Post Satan’s Butthole Disorder

Being the newbie sucks.

As you know if you’ve been reading my blog, I resigned my job from Satan’s Butthole two weeks ago and started with a new company the next week. The job itself is something I did for the first fourteen years at Satan’s Butthole, but the systems and processes are completely different.

If there’s anything that causes me great anxiety (besides driving, bad weather, packing for a vacation, not having a plan, pissing off someone I love…holy shit, I have a lot of anxiety!), it’s not knowing what the hell I’m doing and feeling completely incompetent.

I know, I know…I’ll get up to speed soon enough and learn what I need to know and it’ll soon become second nature. It’s just that period of time in between that bothers me.

When you’re new, they don’t usually want to overwhelm you, so the work comes in small spurts. Like, I’ll spend an hour doing this:

Then a new file comes to my desk and because I’m still slow and learning the process, I spend the next hour doing this:

And bothering my coworkers and boss with lots of questions:

Then when I’ve completed what I need to do, I’m back to:

I’m NOT complaining about this. I see my coworkers around me and they have plenty of stress to go around. Things DO get busy, especially when we have a tropical storm followed by a couple of hurricanes, as appears to be happening as I write this. I worked claims during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent storms that followed within just a few years. I KNOW THIS JOB CAN BE STRESSFUL NO MATTER WHERE YOU WORK.

But do you know what I don’t see at my new job?

I don’t see this:

And even though I have no clue what I’m doing sometimes, I don’t have the urge to do this:

Yet.

Know what else I don’t see around here? I don’t see management doing this:

And then this just before talking to you about whatever they think they saw:

You think I’m exaggerating? The other day I was about to walk out the door for lunch when my supervisor, who was my coworker at Satan’s Butthole for sixteen years, jokingly asked, “Did you clock out? That’s points!”

Which caused me to do this:

But he’s a good guy who knows what it’s like at Satan’s Butthole, so I think he felt a little bad about the joke:

So now there’s a counselor who comes in every Tuesday just for all the former Satan’s Butthole employees suffering from Post Satan’s Butthole Disorder (PSBD).

Absolutely all None of this is true. It’s just funny, right?

I know this sounds strange, but I’ve had just a few fleeting moments of wondering if I totally blew this whole writing thing by taking a somewhat less stressful job with a much better environment.

I mean, Satan’s Butthole was slowly killing me and had long ago sucked all the joy out of a work day, but let’s be honest…the blog posts that came out of that were some of my best and continue to be my most-read since I started. People really enjoy the biting humor and sarcasm that my totally crippling misery produces.

So now that I’m feeling sort of semi-happy at my new day job, what am I going to write about?

Who am I if I’m not the coworker silently seething on fire with rage while simultaneously turning on her smile and customer service voice?

Who am I if coffee is ACTUALLY able to silence the voices in my head, telling me to kick shit over and punch somebody in the throat?

Well, I guess I can write really short blog posts full of GIFs.

Until next time…Stay weird, my friends. Normal is boring!