my transition manual appears to have been written for someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
They didn't tell me that I should expect to essentially give up my September to this place. They didn't tell me that I shouldn't really expect to be only working 20 hours a week as the description says, nor that I'd be expected in those not-20 hours to do more work than two people on 20 hours weeks could realistically finish, when one takes into account the other random crap that's constantly coming up in my office. Nor does it say that if there's noone to work a shift either I or my director will have to fill it, including if (and this definitely happened this weekend) the person in question has had a glass of wine, which is strictly against the rules (apparently we need to be open more direly than we need to follow rules). They didn't tell me that this might be up to 3 shifts a week completely unexpectedly.
On the bright side, I like almost all my volunteers. Some of them are, in fact, quite awesome, totally willing to do random grunt work and put in more volunteer shifts than I'm even doing, and cheerful spots in my otherwise often crappy workday.
I did go to Jasper two weekends ago (so, a week and a half ago) with pearlygirl and her roommate and a bunch of said roommate's other friends. That was super-awesome and excellent for allowing me to release some of this work-related stress. It was just the perfect time of year for it: all the trees' leaves were just changing colour without having fallen off yet, so everywhere you looked there was this fantastic mix of the green conifers and the yellow or orange or (once in a while; this is Alberta, after all) red leaves. Gorgeous. On top of that, the weather was such that it was perfect for our daytime activities and cold enough to require us all snuggling on the second night 
This weekend will also, hopefully, be de-stressing. I've got very little planned, other than working on my assignment for which I asked for an extension til Monday on the day we got it because I knew it wouldn't get done this week.
This post was derailed midway through by this game, which is highly addictive.
That game is totally AWESOME!
Have a great day!