The Waiting Game
Monday morning, my workload in the hands of someone else. It is like being abandoned by my instructor in a game of Nightmare but without the helmet and numerous keys.
Playing the waiting game.
It is a continuing problem of starting work two hours before my colleagues. Generally, I have managed to assign myself some task or other the night before but Monday mornings stretch out endlessly and drag their heels like a petulant schoolboy. I have had my breakfast, by far the most exciting thing about my morning, an hour early. I was disappointed at myself but hunger through waiting snapped viciously and disappointment withdrew into some dark whole for the five minutes while I ate. Now I don’t have breakfast to look forward to and I am suitably grumpy.
Everything is off-balance and I, with my beautiful Newfy breathing heavily, heftily beside me, in the warm, listening to the radio, am lonely. There you go, said it. And what do I do with that?
I am, I fear, middle management or at least lower-middle management aspiring unwittingly to be middle management (an unsavoury wish made not by my conscience but through my presence). I can write documentation about doing things, but I don’t appear to have the authority to actually implement these things, apart from for myself. I am a ‘kind of line manager’ as my boss so affectionately described me (I think I’ll omit that quote from my CV), however it’s all in the ‘kind of’. I have no authority but to listen and verbally react (usually with ‘yeah its shit isn’t it?’ in a sympathetic manner). I can suggest assignment of work, but can be swiftly overridden by everyone else above me (which appears to be an overwhelming percentage of the company).
Before Christmas I generated a hefty amount of work for myself by writing process after process, hoping to impress my seniors with my intuitiveness and proactive behaviour. While I now adhere by these very processes, I have noticed that another of our designers does not. I do not manage them, despite my hallowed position, apparently. I can give them a gentle nudge but that’s about it, and then I just appear like a whining colleague instead of a strong authoritarian figure striving to turn the department into a slickly oiled machine of creativity.
[pause to stroke Newfy’s belly]
But that is not the problem, merely a diversion, a momentary channelling of the real problem. Not being able to assign myself work, without generating process documentation that no one reads, is not the worst thing in the world. Frustrating, yes. But that is all, really.
I am the problem.
I am tired with it all, and I am tired of myself complaining, and I am tired of these empty, hollow promises I have written and thought and spoken over and over.
Monday morning, my workload in the hands of someone else. It is like being abandoned by my instructor in a game of Nightmare but without the helmet and numerous keys.
Playing the waiting game.
It is a continuing problem of starting work two hours before my colleagues. Generally, I have managed to assign myself some task or other the night before but Monday mornings stretch out endlessly and drag their heels like a petulant schoolboy. I have had my breakfast, by far the most exciting thing about my morning, an hour early. I was disappointed at myself but hunger through waiting snapped viciously and disappointment withdrew into some dark whole for the five minutes while I ate. Now I don’t have breakfast to look forward to and I am suitably grumpy.
Everything is off-balance and I, with my beautiful Newfy breathing heavily, heftily beside me, in the warm, listening to the radio, am lonely. There you go, said it. And what do I do with that?
I am, I fear, middle management or at least lower-middle management aspiring unwittingly to be middle management (an unsavoury wish made not by my conscience but through my presence). I can write documentation about doing things, but I don’t appear to have the authority to actually implement these things, apart from for myself. I am a ‘kind of line manager’ as my boss so affectionately described me (I think I’ll omit that quote from my CV), however it’s all in the ‘kind of’. I have no authority but to listen and verbally react (usually with ‘yeah its shit isn’t it?’ in a sympathetic manner). I can suggest assignment of work, but can be swiftly overridden by everyone else above me (which appears to be an overwhelming percentage of the company).
Before Christmas I generated a hefty amount of work for myself by writing process after process, hoping to impress my seniors with my intuitiveness and proactive behaviour. While I now adhere by these very processes, I have noticed that another of our designers does not. I do not manage them, despite my hallowed position, apparently. I can give them a gentle nudge but that’s about it, and then I just appear like a whining colleague instead of a strong authoritarian figure striving to turn the department into a slickly oiled machine of creativity.
[pause to stroke Newfy’s belly]
But that is not the problem, merely a diversion, a momentary channelling of the real problem. Not being able to assign myself work, without generating process documentation that no one reads, is not the worst thing in the world. Frustrating, yes. But that is all, really.
I am the problem.
I am tired with it all, and I am tired of myself complaining, and I am tired of these empty, hollow promises I have written and thought and spoken over and over.
posted by thewebstress at Monday, February 05, 2007
1 Comments:
I, too, find myself lonely on a Monday morning. Perhaps we should schedule some sort of tele-conference? We could have an agenda and I will volunteer to take minutes...
xx
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