Exhausted.

Extricating myself from my current job is…challenging. I have to remind myself that it’s the company’s damn fault that they have no plans to replace people – it’s damn crazy that this is the case considering that the people leaving are contractors! We Are Not Employees! OF COURSE we are going to jump ship if we get a permanent job elsewhere! Yet, they put critical functions into our hands, then freak the fuck out when we get other jobs?

It’s not just me, the group I work in lost another long time contractor (we’d started with the company within a couple of weeks of each other), she went to an outside firm. Another former colleague already was an employee and got a better job within the organization.

So I’m creating some barriers: I will get things in as much order as I can in the next 7 working days. I’m available going forward for issues that arise on things I’d worked on, but going forward, best of luck to y’all, I didn’t create this issue.

I do feel for my supervisor, he’s a super nice guy and he didn’t create this issue either. He’s making his case up the management ladder that this “critical role” can’t be in the hands of a contractor, it should be an employee position, and there has to be a better support system in place. As I said to him in exasperation when we met on Monday “What would you all do if I got hit by a bus?” Would everything just grind to a halt? Yes, yes, it would.

I’m looking forward to my new position. Not because it will be easy, not because it isn’t responsible or important, but because I will have more control over how things unfold.

I wish I could share specifics about the insanity but it’s too industry specific. Let’s just say we had a screwup for which I was about 10% responsible, along with 2 or 3 other people who were also maybe 10% responsible. The rest of the screwup was entirely beyond our control. Like, waay beyond, like shit nobody could have even suspected was possible. Yet, this being Corporate America, we had a discussion where managers said helpful things like, “We can add a checklist!” Right. Let’s also add a checklist for UFO crashes on job, because that’s how rare this was.

I’ve gained 15 pounds in the last two years, and I swear it’s all work related stress eating. I’ve been making an effort to get myself together, but then something happens like today (the first snafu since I took this position) and we had a meeting with people who barely understood the issue. And I truly, deeply needed chocolate. And wine.

7 more work days in this role. Then they can figure it out for their owndamnselves. I’ll help out with what I can, but seriously, I came into a mess and muddled along for two and a half years and kept it all going and apparently did a great job with it, but I’d never done this shit before in my life. Now I’m like their expert? With two years of figuring it out as we went along?

Maybe it should be a real job you respect and you hire people with this specific experience? Crazy, right? My supervisor gets it, totally, I love him to pieces, but he’s currently Sisyphus, pushing this crazy boulder of an idea up the management chain. People who have ZERO idea of what the job entails are pushing back. I just…cannot even. We compared stress notes. I’ve gained 15 pounds, he’s gained 40.

I’m always amused by people who think Corporate America is some sort of all-knowing monolith. All they have is money. I’ve worked in several Big Name Companies in my long and checkered career and I swear, get past the public image and there’s a sea of earnest middle managers and oceans of people like me trying to keep it all moving.