Stress ball

I have been packing up my office at work, getting ready to move to our long-term temporary quarters in a little over a week.  Our office is splitting into two spaces, one small classroom with three of us and a double classroom with the four others who will be working alongside the rest of the front counter positions.  It's a challenge keeping the staff up to date when the plans keep changing and I'm not always in the loop.  I can figure out what to do in the office where only our staff will be but it's not my call in the shared office.  It's just my problem to make sure it works.

Feels like a lot of extra stress and uncertainty, and it's getting to me a little.  My staff runs from "go with the flow" to "why don't you have answers" which are both valid.  I'm probably trying too hard to put a good spin on it, and to give them answers of some kind.  Sometimes their dismay feels personal.

Right now, I also have to balance students who are upset for one reason or another, but the joke in our office is that I can handle most anything Monday through Thursday but by Friday I'm done.  On Friday I worked on student requests for a waiver of late fees, and I tried to take the "Friday attitude" out of it.  I got through my stack and tried to be fair and consistent in my judgements, and I sent off emails with my responses.  Today I got an email from a student who chided me for talking down to her because she wasn't an 18-year old greenhorn and she didn't like my tone.  Another department had mis-advised her and I took that into account in my decision, but she still felt I was faulting her.  And this is a student who had her late fee waived completely!  I believe this is the very definition of "can't win for losing"........

Imagine how mad she would have been if I denied her request!

It's been a tough couple of weeks.  Two young men (our kids' ages) who we knew died, at least one by his own hand. Then two women a little younger than us also died, one from cancer and one from heart problems.  We're attending a visitation tonight for one of the women because we won't be able to make the funeral.  I need to use these tragedies to keep my perspective for work, for home, for life.  Whether or not a student or employee is mad at me doesn't really amount to much in the big picture and is a very temporary condition.  Neither of us will remember it after a while, and neither of us will suffer a loss of anything that matters.

Still, I've been trying to breathe deeply, relax my neck and shoulders, and squeeze the stress out of my system like a stress ball.  That's what I am some days -- a big ole stress ball.  I need to learn to allow people to have their reactions and be the grownup.  Then when I can get home I can have my reaction in private, with wine, chocolate, or popcorn at the ready.

Some days, it takes all three.