Sarcasm with a side of optimism.

Work Truths II

A Typical Day
Arrive anywhere between 7:45am and 9:35am. Go through several layers of security. Drop off my purse and jacket in the office. Grunt some incoherent morning greeting to overly cheerful coworkers. Separate lunch from giant tote bag of diversions and walk around the corner to the kitchen area. Place lunch in refrigerator. Go back to office. Participate in office banter. If I'm too lazy/tired/unenthusiastic, I will just sit and listen until 10:30am. From this point on, we discuss what we should do for lunch until noon when the collaborative lunch plan is executed. Lunch is eaten and the remainder of people on the program all fit into one office, so we eat lunch together. The group disbands at around 1:30pm. After that, I have no idea where anybody is. I may see them again briefly around 3:30pm, but then that's it. I leave anywhere between 4pm and 6pm. To not go insane, I carefully pack my tote back full of diversions; usually books. On other occasions, I've made jewelry. On really bad days, I am too depressed to do anything, so I just sit around moping for the entire day, eventually cry then take a time out in my car. With all this free time, I can blast through a book in a day, so sometimes I will make a quick trip to the library to return books and grab a few off the "New Arrivals" shelf in the front. Other days, estudio espanol. The worst part about all this is that when I get home, I'm drained and depressed from the "work" day that I don't want to do anything.

Lunch as a 3 Hour Affair
When you have a lot of free time, lunch becomes a major production. It begins around 10:30am with the tummy rumble signaling hunger. This inevitably is pointed out by somebody, and begins the ever-so-important group discussion of, "Where should we go for lunch today?"

On a previous slow day many months ago (and we thought then that it was REALLY bad, little did we know), we determined that lunch choices were influenced by three main factors: fat, lazy, and cheap. These were plotted three dimensionally, and each one of us nerdy engineers took distinct pleasure in getting to demonstrate our competency in plotting ourselves on the graph. We then quickly realized why our lunch decisions took so long: several of our group members are strongly weighted in a single attribute, but neither of them share the same one. Rather than choosing the sensible option, which would be excluding the perceived difficult party, this cheerful diversity allows us to have a full conversation for one and a half hours about what we're doing for lunch.

Getting and eating lunch takes an hour. The additional half hour after lunch is spent describing in detail exactly how tired one is now that they've eaten, and how they wish they could take a nap, and if they could take a nap at work, this is how they'd pull it off. Lunch generally ends with disinterest in one another.

Job "Opportunity" = Sucker Backfill
The problem with finding a job within your own company on a different project is that there are politics at work between your manager and your prospective manager. The new job could be so perfect that it seems like the job requisition was written for you, and even though you might have the qualifications, or be OVER qualified (!!), you still need the blessing of your manager before you can bail. This happened at my last job, and I wasn't allowed to leave because my project was "frozen", meaning all critical people are not permitted to change projects at this time. When there are three of you, even if you're not doing much, the small number makes you critical.

My coworker who also has the same parent company as I has a job lined up. It's his if he wants it, and the new project is eagerly waiting for him. I've heard day after day how much he is underutilized in his current job (he is), and how much the job sucks (it does), and how annoying it is that office politics are so bad that it's difficult to get anything done (they are), and how he CANNOT wait to get out of here.

Yesterday, I looked over his shoulder while he was on the computer and saw a resume for somebody else who was junior to him. I knew immediately what he was doing and called him out on it. "How could you DO this with a CLEAR CONSCIENCE?"

"I...I...need to get out of here."

Apparently, he made the job sound so good that the girl asked why *he* was leaving if it was *that* good. I'm sure he gave the typical "pursue a different opportunity in line with my interests" line. What a crock of shit. The lesson? Be wary of the green grass that you're seeking.

posted by v @ 10:09 PM