Yup, that pretty much sums up most of my weekend.

An acquaintance of ours offered J a contract job last week. J declined, but suggested that I might be interested. "I'd be happy to help," I said. (Ha! Famous last words.)

Now the one thing I hate the most about contract work is the quoting aspect. Gawd, how hate quoting... I just feel awkward about it. I wish people would come to me with a price and then I could decide if it was worth my time or not.

Anyhow, since this individual kept asking how much it would cost to get the job done, I felt pressured to throw him a solid figure instead of an hourly rate. The work seemed easy enough, so I guesstimated that it should only take maybe an hour or two to knock off. Because it was for an acquaintance from work, I cut my hourly contract fee to less than half of what I'd normally charge. The rate was so low that they even suggested I bump it up a little higher, insisting they would pay me no less. So I agreed.

Well fook me, that contract job ended up being a total b*tch to get done. My estimate of one or two hours turned into about 10! I can't believe how naive I was. Yesterday I was practically pulling my hair out and I was sure my head was going to explode.

On top of that, I received an email from my manager which only snowballed my stress. Normally I stay away from checking my work email on the weekend, but since I was corresponding to this individual using my work addy, I ended up reading all the other mail that came in.

Manager is coming to town on Monday and wants to meet with me about the letter I wrote. He asked that I provide him with my hours spreadsheets for the last couple of months so he can see what I've been working on, because apparently he has no clue... which is strange because our department has weekly meetings where we all go over a different spreadsheet that has everyone's assignments listed on it. He calls into those meetings every week and has copies of all those spreadsheets... so his excuse that he doesn't know what I do is pretty lame.

Anyhow, like I was saying about the hours spreadsheet... so while that is all fine n' dandy, the one snag is that I haven't filled out my time sheet in MONTHS. No one has. We were told back in October that no one in the company was referencing them anymore (I don't think they ever had), and truth be told, when you're super swamped, logging every fifteen minutes you spend on each little project is a total waste of precious time. So we all stopped using them.

So now here I am, months later with no hours logged and I'm being asked to provide them. Really, it's my own stupid fault. How can I complain about my workload when I haven't been logging the hours I spend on each project to back myself up.

Fortunately, I have all my Sent items saved, so I've been going through old emails and figuring out which projects I worked on during which months. Our time sheets are not very specific, so that definitely helps with the fudging. Three hours here... four hours there... making it all add up to 160 hours a month. (If he wants something more specific, perhaps he should've been paying attention in our meetings every week.) Still... as easy as it is to cover my a$$, it still left me with a big mess of knots in my stomach.

This is not how I wanted to spend my weekend -- selling my time for a few bucks an hour, and logging all my hours from the last few months.

I woke up stressed this morning just thinking about tomorrow. I shouldn't be stressed. I have every right to speak up... it's just that I absolutely hate confrontation, even if it isn't the shouting kind of confrontation, any kind of disagreement feels icky. But then again, I asked for it, and I know that this is the only way anything will get resolved.... hopefully.

*sigh*

Anyhow, keep your fingers crossed for me, as I dive in for round two tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get better results than round one. :oP