When life gives you lemons make a humble pie

90 days ago I started my new job as a Graphics Specialist/Planner 1 with a quaint little land development firm here in the Hole. For 90 days I have toiled away learning all about Autocad and Mapinfo and Photoshop and Excel and producing, what I thought, were lovely little maps detailing new boundary lines and flowline ditches and setbacks and building envelopes and a variety of other items that I am completely unfamiliar with. I have listened as my office mates discussed PRDs and PUDs and moratoriums and Environmental Analysis PreApplication Conference Requests and I have read a thousand pages of Town and County land development regulations in an attempt to learn what PRD and PUD stand for. I have learned land development calculations and I now know how to figure out how much house a land owner is allowed to build and where on their land they can build said house. All of this I have done in 90 days.
I have not been allowed to design a landscape. This is my training, my background, but I have not been allowed to do this. I have not been allowed to work on a planting plan or a grading plan. This is my training, my background, but I have not been allowed to do this.
I gave up a job that allowed me to not only see the world, but to see my friends and family who are scattered all over the world, at a moment's notice. I gave up that job to pursue a dream. To go to an Ivy League school and amass an ungodly sum of student loan debt so that I could design landscapes. Leave my mark, make the world a more beautiful place.
Yesterday, at my 90 day review I was told by two men who have been telling me for 90 days that I am doing a great job that I am not qualified for my current position. Really? I could have told them that. I am not a cartographer or a planner, I am a designer.
I was told that my learning curve was unacceptable and that my writing skills were not on par with what they expected. I was told that they did not feel like I could ever be good enough to do what they need me to do. When I thought I was doing a good job in actuality I suck.
They said I was nice and easy to get along with and a hard worker.
They asked me to be the assistant to the Office Manager's Administrative Assistant. I.e. the secretary's assistant.
The true measure of success is how one deals with failure.
When faced with adversity say, "oh fuck it."
Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems.
yea. whatever.
No clever anecdote will change the fact that my title is now Secretary.