Dododreams

I don’t write much about my job here. Almost every evening when I arrive home from work my father is kind enough to ask me how my day went. Almost every night I say “Busy today” and maybe mention a snippet or two of something that happened (aka the on-going series called “Inventive Yet Stupid Ways To Get Yourself Fired”) or just say “It’s hell right now, Dad, but it’ll get better.”

But I don’t write much about work here for a couple reasons. The first is that it’s smart to not associate yourself with a company name, in case of googling and other search engines. There’s also the chance that a co-worker might happen on your website and somehow take it amiss and you will find yourself in hot water at work.

The second is that no one, myself included, really wants to hear an on-going litany of what’s bad at work and face it, it’s “work” and not “fun” so the negatives in general outweigh the positives. There are some good things about how I spend my 40 hours a week and I have written about them in the past but over the last few months they have sadly been few and far between.

Here’s why.

This is how my little piece of the then-920-person division was structured as of last October. The two remote sites had about 150 and 125 people respectively; except for 35 or so others here at Corporate everyone else was scattered across the country.

Here’s the changes that have happened in the 9 months since, with the division size decreasing to around 750:

Let me point out that this is not good. Most of the upstream and downstream work of the poor Employee Relations Person has fallen to her, with me taking some of that as well and also having quite a bit of her normal work being offloaded onto me.

I would rather be busy than not but it’s been a bit tough, especially since quite a few of the things that I ordinarily do have fallen to… not being done except in urgent emergency OH MY GOD IT’S ON FIRE situations. For me it’s meant extra work (that part is okay) as well as not doing what I ordinarily do very well as those things tend to be neglected. Overall I am not enjoying this a great deal.

And finally here is how the department structure is hypothetically going to settle:

Still much shorter than the original way but once the vacancies are filled life will be much more amenable. Having a boss and having another person to handle employee relations stuff will certainly make life much easier for my co-worker and me. In the meanwhile, it’s hang onto the bucking bronco and hope not to die and don’t write about work because what’s to say other than “Busy today.”