Yes, As A Matter of Fact, I Will Bite Your Head Off

In 6 weeks I have my yearly performance review at work. My boss decided today that he’d like to make sure that I’m caught up on meeting my goals and adjust them if need be (read: you’ve met your goals lets add more).

One of my goals is “Support new and existing projects to include direct customer interaction when appropriate”

I had this goal in the pocket, I was golden on supporting new and existing projects, I even go as far as when I’m in a project and I see something awry, I own it and fix it. I work with customers directly all the time, they email/call me personally instead of going through the normal chain of command with customer care because (and I quote) “customer care won’t get back to us for a day, you respond immediately.”

I may hate supporting existing projects but I do it, and I do it well. (At least I think I do.)

My boss, he said, yeah, you have that one under control, a comment was made though when someone asked for a resource and I told them to assign the ticket to you, they said “She won’t bite my head off” and he said he didn’t know where that came from and that I shouldn’t put much thought into it or try to figure out who said it, he said it was something I needn’t worry about.

*ROLL EYES* WHAT-EVA! Like, if it wasn’t something to worry about, you wouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place.

I really wanted to respond, yeah, I’ll bite their head off, whomever it is that assigns me a production issue. (They would deserve it, I’ll stand firm in that position of thinking). But I behaved, I said, I don’t bite people’s heads off when assigned issues, I take issues sometimes before they’re even assigned to me because I know that I can do them, I willing help people that are having issues with issues. He was like “I know, I’ve never known you to bite people’s heads off, you’ve never bitten my head off” (and he used to not be my boss, but just my mentor, so it’s possible that at some point he could’ve gotten his head bit off) and he continues “blah blah blah”.

I can think of a few times when heads may have gotten bitten off, but they weren’t exactly bitten off so much as I just got really cantankerous and was arguing over things I should’ve understood and didn’t understand. It’s in those times though, where people have learned to say “Courtney, go check your blood” and of course, I’ll say “I’m fine, I don’t feel low” and they’ll say “I don’t care if you don’t feel low, go check your blood” and I’ll march off to my office and check my blood, and guess what, 10 times out of 10, I’m low.

Since the recent return of some symptoms, I’ve been trying really hard to make sure that I leave a conversation when I’m feeling low so that I don’t start fighting over something that shouldn’t be fought over. There are a few times when people have come to my cube and I turn them away saying “yes, I will come see you, but right now I need to take care of my low, give me a few minutes.” No one has really every complained about this because most of them have seen a low.

Most of them have had me in their office, with me arguing over stuff as simple as 2+2=4 with me saying no it doesn’t 2+2=5. And then there was the unfortunate day where I completely fell apart because a low got far too low and a customer personally attacked me, and at that time no one really thought to ask “did she check her blood” until later that afternoon. Most of the company saw that incident, it wasn’t pretty, now pretty most everyone recognizes a low.

But really, being low is the only time I can think of where I’ll come close to biting a head off. I might argue about a way that something needs to be done or should be done or how I don’t want to do it the way that’s being suggested, but I don’t just bite off ones head without a good reason. Especially at work.