#let me do my job you're so ADAMANT I'm shirking

[poundfooolish]

So I've been having a right miserable month of work, going into week 3 of daily 4.5 hour working calls with a tech vendor who is completely and utterly baffled as to what the fuck has gone wrong with our upgrade, which was supposed to go live a week ago but due to, again, the literally unbeforeseen fuckedness of the situation (They brought on a guy last week who was overjoyed and excited about getting to add two or three paragraphs to his blog about our problem, and I have watched his joy and his smile leave us in real time since) we haven't even had a functioning test environment to hand off to QA

And as a result my boss is. Very deeply unhappy with the situation, and has capped off the last two 4.5 hour meetings with a thirty minute speech about not only his disappointment, but his mounting conspiracy theories regarding the vendor using us as their personal test sandbox, and how we really need to stop wasting time and finish this job before the new year (lol. lmao. Sure.).

But yesterday he decided that we need to start the meeting even EARLIER. We've been starting our meetings at 9:30am (Preceded by a team meeting sans the vendor so the project manager and my boss can be sad at us), but now he wants to start the meeting at 8:30, so about exactly when I log into work.

And as he makes this decree and sentences us all to even earlier mornings, he realizes: He has accidentally scheduled us over the IT Holiday Party. But he can't. Bring himself to outright say 'never mind attend the party'. And admit he's fucked this.

So instead he starts trying to get us to bow out of this extremely early meeting we scheduled, constantly sending messages like 'are you coming to the party? please make every effort to come to the party. Are you sure you don't want to come to the party?' I'm pretty sure he also tried to coerce one of my coworkers into picking me up and driving me to the office because that's what he does when I tell him 'no'.

My boss. Knows. That coming into the office for me is a 2-3 hour fucking Event. I have to take a bus to take a train to take a trolly to take another bus and if I miss that last bus (which runs once every 3 hours) take an uber into the office. I do not come into the office on a dime I have to plan extensively for this shit. And I also usually end up not getting anything Done.

So today, three hours into the meeting, that my boss already knows I'm in because he also joined at 8:30am, he goes 'Oh.... Shawna did you decide not to come to the party??'

Ram, if I dropped everything and left that EXACT moment, I would arrive at the office when it fucking closed. Obviously I'm not coming to the fucking holiday party, FURTHERMORE, it is real fuckin brave of you to spend the last three weeks berating me for wasting time and borderline accusing me of not doing my job At All, only to try and twist my arm into leaving a meeting you arranged, for a fucking holiday party.