I know I've talked a little bit about challenges of living on this island, but I think I have really understated how difficult it is to work in an office setting where there is absolutely zero guarantee that the tools you need to do your job will be there on any given day.
Case in point - I arrived today and discovered I was without the ability to print or access the Microsoft Exchange server. Makes it a little difficult to do your job when you spend 7 hours of your 8 hour work day at a desk. But then again, it's Monday, so I've just come to expect that sort of thing.
Flashback to a few weeks ago. I walked in Monday morning to find that my phone was dead. Only my phone. All the other phones in my trailer/office are functioning normally, but mine is not. Now, this is approximately one week after we have FINALLY gotten voicemail at work. Yes, that's right - I worked 7 months at a job where nobody had the ability to leave me a voicemail. If you've never worked in a place without voicemail, it may sound great initially - no annoying messages, no blinking light when you return to your office from lunch, etc. In reality though, it means that almost every time you get someone on the phone, the first thing they say to you is "I've been trying to reach you all day!" Usually this sentiment is hurled at you in a fairly accusatory tone, as if you've been purposely dodging their phone calls for a laugh. It gets old pretty quickly, let me tell you.
So now that my joy in my new voicemail system has been cut short, I set off in search of our Maintenance department. You have to search for them, because our property is 35 acres, they don't answer their cell phones, and I don't have a radio. It's like hunting for your dropped car keys on the beach. I finally track someone down, and he informs me that it's an IT issue. So I go on a search for our IT guy, who when I find him informs me it's a Maintenance problem. At this point, I've lost half my morning, and am feeling a wee bit irritated. I throw my hands up in the air, tell them to get their acts together (or something to that effect...) and head back to my phone-less office. I work the second half of my day, clock out at 4:30, and head home.
Tuesday morning, I walk back into my office to find that I still have no phone. This is really getting frustrating. I repeat yesterday morning's exercise, and finally get someone to come over to my office to look at it. He takes a look around, and then suddenly disappears. Now, I realize that this happens in a lot of places, but it seems to be the standard MO down here. A guy (not to enforce stereotypes, but it's almost always a guy) is working on something for you, and then suddenly he's not there. You have no way of telling if he went to get a tool, or went home for the day. Evidently this time he went to find the IT guy, because about an hour later they came back together, and by 1:30pm I have a working phone.
Hazah!! Only a day and a half without a working phone. Not too bad you say. Or at least, I said, given that this is a tiny backward island in the Caribbean. I heave a huge sigh of relief and go on with my day. I clock out at 4:30, and head home.
Next morning, I am sitting in my office at about 11am when the phone rings. I am in the process of answering a question for a co-worker when the phone line goes dead. I look up at my computer to see a notification that network connection has been lost. My internet radio station goes silent.
Huh.
You have got to be fucking kidding me!!
I step into my boss's office next door. "Jefe - do you have connectivity? Any connectivity at all?" No. No he doesn't. The whole trailer is without internet, network, and phone.
I don't know if you've ever worked in an office, but even if you haven't, you can probably imagine that those things are pretty fucking essential to getting anything done at all. Without those things, I am literally dead in the water. Useless. Waste of space.
I look out my window and notice the heavy machinery. My trailer/office sits in the middle of our employee parking lot, which floods every time it rains. Especially when we had what would eventually become Tropical Storm Bonnie come through, we had massive flooding that washed out a walkway and just generally made a mess. So, since that time, we've had people digging some drainage ditches to make sure that doesn't happen again.
And instantly, I KNEW! Those idiots had cut the fiber optics that carry our lifeblood to the trailer/office. Shit. This is bad. This is really, really bad. It takes forever to get minor things fixed down here, let alone MAJOR things like this. Crap.
By 3pm that afternoon I have been set up in a satellite office, halfway across the property from my trailer/office. In this office are myself, my boss (the Director of Human Resources) and the Security Manager. All sharing one office, and one phone. We each have our own computers, and one communal printer. While this is certainly better than nothing, it makes it hard to get certain things done, as everything else I need to do my job is a 5 minute walk away. It also causes some sticky situations, when we have to do something like fire somebody. Oh well. Do what you can with what you have, I guess. I start taking bets as to how long we'll be in our satellite office. I say 2 weeks, the IT guy says 3 days (HA!) and the Security Manager, who's lived on the island for 5 years, says a month.
As usual, I'm right. Two weeks later we move back into our office. It's so nice to be settled and have all my tools right at my finger tips. Ahhhh.
I should know better by now than to get too comfortable.
I had been back in my office one week, when mid-morning, I hear a clunk in the A/C. Suddenly the hum that's always in the background sounds different, and the air seems a bit still. Weird. I ignore it, and head to lunch at my usual time. I return to my office to find that it's 82 degrees. Now, I love the heat, but that's a bit toasty for my taste. And my office usually goes through about a ten degree temperature change over the course of the day (have I mentioned that my office is a trailer? Trailers aren't terribly well-insulated...), but it's now gone up ten degrees in four hours.
This is bad. Very, very bad. I repeat my exercise of hunting for people (I leave the IT guy alone this time though), and finally find someone to come look at my office. He takes a look around, and then disappears. Standard MO. I wait an hour, and then go find someone else. Shower, rinse, repeat. I go through 4 guys with no answer. By now it's 4:30pm, and 95 degrees in my office. I clock out so I can drag my sweaty self home and through the shower.
The next day, my boss intercedes, but it's more of the same. Different guys come to look at the problem, and then leave. By 2pm, it's 89 degrees in my office, and my boss takes pity on me and buys me a fan. But we have no internet again that day (it's really a pretty regular occurrence), so all I can do is file - which is difficult to do when you've got a fan blowing papers around. 4:30pm rolls around, it's 98 degrees this time, and I head home.
Finally, ONE WEEK after I first reported that my A/C was broken, it got fixed. HALLELUJAH! What a miserable week that was. But now it's fixed, and I can relax.
Right.
So today, after my morning of no MS Outlook and no ability to print, I started to notice it felt a little warm in my office. I came back from lunch to a thermometer that read 81 degrees. By an hour and a half later, it read 87. I kicked on the fan, but had lost the will to persevere. At 2pm I walked into my boss's office and said "Jefe, I'm out. I can't hack it anymore. I have to go." And he looked at me and said "Gill, you do what you gotta do."
It feels like an exercise from theater school. OK, you're at a base camp on Mt. Everest. You have been selected by a soft drink company to climb Everest with their sponsorship as a publicity stunt. You've been dropped off by helicopter with everything you'll need in the bag right next to you. Open it up and see what's there.
Inside the bag I find a bikini and a toothpick.
And - go!
