We who mystically represent the cherubim and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the live giving trinity, let us now lay aside all earthy cares, that we may receive the King of All who comes invisibly upbourne by the angelic hosts.
CHERUBIM and SERAPHIM
Monday, June 28, 2010
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov
And when trials beset you, comfort and fortify your soul by saying to it: Shall I not drink the cup which the father has given me? The Chalice is bitter. One has merely to glance at it, and all human calculations vanish.
Substitute faith for calculation, and courageously drink the bitter cup. It is the all-good and all-wise Father Who gives it to you.
It was not Pharisees, of Caiaphas, or Judas who prepared it. It is not Pilate and his soldiers who give it. Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given Me?
The Pharisees plot, Judas betrays, Pilate orders the iniquitous murder, the governor’s soldiers perform it. By their evildoings they all prepared for themselves certain perdition.
Do not prepare for yourself perdition equally certain by animosity and resentment, by desiring and planning revenge, by being indignant and angry with your enemies.
---St. Ignatius Brianchaninov
Substitute faith for calculation, and courageously drink the bitter cup. It is the all-good and all-wise Father Who gives it to you.
It was not Pharisees, of Caiaphas, or Judas who prepared it. It is not Pilate and his soldiers who give it. Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given Me?
The Pharisees plot, Judas betrays, Pilate orders the iniquitous murder, the governor’s soldiers perform it. By their evildoings they all prepared for themselves certain perdition.
Do not prepare for yourself perdition equally certain by animosity and resentment, by desiring and planning revenge, by being indignant and angry with your enemies.
---St. Ignatius Brianchaninov
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Meet the solicitor
Anyone that has probably ever talked to me knows that my job is a less than ideal situation. It's not a fact that I conceal. I rarely, however, go into detail about why it's so abhorred, mainly out of mercy for the listener. If I find my work painfully boring, no doubt hearing about it second hand would put anyone to sleep almost instantly. Today, though, prepare yourself. I'm about to divulge.
Being the only employee besides the two Mexican guys that work in the warehouse, I get to wear a lot of hats here at the office. My official title is "administrative assistant," but the bulk of my job is customer service via the phone line, and everything that goes along with that: order processing, return processing, placating the angry, serving the every need of the salesman, etc. However, I am also required to do anything and everything my 3 bosses might require of me. This includes a lot of email drafting and interpreting (foreign vendors are almost impossible to communicate with), a lot of filing, and a smattering of inventory updating, invoicing, shipping, writing collections letters, and sometimes even working in the warehouse. I also design and email fliers on a regular basis.
Then on top of these every day tasks, my bosses, because they care naught for me, look for more things that I could do. Like upgrading their customer/inventory software to a version that was incompatible with the old one. Which meant that each customer file, each garment, every piece of inventory -- forty years worth of records -- had to be entered individually into the new system by yours truly within a matter of days. That was last month.
This month they decided to update the website. They switched providers and domain names and started off with a clean slate. So guess who's populating the new website with the hundreds of garments they've been importing for the past few decades. That's right. No training in website maintenance did they offer me. They just said, do this asap, and I said, bloody hell, but not to them.
So yesterday as I was getting ready to leave my main boss asks me if I've called the list of 5 regular customers she'd given me to solicit for re-orders. Yes, I have, but none of them need new merchandise right now. Ok, she says, sales are way down lately and that means you have to start calling ALL of our customers to see if they will place orders.
Ok. ...
Which means that today I am a fully fledged solicitor. Or saleswoman, I guess. Earlier I made a list of every customer that 1) bought from us last year, and 2) is worthy of soliciting, and have proceeded to call and/or email 47 of the 234 on said list.
Suffice it to say, I am not looking forward to the next few weeks at work.
Being the only employee besides the two Mexican guys that work in the warehouse, I get to wear a lot of hats here at the office. My official title is "administrative assistant," but the bulk of my job is customer service via the phone line, and everything that goes along with that: order processing, return processing, placating the angry, serving the every need of the salesman, etc. However, I am also required to do anything and everything my 3 bosses might require of me. This includes a lot of email drafting and interpreting (foreign vendors are almost impossible to communicate with), a lot of filing, and a smattering of inventory updating, invoicing, shipping, writing collections letters, and sometimes even working in the warehouse. I also design and email fliers on a regular basis.
Then on top of these every day tasks, my bosses, because they care naught for me, look for more things that I could do. Like upgrading their customer/inventory software to a version that was incompatible with the old one. Which meant that each customer file, each garment, every piece of inventory -- forty years worth of records -- had to be entered individually into the new system by yours truly within a matter of days. That was last month.
This month they decided to update the website. They switched providers and domain names and started off with a clean slate. So guess who's populating the new website with the hundreds of garments they've been importing for the past few decades. That's right. No training in website maintenance did they offer me. They just said, do this asap, and I said, bloody hell, but not to them.
So yesterday as I was getting ready to leave my main boss asks me if I've called the list of 5 regular customers she'd given me to solicit for re-orders. Yes, I have, but none of them need new merchandise right now. Ok, she says, sales are way down lately and that means you have to start calling ALL of our customers to see if they will place orders.
Ok. ...
Which means that today I am a fully fledged solicitor. Or saleswoman, I guess. Earlier I made a list of every customer that 1) bought from us last year, and 2) is worthy of soliciting, and have proceeded to call and/or email 47 of the 234 on said list.
Suffice it to say, I am not looking forward to the next few weeks at work.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Thursdays seem to be hard for me
These days have been endless ones. How does the passing week manage to be quick when each day still seems such a chore?
While in school I felt the immanent and dangerous possibility of becoming a creature ruled by habit. Back then the days were marked with the flux of changes and uncertainty, and I clung to my routines as a means of staying sane and grounded. Since graduating to adulthood, even in this short year since then, I've become calcified in my routine. Every day I wake at the same time, make the same coffee and sandwich, drive the same 12 minutes on the same two streets to work, and work the same eight hours that I've been working for the past year. Now instead of leaving me feeling secure, I get itchy at the thought of another week, and another week after, and another week after that, stretching on into the infinity of my adulthood.
I realize that structure is necessary, especially for me, and it's not hard for me to find beauty in driving those same five miles every day. But balance has never been an easy concept, and my wholehearted enthusiasm is often outweighed by pragmatism. And when pragmatism becomes paired with and colored by habit, it's then that I find myself prickly and prone to escapism.
It's Thursday again and I'm tired.
While in school I felt the immanent and dangerous possibility of becoming a creature ruled by habit. Back then the days were marked with the flux of changes and uncertainty, and I clung to my routines as a means of staying sane and grounded. Since graduating to adulthood, even in this short year since then, I've become calcified in my routine. Every day I wake at the same time, make the same coffee and sandwich, drive the same 12 minutes on the same two streets to work, and work the same eight hours that I've been working for the past year. Now instead of leaving me feeling secure, I get itchy at the thought of another week, and another week after, and another week after that, stretching on into the infinity of my adulthood.
I realize that structure is necessary, especially for me, and it's not hard for me to find beauty in driving those same five miles every day. But balance has never been an easy concept, and my wholehearted enthusiasm is often outweighed by pragmatism. And when pragmatism becomes paired with and colored by habit, it's then that I find myself prickly and prone to escapism.
It's Thursday again and I'm tired.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
