Meeting Notes

We have monthly staff meetings at my new job, for our section of 6 people. We're fairly close-knit, so at first I was shocked and horrified by the amount of time allotted to each one: 3 hours, in fact, were given over to the first one I attended.

Hey, remember the panicmonger? I do, sort of. The panicmonger held staff meetings every other week. God help me! how I dreaded them. It got worse after Robbie left, because he and I used to sit next to each other, barely (or not) containing the occasional snicker or smart-ass remark, and greatly bolstering one another's courage. After he was gone, the "pointless fish meetings," as Robbie christened them (for reasons I don't have time to go into right now (but they are excellent reasons)) became much more depressing. Perhaps the worst part of all was that, in addition to hating the meetings and the lavish displays of negativity and mistrust therein, one had also to feel terribly sorry for the poor panicmonger, who, it was agonizingly obvious by this time, just had never figured out something very, very, very fundamental about how to be.

On the bright side, I hear she's pretty much given up staff meetings at this point. But I digress.

Staff meetings at the new job are not agonizing at all, for two important reasons: (1) nobody is looking to blame anybody for anything, and (2) nobody is admonishing anyone for the eight hundred thousand million billion bajillionth time to send time-off requests only via GroupWise reminder notes, NOT calendar appointments, because the panicmonger didn't want her calendar blocked, although she could simply accept an appointment and select the "not busy" option, of which I suspect she is probably unaware; but no, they have to be reminder notes, and be sure to copy your lead worker, and put the time you'll be leaving, the amount of time you'll be out, the kind of leave you're taking, and your name in the subject line, but DON'T use your whole name because it makes the subject line too long and the whole thing won't show up in the panicmonger's calendar when she mouses over it and it will confuse her, so if you have a long name just use your initials, unless you have the same initials as someone else which will also confuse her, in which case you should find some understandable but concise way to shorten your name for her convenience, oh and don't forget to log all your activities in the tracking program and send in a weekly status report and send in a monthly status report and also be sure to sign in and out of Scotland Yard.

Hey, remember Scotland Yard? I don't.

Anyway, staff meetings at the new job do run a bit long, but the reason for this is that they're extremely chatty - a luxury for which everyone is generally too busy unless they've specifically set aside some guilt-free time away from their desks. So our section director gives us an update on what's going on "upstairs" - a real update, too, intelligent and analytical and confidential and, frankly, a little gossipy - and then we take turns going around the table and talking about what we're working on, what kind of issues we've run into, what we're feeling good about, and what we find frankly so boneheaded that we need to spend ten minutes rolling our eyes and groaning in a most satisfying and convivial fashion.

And since we're all in it together, maybe in the next month or two I'll be able to convince them that these otherwise very agreeable staff meetings must be timed not to interfere with my rightful three-martini break. Because they may not snore while walking or have three heads apiece or need information carefully fed to them on a very, very, very, very tiny spoon, but they're still state employees, by God.

Some things shouldn't change.

Decisions, Decisions

This afternoon at about 4:40, my desk phone rang. It was the woman I interviewed with last Friday. She was calling to offer me the job. So we talked for a few minutes, and I told her that, while I was pretty sure I'd accept, I'd like to think about it over the weekend. I am still not completely certain it's the right thing to do. Well, who better to ask for advice than the interwebz?

So here are some good reasons and bad reasons, to stay and to go.

Good reasons to go:
I'm being offered a 6% pay increase. Shazayam!

The work appears, on the face of it, to be a better match for my background and overall career goals, inasmuch as I have any.

My current work group is permanently bogged down in one pointless, fruitless project after another, and as far as I can tell, this is largely just because the panicmonger's boss dislikes her so much.

No more panicmonger, no more hourly and daily and weekly and monthly status reports, no more documenting the documentation, no more Scotland Yard... at least, not as far as I know. I have to admit I didn't ask that in the interview. ("Would I be expected to show up on time at this job?")

I'd get to travel a lot more!

Jobs don't seem to open up very often in the new division, which would kind of tend to indicate that people aren't leaving. And I do take it as a positive sign that they move so quickly.

Bad reasons to go:
Practically everybody else has, and I really want a happy hour.

I beat the newbies! Ha ha! In your face, newbies!

Robbie wants me to make the PM cry.

The building has better lighting. And it's closer to home!

The prospective new boss seemed really, really happy and excited when she called to make the offer. (I don't know if that's really a bad reason, but I'm putting it under the emotional reasons vs. rational reasons column, anyway.)

I wouldn't have to share a ladies' room with those stuck-up girls from Bridge anymore.

Good reasons to stay:
In the new job, I would be the third person in line to answer phones to the general public in case of an emergency such as Hurricane Rita. That sounds so not fun.

The job overall is entirely administrative - "soft" work, whereas what I'm doing now is partly technical - "hard" work. I'm probably better suited to "soft" but the "hard" work makes me feel smarter. And overall this would put me back on the "softer" career path.

I enjoy a significant portion of my current work, and those particular job duties excuse me from the bulk of the hopeless, endless, pointless projects mentioned above.

I'm on the short track to promotion and am generally treated extremely well, including being exempt from a lot of the tracking and checking up that many of my coworkers - and for that matter the PM - are subject to.

I like the people I work with, particularly Robert, with whom I work very closely, who recruited me to the agency two years ago, thus rescuing me from Corpus and from underpaid marketing hell, and who will be seriously left in the lurch by my leaving.

Bad reasons to stay:
The great unknown. What if I don't like it? Is there an "undo" button?

Guilt. Agh! The walloping, horrible, awful guilt.

Though it's closer to home, the building is further from the break spot as well as Dominican Joe. And will I still be able to take three-martini breaks? This is another important question I didn't ask during the interview.

I'd still be with the agency, so I couldn't spend 43 seconds on LeatherDreams.com on my last day.

What if the new division doesn't have people who snore all day or walk around with antennas sticking out of their heads?!? I'll be seriously short on blog fodder.

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And on a superstitious note: If you want to be sure you're offered a position, call in sick with the runs when you go to your interview. So far, this tactic has a 100% success rate.

Having a Craptacular Time! Wish You Were Here!

How come people who are on vacation are expected to send picture postcards to their friends, innocently going about their daily routine at work? This only serves to foster envy and resentment, don't you think? Why don't people at work send postcards to their vacationing friends? I think this would make a lot more sense. At least, that's a thought that was occurring to me right as I was racing down the stairs to morning break, and came very near tripping and being killed in a freak stairwell accident.

The rubber treads in the east stairwell are cracked and peeling, and chunks of them are missing. Several months ago, everyone in our building received an email notification that they would be replaced. (The stair treads, I mean, not everyone in the building, though that's also a rather intriguing idea.) This hasn't happened. But today some workmen came and ripped out a perfectly good wall on the south stairwell, taking care to turn off the adjacent elevator first. I don't know how the smokers made it to their cigarette breaks. They might have had to dive out the window, which I think is slightly more probable than their walking all the way to the opposite end of the building to use the other elevators.

We, the break group, suspect these were the workmen who were supposed to replace the stair treads, but that the project is being overseen by the infamous director of the administrative section: he who coordinated our division's move with such staggering incompetence that what should have taken two weeks, at the outside, ended up taking almost two years; he who opens and reads all division employees' mail; he whose brainchild our Big Broth^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Scotland Yard software is, which pretty much everybody except our (new) manager's group seems to find some excuse to get out of using; he who was supposed to order Bitching Smoker a replacement ergonomic keyboard for her new computer, but whose underlings finally informed our boss, non-apologetically, after sitting on the request for five months, that the paperwork appeared to have been misplaced and would need to be resubmitted; he who sends out urgent, division-wide emails telling people not to burn microwave popcorn or take paper towels from the bathroom to use in the kitchen (they are purchased from a different budget, so this is a huge deal, you know) but will never respond to repeated emails asking for actual information pertaining to his actual job function; he whose name has become so universally synonymous with the term "great vast blithering idiot" that if you so much as mention him to anybody in our division - I am not exaggerating, this is totally true - they will immediately say "ugh" and roll their eyes. Seriously. They can't help it, it's reflex.

In our staff meeting yesterday, our supervisor had apparently been instructed by someone - senior to herself - to stress to us all that we have to, have to, have to be sure to keep our Scotland Yard updated. We've been told over and over and over again that it's only a tool to let anyone looking for us know where to find us. It is not a time clock. But in our meeting yesterday, our supervisor once more stated that, while it is definitely not a time clock, and she is definitely not trying to micromanage us, we really need to be sure to keep it updated for our own good. You know, so that when the people who are snooping around on us come to her to tell her that we're a bunch of lazy, no-good, do-nothing slackers who come in late all the time, she'll be able to pull up reports from Scotland Yard to demonstrate that we in fact have signed in right on time every single day, and therefore defend us. To whoever it is that's attacking us. She didn't say.

We took extra-long breaks yesterday, and I spit on my resume a few times, and shined it up a little bit with my sleeve. The thing is, the one thing this rather silly job has going for it is that it's been entirely stress-free. I'm a little cheesed at the attempts to address this and only this aspect of working for the state.

Want to see the picture on my postcard?