Warning: Extreme bitching/venting ahead. Mind the gap!

As I may have mentioned in passing over the last few months, I am essentially doing two jobs in my organization at the moment; in addition to my normal program management duties, I’m being increasingly pulled into preparing acquisition packages for contract services.

This kind of makes sense, because I was in contracts for almost two decades, and really know what the heck I’m doing, and have the certifications to prove it.

The problem is, my current organization not only has no clear process for what one of these packages is supposed to look like, but changes come at the whim of whoever happens to be in a position to have approval on something. No two packages (never mind that I’m doing them concurrently, including an official checklist!) are ever the same.

We’ve also got a damaged culture of “last-minute, half-ass”, as well as the unfortunate habit of (what I can only assume is willful) misreading or non-reading of messages in the interest of exercising some sort of empty bit of authority, so they can tell someone they did something wrong, largely because they’ve ignored the last half-dozen emails with the latest documents and reviewing old, incomplete drafts so they can feel important, high, and mighty.

Because I do my best not to be a jerk (I fail a lot), my standard recourse is to gently and extremely politely remind them of their error in misreading something, to the point where (as goes the lyrics to one of the songs I wrote this year) “Warmest Regards” really means “F**K YOU!”

It’s bad enough I can’t get a child to put their damned phone down long enough to clean up after themselves at home; I have to deal with being treated as a non-entity pretty much everywhere.

Thank you for listening to my TED* Talk.

_______________________

* – Thoroughly, Entirely Defeated