As much as I hate talking about work in this space (this is, in my mind, isn’t really the place except in generalities, though I end up doing it quite a bit), a lot of stuff from the office side of my life is really weighing me down lately.

Regular readers will remember that I’ve been bitching on and off in the space the last couple of months about the shakeups and uncertainty regarding resources and stuff in my public sector agency. It seems every week I’m being called to provide some new form of documentation or justification or data to support the work I do (which nobody disputes is important work that needs done), and last week, I spent most of a day sitting in front of a review board going line by line through work statements to break down how work is distributed across the contracts I have to deal with. The review board really rather liked my performance statements, which made me feel good about the one I wrote, and worried me because if the one i inherited and didn’t write is still impressive, it means the rest of the organization is in deep trouble because I know as as person who has a decade or so of contracting experience that that work statement is total shit.

In the last week or two, heads have been rolling here in this organization in response to waste and badly written contracts, and I expect it’s not quite over. My job is safe, thankfully (though I’m not happy with it, and thanks to the current hiring freeze, I don’t have much option to move anyway, as with the 20 years I have invested, it doesn’t really make sense for me to go private unless it’s absolutely necessary), but I expect that others in the organization don’t necessarily have the same assurances.

However, as they’re reviewing and killing certain programs and basically locking the purchasing people away for mandatory training/counseling, there’s still work to be done based on what I’ve been assigned to accomplish that goes beyond the budgeted resources on my current vehicles, and as my boss and I learned last week, there’s really no process in place to get requests approved and orders issued under the current in-flux regime; just a bunch of shouty executives and senior officers looking to castigate people for what, in many cases, were legitimately bad choices and work products.

This, as you might expect, is a problem.

The stuff above, however, is entirely academic. What’s really got me anxious is that the changes coming means that very real people I’m fond of in both “productive worker” and “very nice person” senses, could quite possibly lose their jobs; even if I get eventual answers to concerns about the process. Even though this isn’t really my fault in any way, and it won’t personally be me letting people go, it still really bothers me that I’m involved in this.

At this point, I just want a clear-ish answer about what the circumstances are going to be for my particular programs, so I can start planning priorities toward a semi-realistic target, and we can give the really good people we’re going to lose as much time to make their adjustments as they can. It’s the least The Powers That Be™ owe me, and it’s the best I can do given the circumstance for the folks who work with me.

It’s still a crappy situation, and I don’t like it one bit, and I needed to say it (figuratively) out loud.