Cultural Anthropology

I think the top of my boss's head is about to pop off. Either that or he lives in that state and always has; I haven't enough data points gathered to put my ass on the line with that sort of statement or belief but I do have a gut which is telling me to duck and roll Right. This. Second.

Well alrighty then.

A week ago or maybe it was a week and a half ago or maybe, oh hell it might as well have been day three, I actually asked my boss if my peer was OK or should I be worried if the top of HIS head was going to pop off and if so what could I do to make it better; please! What can I do to help? I was assured this was perfectly normal and Peer was going to have to work it out. This has been going on since June. When I asked about the top of Peer's head I didn't have enough data points gathered to know whether or not the stress factors were constant or even be able to define them.

You know, sometimes distress is so palatable as to cover the source entirely. I think that's called panic.

I remember saying something rather snarky and quite honestly it was mean spirited almost 12 years ago at an off-site meeting. I was in a group of people with one or two people I didn't know all that well and one in particular I didn't know at all but really needed to get to know him and the relationship was going to be important. I fouled it instantly with that one snarky mean spirited statement about somebody and in his directness he let me know. This isn't quite a direct quote but it went something like this:

'I don't know know you well enough to know if you're joking or just mean spirited.'

I said I was joking but you know, he'd already drawn a conclusion. Mean spirited or not, in the moment I was being mean spirited, and looking back on the time period and the circumstances I WAS mean spirited or BEING mean spirited enough that the conclusion was accurate. He was new. I was poison. I think the only people who wouldn't have experienced me or called me mean spirited would have been the people who knew or worked with me before the shit started really hitting the fan.

I even know I how got there. I got on board the mean bus. Choice. I don't know if I was panicked yet though. I do know I was within weeks of panic and within a year of outright terror. Anyway, this is just a look back in the mirror and it helps me, or at least it should be helping me step back and try to untangle what's occuring around me because it's either that or I'm going to get sucked into one really painful vortex.

Yesterday I used the word toxic in a sentence. With my out-loud voice. That's a pretty strong word and probably I should have chosen my words more carefully. Nope. Definitely I should have chosen my words more carefully because THAT word is incendiary and came out of anger and contempt and fed-up-ed-ness which caused more panic where panic or something like it is already in full swing.

Or maybe it's rage and paranoia. I'm still not sure.

The one thing I'm sure of, is this has nothing to do with me. Yet. I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible. My boss is doing some very unbosslike things and my peer is as loyal as they come. The noise level is nearly deafening.

So it came down to this: The word 'hate' was being used in a sentence often enough to have become unbearable. It's one thing to 'hate' a process or 'hate' documentation or a tool or a set of circumstances (well, even that's not really OK. You can not like it, want to change it... blah blah blah, hate is rock bottom and hard to get past). It is another thing entirely to 'hate' a person, a group of people or an entire department. To be perpetually vocal about this IS toxic. To be perpetually vocal about this in public is dangerous.

Also, it's getting in the way of my objective which is to learn as much as I can about a very complex system and process as possible.

That's probably not supposed to be a priority.

Hell and damnation.

That means I'm going to have to learn this stuff on my own time and do my job on company time.

Oh well.

So my job.

What the hell is my job and why am I here?

This company worked REALLY hard to get me here. And I mean REALLY hard. Somebody wanted me badly enough to give me exactly what I asked for and then when the on boarding process got so ugly I actually cried at my desk they turned heaven and earth upside down to make sure I started smiling again. Somebody wants my warm body in the building right now. I just don't know why.

I do know that someone or something is on probation. By probation I mean that probationary period wherein someone (usually the company) determines whether or not a new employee is going to work out. In some cases medical coverage is withheld for 90 days (I think this is still legal) until the company decides the employee is acceptable. In some cases an employee comes in as a temp to hire for the first 90 days so that no benefits whatsoever are paid and most certainly, except under very special circumstances a recruiter is never paid until the employee passes the 90 day mark. These days sign-on bonuses are conditional. If you leave within a year you have to give it back. If you leave of your own accord or are fired you have to give it back. If your job is eliminated you do not have to give it back. This has become fairly common. A sign-on bonus that comes with an employment contract is a little different but I don't have one of those; I just have the almost standard variety. Mine is different in one small way.

Most offer letters read something like this:

"You will receive a one time sign-on bonus of $xxxxx (less lawful deductions), which will be provided to you on xx/xx/xxxx." xx/xx/xxxx = a specific date after the start date almost always.

My offer letter reads:

"You will receive a one time sign-on bonus of $xxxxx (less lawful deductions), which will be provided to you shortly after you join TheBigBank."

It's not like that didn't jump right out at me; it most assuredly did. It jumped right out at me in the middle of complete mayhem. I did question it. Once. I sent an email to the internal recruiter on the tail of about six other emails questioning the rest of the mayhem. Each of the other questions was addressed promptly.  

I factored that into my decision to sign and return or not sign and return. In the end I chose to sign and return anyway. It's in the letter; it's as legally binding as any of it and the word 'shortly' while subjective can only be pushed so far. It can probably be pushed as far as 90 days. And you know what? Right now if I thought I could get away with it and if I could figure out who is actually going to make the decision I'd ask that person to hold off on that payment for 90 days because all it's going to do is sit in the bank and collect interest. My initial concern was how I was going to give them back the 40% withholding but then I realized that until the end of the year the tax responsibility is on their head, not mine so they can pay it as they see fit and they will pay it.

So my question is not whether they're trying to work out if I'm viable (although that might be true). My question is whether they're trying to work out if whether I can hack it or if I'm going to cut and run.

I wonder if they've considered I might accidentally eviscerate someone?

Now we come to compassion.

And a reminder. Compassion does not necessarily involve sympathy or agreement. Compassion is a tool. Empathy is also useful and so is human kindness. And niceness counts too.

I'm lecturing myself in case nobody's picked that up yet.

It's all about the data points.

My boss has been tortured whether self inflicted or otherwise and this man has taken one hell of a beating. I have enough details to be utterly horrified while at the same time in a state of shock that he's managed to keep his head as well as he has this far. He's extraordinarily bright. He's as driven as anyone I've ever met. He reminds me of me, uh, let's see, four years ago, February 3. Four years ago Sunday, February 3 sometime in the morning was my breaking point. It's when I had to finally start saying no or die and I wasn't even being tortured. I'd been tortured, but not at my current job. At my current job it was entirely self inflicted although my job wasn't the entire story but the way we behave in one part of our life is pretty much the way we behave everywhere. We are who we are and we choose how we choose.

My peer. He found himself in the middle of a lake without a boat, a raft or a life jacket. The water he's swimming in is pretty cold. The two things I think I know are he wants to do well and he wants to make his boss happy and I actually think those are two separate things.

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So here's what I did yesterday.

Yesterday I stopped everything and told my boss and peer that our cube isle, the side we occupy was toxic because of our use of the word 'hate'. I said that it was one thing to hate a process, a situation, a tool, a product or a circumstance but that when I kept hearing, 'we hate her', 'we hate them', 'she's just awful', 'she did such a bad job' (she being the person who transitioned part of the job to peer and documented part of the process) it made me wonder what was being said about me when I wasn't there. I said that when I hear the words 'enemy territory', 'we don't talk to them', 'they're trying to kill us' I find it very hard to do the internal networking I'm supposed to be doing as a new employee because I have no idea who I can and cannot talk to. I said that some people are better than others at teaching, transitioning and documenting and while I was as frustrated as anyone about what we have to work with I hardly felt like I could hold it against her. I also felt like I wouldn't be allowed to ask her any questions even though she works no more than sixty yards away.

I might have been whispering but I should have taken this into a conference room because it got loud. I can't make other people whisper.

Later my boss looked up at me from his desk as I leaned over his cube to ask him a question and said, you scare me. I asked why. He said, because. I said, not good enough. He said, OK, we'll talk later. I asked when. He said, I don't know. I said, how about now. He said, I'm about to get on a call. I said, sooner is better than later. I said, do you remember when so and so said you were intimidating right here in front of all of us and then wouldn't tell you why, not even later and how upset you got?

20 minutes later we were in a conference room hashing it out.

2 hours later we were in a conference room finishing the conversation. He needed to understand my objection to the difference between frustration with what was occurring and my experience of personal animosity.

I asked if we were OK. He said yes. For now. I asked him what 'for now' meant. I said I didn't like feeling like I was being tested. He said, my wife says that about me all the time. I said, then we aren't done here yet.

So we talked some more until I learned a few more things. And then I remembered to apologize for using the word Toxic outside a conference room. In the end I had to give him four very specific examples of the word hate being used in extremely public and inappropriate places. By my peer. I said I would deal with it directly the next time it happened and if it didn't stop I'd bring it back to his attention because it does have to stop because it's going to hurt him more than us and he can see that.

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Me? I just revealed one hell of a lot more than I meant to so early in the game. On the other hand there is this:

"There are two primary choices in life:
to accept conditions as they exist, or
accept the responsibility for changing them."

- Denis Waitely

A little more FINESSE, Alecto. Maybe.

And also, that's absolutely enough for now. Now what the hell did I do with my Golden Retriever puppy suit?

Comments

[shadowmoss]

I do not do the whole co-worker/boss deal well at all. One of the reasons I am still (back?) on a level 1 help desk. There is less politics. Not to say none. I am back from 2 weeks leave with a new paradigm. Not sure what it is, but it's different.

Re: your previous post. Not sure if it makes sense to you, but while back in the States I got the feeling folks were trying to tell me how well I climb a tree. I wanted to say duh! I'm a fish, can't you see that? To take this analogy even further off track I'll say I could swim anyplace I wanted if only I knew where it was (and, no, I never read the book I badly twisted the title of there).

[Cielo]

Some days I dream of a level 1 help desk job. One of the tings that I used to really enjoy about my skill set was that I could be a tree-climbing fish when the situation called for it. Particularly when the uber-techno-geeks would deliberately use uber-tecno-geek-speak in meetings w/ users, just to intimidate them. I could switch from geek-speak to user-speak, instantly, thus translating the uber-geek crap into something understandable. That skill was respected back then. Last job, not so much.

Hubby is dealing with corporate reconstruction (think post Civil War), and he's not coping very well. Too many carpetbaggers, not enough free laborers. He's being micro-managed to death, and I'm trying to understand why the company is doing what it's doing. Doesn't make sense to me. Yesterday morning I said to myself, in my outside voice, "I used to be competent." What the hell happened to me? Blink, blink.

[Cielo]

(and the Universe just spit this out at me..)

The important thing is not to stop questioning. -Albert Einstein

[okjimm]

" It always something." Rose Ann Roseanna Dana

[Cielo]

Hey, Jimm! Flick the little sweat-ball off the end of yer nose, yer makin' me SICK!

[Alecto]

1. I got paid today. Finally.
2. Said pay included my sign on bonus. Sigh.
3. Boss appears to be trying to work things out in his own stumbling sort of way. I think. Puppy suit seems to be effective but DAMN this thing's tough to keep on. :-) Have I ever worn an actual puppy suit before? wracks brain...