Confidence restored

My boss came back from holiday today and as I expected there are lots of "bitty" jobs that need to be done. These jobs are a mixed bag because whilst I quite like finding research papers and making presentation slides from the diagrams, they are also frustrating because many of the papers need to be printed out and as a result I spend a significant proportion of the day waiting for the printer to catch up with me, and MacOS X print queuing is not very good. At the moment, for example, I have five documents in the print queue, except they aren't queuing. I keep getting a little error box telling me that there is a problem communicating with the printer. This is, of course, because the printer is already printing. I really need to get somebody from IT to sort this machine out, because I will end up throwing through the window.

Meanwhile, the boss is his usual self and trying to get everything done immediately. I don't want anyone to think I don't like my boss. He is actually great to work for, and is very appreciative of his staff, for example, when he went to a conference in Paris he brought me back a very nice box of chocolates, and on return from his family holiday he has brought yet another small gift. Other staff members received gifts too. The "problem" is that he is extremely busy. Sometimes he is so busy that he cannot process his workload to produce work for me fast enough and so I can end up sitting in my office twiddling my thumbs. I should be grateful, I know that there are a lot of people who would love to be paid to do nothing, but it is not really in my nature. And as I am on a twelve month contract, my thoughts run along the lines that if there isn't work for me then what chance is there of my contract being renewed. I know I'm being silly, the boss would tell me if there was anything wrong and I have already told him that I'm not always working to full capacity. He apologised to me for not keeping me in work, saying he would have to do better.

So I shall just go back to waiting for the printer, and smiling and apologising that things are taking so long, whilst thanking my lucky stars that for all the frustrations it could be so much worse.