I’m kinda curious about the soap boxes of the fabled yesteryears that people hopped up on, and let loose their thoughts on how they felt. Hell, the soap I get now doesn’t even come in a box, it’s in a plastic bottle. The soap that does comes in boxes generally comes in a small cardboard box. Hardly worthy of standing upon, that much is certain. For those few chosen ones that happen to be reading this, I must forewarn you, this is likely to be a long, drawn out, rambling rant fest of a blog post. I have a bunch of stuff floating through my head, so without further ado I suppose..
(let’s do this livejournal/emo style)
Mood: Frustrated/confused/worried/anxious :S
Music: Pandora (NIN currently, oh so fitting)
One thing I’ve always appreciated about 3rd shifts is that office politics are almost completely non-existant. It’s just Chris and myself and all we’ve had to worry about is doing what we do. The first half of this week’s been brutal though, as he just recently bought a house and has taken a few extra days off. Congrats to him, glad to see he’s getting his own place, he deserved it. Obviously, the brutal part comes into play with us being a man down at work, and trying to shoulder the extra load at work for the rough 4 hours that isn’t being covered. It’s disappointing because I definitely haven’t strutted my best work out there this week due to rushing through tickets a bit more hastily than I normally have to. That’s my fault, I probably should have enlisted on-call help or something, but it never really felt like the situation was out of my hands. I thought I had everything under control, but after reviewing some of the tickets maybe that’s not necessarily the case. I dunno, I’m not impressed with the work I’ve put forth this week, which honestly is about par for the course. Not really sure how that differs from most weeks, but it does. I suppose it’s because I actually made some mistakes this week. Generally I just feel like what I do isn’t really all that great, I’m just doing my job. So far this week I just feel like I’ve let the “team” down. It’s frustrating, and not exactly impeccable timing. I pick a time right before my review to start stumbling like an idiot, well played.
Speaking of review though, I have been at Contegix for roughly a full year now. It’s been a wild ride, and it still feels like I just started yesterday. I’m not sure yet when I actually get my review. I know historically your review doesn’t correlate with your 1 year mark, and instead typically occurs sometime around 3-6 months after the one year mark. I suppose it’s irrelevant overall though, it’ll happen when it happens. The whole idea of yearly reviews has always made me giggle a bit though. Every company does them, so I’m pretty accustomed to the whole thought process. However, in my experience your annual review really equates to how good you’ve been the past 1-2 months. The idea of bringing up things you didn’t do great in month 2 is irrelevant, because it’s likely been fixed by month 12, and if it hasn’t, and you’ve been doing something wrong for 10 months then management has failed by not informing you of such. Quarterly reviews, with annual raises, always made more sense to me. I think 3 months is a nice time frame upon which to judge someone’s performance. It allows you more flexibility to fix problems with the employee, and to bolster their worth in the company. I know I’m a bit weird on this though. I want the Weather Channel for my performance essentially, so I can know ‘on the 8s’ how I’m doing. Live performance tracking would be pretty stellar! Hell, I’m sure it’ll be part of our fancy new ticketing system (*snicker* inside joke).
Anyways, so, office politics I mentioned above, but quickly side tracked from… We typically get to avoid them on third shift. Sometimes we get wrapped up in them a bit, but not too bad. We’re fairly abstracted from the rest of the company. We do our thing, take care of customers, receive the occasional compliment, and the rare slap on the wrist for our misgivings. We handle the ticket flow differently than other shifts, watch after each other, and never toss each other under the proverbial bus. The only problem is that the third shift joy ride had to come to an end eventually. I love third shifts, I really do, I can’t deny it. At the same time though, I have almost no life whatsoever as a result. I get home at 7 (if I’m lucky), nothing’s open, nothing’s on TV.. I basically get to watch whatever’s on my DVR, eat some form of breakfast food, or maybe go to Wal-Mart. Then on the weekends I have to completely rape my sleep schedule in order to do anything, whch makes me almost useless on my Monday (Sunday truly) at work. Hence, I rarely convert my sleep schedule on the weekends, and end up just keeping it “normal” for the sake of sanity. The downfall of all this is that while Kristie and I mathematically see each other just as much as we did when I was on a normal shift, we never spend quality time together. We used to go to the zoo, catch movies, go to the mall, and get out of the house just in general. Now if we do anything, we watch X-Files or Seinfeld on DVD at home before I go to sleep (right as she’s waking up). It’s not really fair to her, and it’s taking it’s toll on me as well. I guess this is another case of me diving into something, without thinking about the consequences. I didn’t really see that I’d be sacrificing much, if anything, being on thirds.
(yes I know the politics, I’m getting there aight?)
So there are a couple positions opening up at Contegix, and initially I was just excited about the possibility of moving up in the company. As time had gone on, the idea of getting off of thirds and joining the ranks of the daywalkers increased the level of excitment/anticipation I had for a potential new position at Contegix. Initially I was pretty excited about the Operations Coordinator position that’s up for grabs at work, but birdies in my ear tell me it won’t be nearly as exciting as I had originally thought it might be. I knew stuff like inventory and billing would be side effects of the new position, but rumors would have me believe that would be a large chunk of the position. Given some of the new positions that have been filled that are above Ops Coord, that rumor from the birdies seems to hold a significant amount of water. We’re a great big sewing circle, us engineers that is, so who the hell knows. Information tends to come out like urine from an old man… sudden gushes of unexpected information right in your pants, followed by long droughts with times that it feels like urine will gush again but never does, until that sudden explosion reoccurs. Hence, things are often left to us to theorize, guess, and craft hairbrain ideas out. So anyways, a ‘bug’ was planted in my ear about some exciting new positions that would be right up my alley…. next year. Early next year, but next year. My problem is two-fold with this: 1, it takes the excitement about returning to be a daywalker, and seeing my wife more and 2, a LOT can happen by early next year. These supposed new, exciting positions may fizzle out, or perhaps someone more qualified than I comes along, then they get snatched up by someone else. I dunno, apparently I’m supposed to feel flattered that next year at some point in the fiscal 2009 year I might be considered for a promotion. I suppose I’m taking it more as ‘the positions currently available won’t be going to you, but here’s a different carrot’, rather than the good way it’s intended. Of course, I haven’t been told these current new positions are unattainable for me, but planting a bug such as this seems awfully odd if you’re really thinking about promoting someone. That, and the timeframe that was given to me for the interviews has past, making me think that perhaps the interview process is null.
Ah well, just lots to think about now I suppose. I love my job, and I know there’s nothing like this out there. Maybe just being a normal, run of the mill engineer ain’t so bad.