15 is not a magic number

The story from yesterday continues...
It was a bad day, but today was even worse.

Yesterday I was on the shop floor and because I went through a cold/sore throat/misery last week, I was coughing. Sometimes in a usual "cough-cough" way and sometimes with loud coughy sounds.  About an hour later I receive an email from one of the managers that I need to go and see her (all my managers are female and by the way, much younger than me).
So I go to see her and she tells me that she had two complaints that my cough was very loud and disturbing other people, customers, passers by, the homeless hobo outside the store etc.
WTF????? I was coughing not farting!
Therefore I was asked politely to go to one of the offices (so now they give me office time!) and deal with emails.  Fair enough, I go to the office and start dealing with the emails, total 28.  That was a fair number, I was probably going to finish all of them.
FAIL! Before lunchtime I had only dealt with three.  They were complicated, with obscure requests, with me going back and forth to the customer's accounts to see their activities, to read other colleagues notes, to liaise with managers and so on.
By 5 o'clock I had dealt with 10 and because I was finishing by 5:30 I dealt with five more easier ones and I left. (The good thing with my job is that when it's time to finish, you finish. Unless you are a manager, hehe).

Cue today.
Our Area Manager is usually a softy.  Very nice and understanding to all of us. I don't know what got into her today and she took me aside and started talking to me about me coughing and me smoking, and how I should quit smoking because it affects my health. (Like hell I am going to quit!  I am VERY stressed to give up on ciggies now). So far so good.  I was nodding, sometimes agreeing, sometimes debating. Nothing much.

Until she asked me the crucial question: (we'll call her Not Always Softy Area Manager)
NASAM: How many emails did you do yesterday?
ME: 15... (waiting for the worst to come of course)
NASAM: That's nothing. Why so few?
ME: Erm... They were quite complicated...

(Parenthesis: I am very good at responding to emails. My emails have won commendations, have become into templates for others to use and when everyone had to send their emails to the managers to be proof-read, I was the only one who didn't have to do this. And yesterday I was not copying and pasting from other templates, but I was writing from scratch each answer, as many requests were unique-never-seen-before requests - end of parenthesis).

So NASAM takes me inside the office (there's that fecking office again) and we go through the emails, one-by-one and she was reading each and every one of my replies.

NASAM: That doesn't look complicated - that is copy and paste (huh?) - that's the same with the other one (ok, one!) - ok that's a bit more complicated - there you wrote extra things the customer didn't ask you for (fec-xcuse me for going the extra mile for the customer) - this is easy - this is shit - this is bollocks.
One by one she found them easy and not so complicated, she only found two that in her opinion were the more complicated ones.

(Second parenthesis - each email takes at least 10-15 mins to deal with, and these are the easy ones.  The more complicated ones might take half an hour, an hour or even days to complete.  The procedure is: copy customer's info like email, phone numbers etc. on the database, format the email to standard Arial 10, delete or change all other messages if another dept. has forwarded the email, change subject title, deal with customer's request, reply to the customer, proof-read, send and leave detailed note on their account - phew! - end of second and, I promise, last parenthesis)

NASAM told me that this was a very disappointing number and I should improve my productivity. I wanted to cry.  I told her that I wasn't just sitting in that office doing nothing, honest to God these emails had a lot of work on them.  Her reply was to lower my voice so that I don't create a scene...

My biggest problem with this job is: WHAT MORE CAN I GIVE? I am doing beyond my best, beyond 100%, beyond my strengths.  I am fully dedicated, a soldier, a robot, a bleeding worker.  I am committed and responsible, I am not a silly young girl who does this job as a springboard, I love my job, but I would like a bit of understanding and recognition.

After a long, unfulfilling day - yes! in the office again because of my coughing - I was dealing with enrollments and emails today, all together - I will see the results of my performance tomorrow - all I need is to come home, light a cigarette ( :P ) and RANT!