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Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
Here I am, wearing the shackles
14:15:00 on 2005-08-29

Two weeks ago today I had my thirty-fifth birthday. Traditionally we have recognized people's birthdays at work in two ways: harassment (unwanted decoration of their work areas) and taking them out to lunch. Well, we don't generally decorate work areas anymore because that makes a "hostile work environment" (complete with fingers making quotation marks while I say that), but we still did the lunch thing.

Well... we used to, I guess. Y'see, we didn't do that for me this year. I was upset a little, but I'd come to be okay with it and let it go. But then I found out that I've been dissed again.


It was about 11:15 this morning and Lois and I were the only ones left in my team's area, but John walked in and asked us, "aren't you going to the luncheon?"

What luncheon?

Apparently, there was a luncheon for a team award for people who worked on the clinical workstation standardization project. Oh, that luncheon. Lee asked me about it about a week and a half ago, but I didn't know anything about it. He seemed surprised that I hadn't been invited. Well, Lois and I weren't invited, so I guess we weren't supposed to know.

Well, according to the Powers That Be™ I didn't have anything to do with the project. I see, I just build the tools you need to clean up your screw-ups after the fact, like services turned on you don't want, or services we need that aren't. How about filesystem permissions that are jacked up and need to be fixed en masse? And I know I gave input about how the images for these workstations should be built to support our old Windows 2000 applications transparently. And no, it mustn't have been me who keeps doing the work to truck the redirected start menus from server to server because we can't find any hardware in our organization that accepts thousands of simultaneous connections for frequently-used information without cratering. (Spend some money, folks!)

So no, I guess I didn't have anything to do with that project.


Yes, I feel unappreciated at my work and I have for some time. I get some lip-service that what I do matters, but I feel more and more that my job is becoming writing code to fix somebody else's screw-ups or help someone else grandstand. Things I like doing are being taken away from me one by one through others' politicking (but I am expected to keep helping the person who's taking them away set things up and manage them), just the way other things have been taken (a private office, less restrictive dress code, and let's not even talk about the health insurance situation!). I have projects I would like to do but I am constantly working at cross-purposes with other members of my team who do everything in secret now it seems, and I keep getting pulled away from working on these projects because of problems others cause due to carelessness or ineptitude.

It's becoming too much to deal with in any constructive manner.

A while back I had a talk with my manager about my burnout and dissatisfaction, but in the end he just voiced that he shares my frustrations, and nothing ever came of it. I am thinking all I can really do is quit and find somewhere new to work, which brings me down all the same. I mean, I'm in Houston — here all we do around here is soul-crushing IT work, nothing of any consequence as far as I'm concerned. I would like to be developing something worthwhile, not keeping a bunch of underutilized workstations humming along for someone else in information systems to come along and screw up.

I have wanted to be in the San Francisco Bay Area for the longest time because there the things I'd like out of a career and life are possible. San Francisco has a soul. Geeks can be geeks and do good things there, explore ideas and build new technologies. There's a culture that understands that good things don't come from companies with their R&D departments, they come from people with motivations and desires for something new, and they can take their ideas and build something new from that. That's some of the cornerstones that high-tech was built on, but Houston doesn't do that. Technology doesn't happen here unless it's to serve some greater corporate entity, and the people who work in tech here (such as it is) are okay with that. Really. The total lack of a soul is heartbreaking.

But then, reality sets in. There's no way I can afford to move Marilynn and I there right now, much less even leave my job. We have a joke around here about the "velvet handcuffs" slapped on you when you get a few years tenure here: you can't afford to leave but you hate to stay. It's all too true. In fact, I've found that the velvet isn't even the good stuff, it's the cheap imitation stuff that leaves nasty chafing, but still... here I am, wearing the shackles.

So what am I to do? I have no idea.

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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