Ranting about my job

Not enough hours in a day.

Actually not true.

More like not enough minutes in an hour.

See, it is like this. In my job, I have to coordinate and give status on many projects. Problem is, there are so many meetings that I have to be in to give status, that I don’t have enough time to actually go find out what the status is for the said project.

The trite answer is to work harder.

That does not work, as most of the time is spent listening to things that have no bearing on what I need to know, or need to be doing. The nature of meetings. But of course I can’t just bail on the meetings. Maybe I can, maybe that is the answer? Not if I want to keep my job. So it comes down to whether I want to do my job well, but piss people off because I won’t come to their meetings, or keep people happy, but do a crappy job. So it comes down to doing a bad job if I want to keep my job.

How is this a good thing?

Course I could work longer hours.

Not that that would help. Because if the people that I need to get status from are not around in the longer hours, that does not help. I could send them email, request status. But I already get too much email, which is part of the reason that I cannot find out the status of projects, because when I am not in meetings giving status, I am answering email giving status. Not to mention that email status reports suck. No one wants to write them, no one wants to read them. And they only give status on things that are going great and things that are slipping horribly. The stuff in between, the stuff that is going to come back to bite you because you never saw it coming, that is the stuff that never gets reported in the status reports. You have to ask that face to face to get a straight answer. The projects that you know are going to fail, and badly, everyone else knows that they are going to fail, so a report telling you that it is failing does not do anyone any good. It just makes the person writing the report feel like a smuck and a loser, when it is usually not their fault. The projects that go really bad, usually go really bad because the project is not in the hands of the people that can actually do anything about it.

Those are my opinions, and I am sticking to them.

It is just a sad state of affairs that to look like you are doing a good job and keep the people you report to happy, you have to do a crappy job and make peoples’ life hell.

Not much you can do with those lemons other than spend the paycheck…

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