So much for delusions of grandeur—I think I just lost my job

My current boss is a travelin’ man—his job takes him from one coast to the other, and to points in between, as well. Unfortunately, the cheapskates refuse to give him his own permanent secretary, figuring that he’ll just “borrow” whoever’s at the location in which he’s working that day. The result is that no one person has all of his files on one computer, nor is anyone keeping track of who typed what where. The result of that is that the project on which I’m working for him, is, without the least shadow of a doubt, the single worst-organized project on which I’ve ever worked since earning a certificate in word processing in 1997. We’re actually using white-out to make changes in documents because we have no idea who typed the originals, and, therefore, can't get copies e-mailed to us. (I can’t retype everything—the final product is well over a thousand pages long!) And these whited-out documents are being sent to a government agency that has the power to decide whether or not to authorize the project that our organization wishes to undertake. It’s an embarrassment to the organization, and a blow to my personal pride in a job well done. I’ve always considered it my responsibility, as an administrative assistant, to make my employer look good. In this case, that’s quite literally impossible.

So last week, I made a business proposal to my boss—I suggested that he hire me as “traffic controller” to keep track of his documents, on the entirely reasonable fiscal grounds that the organization is paying me approximately three times what it should have had to pay me because I’ve had to work a ridiculous number of hours as a direct result of the fact that this project is so poorly organized. Well, that was last week. This week is another story entirely. Today, I screwed up the project completely, and gave up all hope of ever being hired as a full-time permanent employee.

This project was a mess from the get-go. They called me in to pick up the pieces—and I dropped every last one of them. Please excuse me while I go cry myself to sleep.