How to Suck as a Manager

In recent news, my employer has apparently posted a job opening in the Communications department for a position that is... suspiciously... an extremely precise duplication of my current job description. To be clear, my current job description actually only covers about 1/5 of my current actual job. So at a guess, they're probably planning to remove those responsibilities from me so that they can pretend that they shouldn't have been paying me for the full range of my responsibilities over the last five years or more. Then, when/if they finally do manage to reclassify my job, they can set the salary to match that reduced set of responsibilities. 

Which is a remarkably shitty thing to do.

To make this even more fun: 

• It looks like this got posted back in early November, meaning that it must have been in place and approved even earlier than that. Despite that...
  
• Friday was literally the first I heard of it -- I found out because one of my co-workers said, "Hey did you see that position in Communications? It looks right up your alley. Are you planning to apply for it?" 
• The new position pays (potentially) more than what I'm currently being paid for the same job title, which in my case -- I'd like to emphasize again -- doesn't even begin to do justice to the full range of my responsibilities. 
• My immediate supervisor didn't know anything about it either. 
• Apparently it didn't occur to anyone involved in the decision-making process -- not even the faintest hint of an inkling of a spark of an idea -- to consult with me about how I might feel about this. Which, right now, I honestly can't tell you how I feel about the idea itself, because I'm too busy being rightly pissed off about the sheer level of disrespect that infuses everything around it.

I like my job. I like my workplace, I like the rank-and-file folks that I work with in my department, I like the folks I work with in other departments. But our leadership is absolute shit. And, again, it's probably impolitic to say so -- this blog is not private, and I know damned well that some of my regular readers know who I am and where I work in real life. 

But God fucking damn it, if they don't want me to point out that our leadership actively sucks then they need to work at sucking less.

Plague update

So the general run of COVID has looked like this: 

Beautiful Wife had the earliest symptoms, which showed up mostly as a massive head cold -- lots of mucus, lots of drainage, sore throat -- and felt like it was trying to climb down and become an upper-respiratory thing; the nebulizer helped with that. She was also very tired, which... no surprise there. She seems to be coming out of it now, but she's still sleeping a lot. 

Secondborn was the next one to show up with a fever, but then he's always been more prone to fevers than the rest of us. He slept for about eighteen hours from early Tuesday night into Wednesday, and we had to keep nudging him awake long enough to put Tylenol or Advil into him (alternating) to keep his fever down to something that wasn't dangerous. On Wednesday he got slowly back on his feet and seemed to be much better, but of course it took him a while to go to sleep Wednesday night. Still, he seemed to be more or less back to normal on Thursday. I wasn't quite there -- still tired, though I think some of that was emotional -- but pretty close. A bit of fever in the evening, but nothing life-threatening.

Anyway, we're still being cautious about not going out and potentially exposing anyone else, and Beautiful Wife's throat is still sore, but I think we're coming out of it. 

We've been lucky.

Plague House 2022

Just when I thought I we might be starting to get our shit back together, too...

Beautiful Wife tested positive for COVID on Monday, after a night of not feeling too well (mainly sinus meltdown and sore throat). Secondborn is running a fever, and Firstborn and I have both shown up with less serious fevers. So, you know, we're back to isolating and medicating and hydrating and... 

Yeah. We're fortunate that we have a nebulizer and something to put in it -- that seems to have kept the thing from moving down into pneumonia and/or bronchitis.

Really could have done without this, especially right now. It seems like the end of the school year and the start of summer is just one damned thing after another. There are small blessings to be counted, but that's hard to do when the hits keep coming. 

Right now it's not so bad for me and Firstborn, but Beautiful Wife is just starting to come out of it and Secondborn keeps trying to run a fever that's worryingly high. I'm tired, but I'm waiting to see if it gets worse.

And with that, it's definitely time to go to bed. Y'all... take care, please. Everybody in my area seems to be acting like the pandemic is over, but it's very definitely not and the potential long-term side-effects are worrisome, by which I mean terrifying.

Yep, there it is...

I tried to pace myself through the end of May, and I almost made it. Still, I managed to postpone the Great Collapse until early June -- now -- which is better than nothing. And I'm really not in full-on collapse, although I'd kind of like to be. I've just... kind of disappeared into books and video games and left the family to mostly fend for themselves. Writing? Nope, that requires having a brain. And just at the moment, I barely have enough brain to keep myself organized, let alone everyone else, let way alone do that and still put some oomph into writing. Duolingo? Same. Reworking the patch jacket I started in high school? Yeah, no. Cleaning the house? I mean, actually yeah kind of, but at a very measured pace. Ran a lot of laundry, didn't sort any of it.

Still... D&D tonight, and I always feel emotionally refreshed afterwards. We're still playing Evil!Party, too, so we'll probably be doing even more horrible things to would-be heroes. Admittedly, our position is a bit precarious right now, but... Eh, later for that. We'll see how it goes and I'll figure out where to put the write-up in the schedule for this week. I certainly don't have anything ready to post after this morning -- and today seems like to be very busy, even before this post goes up. 

Ah, well. Onwards and upwards, my friends and companions. Nothing but good times ahead.

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(Fell asleep with voice to text on...)

The Hell Did January Go?

Right, January just up and buggered off on me, or at least that's the way it feels. It's actually been pretty stressful, though not directly horrible: getting the boys back into school (no boosters yet, plenty of COVID reports, no good alternatives), trying to get through some projects at work, waiting to see if work is going to actually update my job description to describe my fucking job, mostly not getting any writing done because by the time I finish the day I'm pretty wiped, trying to keep up with dishes and laundry and etc. before the house implodes, and trying to figure out how (and if) we can get back to the youth Dungeons and Dragons game in the middle of a massive surge of "milder" COVID that, um, ain't all that fucking mild and may have long-term health effects that the media seems to be essentially ignoring. Yeah. 

I do have a solution for that last one: we'll be playing online next weekend. Now I just need to remember where we were, and prep for it. 

The last of major SQL transfers is coming up this week, but it's A) the one most likely to go horribly wrong, B) the one where I don't have a good way to try it out using the test environment, and C) the one most likely to scream if things stay down too long. (It's also the system that's going to have to get shut down again so I can finally upgrade it so I can finally go back to setting up one of its components, but that can wait.) 

On the plus side, I did finally manage to do a little bit of writing this weekend. More importantly, I got a huge amount of sleep which I was desperately overdue for. I'm not exactly back on schedule, metabolically speaking, but I'm a lot closer than I have been so far this year. I've managed to get back to practicing in DuoLingo -- erratically, but again it's a start. Or a restart. Whatever. And I finally took the CPAP machine down and did a bunch of maintenance on it that I should have done months ago -- and found that they'd sent me the wrong replacement mask, so I'm going to have to do something about that. 

It's always something, isn't it? 

Anyway, it's Tuesday. Time to spread your wings, shake out those lovely sharp-tipped scales, sharpen your claws and fangs, and go out and drown the countryside in fire and slaughter until the humans bring the tributes and sacrifices you demand. Don't feel guilty about it! A being of your ruthless magnificence deserves this sort of treatment!

New Year, New Mess

So, 2022 is off to quite the start. 

Our friends' older son ("Olderfriend", who's just a bit younger than Firstborn) came down with COVID, and while it hasn't been life-threatening apparently he's pretty miserable. They've been keeping him isolated, getting tested themselves, etc. but now their younger son is also testing positive -- but probably not from his brother, probably from an exposure at school. (You may remember these boys from a special D&D episode a couple of years back.) 

On top of that, it's at least possible Beautiful Wife and I were exposed, despite the fact that our last interactions were outdoors. No real symptoms so far (we've both been a bit tired and stuffy, but that's normal for this time of year) and we haven't tested positive. Of course, that doesn't tell us much: this particular variant of COVID doesn't seem to show up on the tests very well. Olderfriend tested negative on the home tests for three days before they got a positive read off one of the slower-response tests from a testing center. Meanwhile, our boys went back to school last week and started their first full week of school yesterday; this isn't stressful at all, obviously. Oh! And I spent a decent portion of the weekend trying to sort out the nightmare farce of refilling Secondborn's meds; ADHD meds and antidepressants are both subject to very strict scrutiny, which means things have to get prescribed in very particular ways and there's lots of opportunities for things to go wrong even before the insurance companies get involved. Whee! Definitely not stressful.

And, weirdly, my sleep schedule is just off. Like, trying to go off the rails. Pretty sure that's not a symptom of anything except that we've been spending a lot of time isolated and stressed out, but I was up pretty much all of Saturday night and then slept until like two o'clock Sunday afternoon. I made myself go back to sleep at ten o'clock that night and work up a bit after four-thirty. So that's something I'm trying to work on.(It's not just me, either: Secondborn was up pretty much all of Sunday night, which made Monday at school kind of interesting.)

No word back from work on either the job reclassification or the application for the new position, which means that it's time to move on to step three: looking elsewhere. That's probably not fair, since we're just coming out of the holidays and pretty much everything is trying to come back online after grinding to a halt; but that's also why this is precisely the moment when I need to be applying for things. And at this point in my work history -- and history in general, for that matter -- fair can basically go fuck itself. Fair would have been reclassifying my job years ago, after they effectively tripled my responsibilities. Fair would have been having that additional income for the last couple of years to put towards college costs and now medical bills. 

All of which means that this week is devoted to getting my shit together. Sleep? Need to get that together. Writing? Get it together. Job applications? Put 'em together. Keeping boys on schedule? That's actually the one thing I haven't let slip, despite Secondborn's issues with falling asleep, but this would be the wrong time to let it fall apart. The mess on my desk at work? Get it together. Studying German and Spanish? Get back to it. Finishing current projects at work? Already in process, so just get it done. All of this is possible, it's just a matter of sitting down and sorting through it. 

...Which is exactly what I usually say just before something completely unexpected blows up in my face and throws my rhythm off completely. We'll see.