It’s too bad I’m so tired, because if I ever wanted to rant about my job, this would be the day. I don’t have that much energy, so I’ll just tell you what happened. It probably won’t sound like much, so maybe a rant isn’t even indicated.

It started with one of those phone calls from Tim this morning, one of those calls that starts, “Do you have time to answer a few questions?” His questions always lead me in circles. Some of it is trying to decipher what he’s asking, and the rest is trying to figure out what kind of answer he wants.

“How much time do you put in on the kennel paperwork?” I don’t exactly keep track, so I guessed. A couple of hours a week to pay bills. A couple of hours twice a month to do payroll. Four or five hours to help with the billing. Plus an odd hour here and there for miscellaneous documents and forms. Finally I came out and asked him, “Where are you going with this?”

It turns out the Boss has been telling him that I’m overworked. Now, I haven’t exactly complained about being overworked, although I haven’t exactly denied it, either. I don’t have twice as much work to do since we bought the kennel, and the construction company isn’t suffering because of the work I do for the new business. I assured him of all those facts, but he wasn’t finished.

“What about the stuff Julie asks you to do?” He’s always trying to get me to say something negative about Julie, because he doesn’t get along with her. I will not let him put me in the position of saying anything bad about her, so I always choose my words carefully when the subject comes up. I told him that if it weren’t for Julie’s help, I really would have twice as much to do. She doesn’t cost me any time; she saves me time. She doesn’t ask me to do something extra; I ask her.

He got very quiet. “I guess I’ll talk to you later.” So I guess I won the argument, if that’s what it was. But it never pays to get into a discussion like that. Tim is the Boss’s son and will inherit the business. He’s an equal partner in the kennel. He has way more pull than Julie. I just don’t like to be bullied into telling him what he wants to hear, unless it’s the truth. When he wants to hear a validation of his fictional version of the real world, I can’t bring myself to play along.

Did I go to the Boss and tell him Tim was harassing me again? Of course not. The whole conversation took about twenty minutes out of my morning, much less time than I wasted faxing all those pages to a machine that was receiving but not printing. I spent most of the day trying to send faxes to the Boss. My machine told me they were going through. Late in the afternoon I got a call asking where all those pages were, and I just about lost it. They were supposed to call me back when they had the machine operational again. I’m still waiting.