It hit me around 8:00 PM Thursday night. I’d been doing it wrong. And I’d been doing it wrong all week.
What it was that I was doing, doesn’t really matter. It’s a mindless but tedious task that I had been doing to help out. The mistake won’t make any difference, really.
But still I had been doing wrong all fucking week.
And it was 8 o’clock at night. I’d been at work for 13 hours. Again.
And I started to question things.
Why do I bother?
If I’ve been messing this up, is it even worth it?
Things are still not caught up, even for my all my effort. Again why Bother?
I packed up some shit and went home. And I was in a foul mood. The few who bothered to tune in to SBR can attest to that.
My mood was no better in the morning. I went to work early, to make sure I was there and ready when the help desk opened.
My mood got worse as the day went on.
The CIO was going to buy us pizza, to thank us for all of hard work. And while it was a nice thought, I found myself getting angry as the same people who have been coming in late and ducking out early are the ones who can’t wait for the pizza.
I stayed and covered the phones while they ate pizza. I had no desire to be near them. The thought made me sick. Hell, the hour I was there by myself was the best one all day.
I could feel the overwork and lack of sleep catching up with me, and I knew that was really most of the problem. But my anger is real.
As a rule, I try very hard not to worry about how other people do their job, I do mine and I do it as well I can and leave it at that. But I’m finding hard to ignore that one of our Network Engineers, a peer of mine, has come in late and left early every single day last week. Our busiest support week. He worked, on average, six hours a day. To contrast that, I worked an average of 12 hours a day. I worked twice as much as he did.
It’s a fucking crime that our paychecks don’t reflect that. He makes significantly more than me. The joys of working in the public sector. Seniority trumps skill. I could complain to my boss, but she knows. She frustrated and doesn’t want to hear it from me. It’s not like she can fire him. It’s the public sector. Seniority trumps everything.
I don’t remember ever needing a three day weekend like I do right now.
Sometimes, I like my job. I really do. I get to do interesting work. The more that I do, the more my bosses come to trust and depend on me. I like that.
But of the engineers I work with, only one other works with the kind of dedication that I do. He support our WAN and works on his, mostly. The rest of us are a ‘team.’ One is working towards retirement and just wants to maintain the status quo. Troubleshoot the symptoms, ignore the cause. Another is not far behind him. One researches but never acts. Paralysis by analysis. One, as a mentioned works part time (or so it seems) and spends more energy figuring why a plan won’t work than look for the solution that would make it work. And the last hates my boss. He invests his energy into criticizing and undermining her.
Some team.
My plan remains unchanged. We are currently running a Novell Netware network. We need to migrate to Microsoft Active Directories. There are some budget and political issues, but it will happen. I can make it happen. These other assholes would sit around and wring their hands and figure out why it wouldn’t work. But I will make it happen.
And once I do, it will be my network, cause I will have set it up. More than that, putting a migration of an enterprise class network on my resume won’t hurt either.
Once it is done, I’ll take a look and see how I feel about my job.
