I've always considered PMT to be much over-hyped. Sure, we girls are a slave to our hormones - one day I will be cooing over a small baby and then next I really can't see the attraction and yes, I'll admit that I can be a little 'snippy' at certain times... But I've been tracking my weirdness over the last few months and I'm mortified to notice that I SUFFER WITH PMT!!!
Every time I have been at the end of my tether with work, every time I have been ready to throw things across the room and everytime some cheesey song or programme turns me into a sobbing gibbering wreck there appears to have been a hormone-related reason for it.
That said, I'm pretty sure that my long-standing desire to display 2 fingers to my boss and tell him to shove his job somewhere fairly dark isn't all hormone related.
I don't earn a fantastic salary but I'm doing okay - okay enough to pay my bills, afford nice holidays and not have to resort to Tesco Value bread - but I will never be able to retire to a second home in the country. Right now, though, I'd be pleased to chuck it all in and do nothing. Clearly this would only be possible if, for some bizarre reason, Boyf would be happy to slog his guts out at a job (which is equally as infuriating as mine) in order for me to 'keep house' and cut out coupons from newspapers for the afore-mentioned Tesco Value bread... Let's face it, why would he want to do that? Damn sure I wouldn't. Anyway, isn't this the very thing that women have been fighting against for years???
Anyway, I digress. My job....even before this country descended into the current economic quagmire of crap, our business was not doing particularly well, and so new owners and managers were brought in. And why not. They overhauled the place: redundancies; revision of rosta; rethinking of budgets and so on. There were promises of new hope, matrices (???I still don't really understand what that is all about???), extra support from savvy businessmen and outsourcing of crap tasks. Well, in a nutshell, we now have to run this circus of a show on a shoestring whilst jumping through hoops that most of the Cirque du Soliel cast would struggle with. Our little division of the business is definitely the poor relation of the family - you know what i mean, the one whose birthday is forgotten, the one who never gets the call about the family get together and the one most likely to get locked in an attic if they get too old/doddery/much of liability. Worst case scenario is that one day the rest of the family will find a way to justify euthanasia.
I won't bore you with the details of why my job is so crap as, frankly, right now i should be grateful to have one - there are thousands of people who would clamber for my seat and probably do it at a knock-down discount rate too. Suffice to say, the people running this embarrassing auntie who lives in a caravan, do not have a clue what to do. They continue to talk about strategies in a very serious voices and then undermine every piece of knowledge that the pretty intelligent worker-ants have built up over the last few years. They promise artists with over-inflated egos the moon-on-a-stick and then wonder why we look at them and can't find the words to express the damage they have done. They assure artist management that everything will be fine and that we will look after their precious cash-cows in fine fashion and then wonder why our budgets have been smashed into smithereens and we don't cut a profit ... again.
To top it all, we have a finance/accounts system that fails to acknowledge that in order to cut costs and keep to our budgets we will need to economise and choose our suppliers carefully. Gone are the big chain hotels and 'in' are the small family run B&Bs. Gone are fancy restaurants and 'in' are transport-caffs (okay perhaps that's a little bit of an exaggeration!). My point is though, these guys don't 'do' invoicing and waiting 90 day to be paid £150... these guys want cash on the day. These guys don't care if we take our business elsewhere because they have got enough work as it is. We, however, have no alternative in most cases and so really we should be dancing to their tune. Our system thinks we should just look elsewhere if our terms 'don't suit'. The reality is not that simple. We, the poor down-trodden and abused worker-ants, are struggling to muster up the motivation to turn up let alone to do our jobs all over again. We're tired of making arrangements to have to unpick them, we're tired of promising payments and then grovelling when they're not made and we're tired of begging. Life is too short for this. Why should we be the whipping boys for someone else's decisions. Just for one day I'd like them to sit at the end of my phone and take the abuse.
Wow, sorry, that was a real waffle. What was the point of this rant anyway? Oh yes. Clearly today is one of those hormone-powered days. After having a particularly testing morning i wanted to do nothing but cry. Not because I was hurt, not because someone had upset me, I just wanted to cry. Just a little career-pointer though, tears in the workplace do not enhance career development... and and crying in Marks & Spencer's foodhall does not make you big and clever. It makes everyone around you think you are a crazy lady. I'm not ready to be one of those yet. I'd like to be at least 75 first.
So if I am PMT'd right up, does this mean that I am over-reacting to the crapness of my job? I don't think so. There really is only so much crap that can be taken before the 'why bother' gene kicks in but getting the really bad days over PMT time really is a kick in the doodies (if we had any... which if we did would probably alleviate all our hormonal problems anyway... or at least change them a little).
In conclusion, ladies and jellyspoons, PMT is a real thing. I don't like it, I don't want to admit it but it is.
