What do you call it....

When you find out your girlfriend quit her job (with possible negative repercussions for her, which makes you worry), your job is threatened, you work with cool equipment at your job, and you get home four hours late?

Why, you call it a normal day! Well, normal, except for the part about your girlfriend quitting her job. I'm a little bit upset about that, but it isn't my decision. It's her life and her choices, I need to respect that. I just hate to see anything bad happen to her, or have her walk away from this with even more problems hounding her. I hate that she has all the issues she has in her life as it is, with creditors, job searches, car troubles and the like. It makes me very, very upset that I don't have more of my current debt load paid off so that I might be able to offer her some financing to get these things addressed. Of course, she might not accept it, but I want to be able to help -- to do that, I must have the funds to be able to do so. *sigh* Anways, I can relate to where she's coming from when she says she just couldn't stand her current job any more. I had that when I was working at Best Buy. But even then I played as best I could by their rules and politics and was able to walk away with a few months of worthwhile experience on my resume. Hopefully she can do the same and walk away, unscathed, to a new job. I care about her too much to see her get hurt by bad decisions. :(

Work today was interesting. A member of middle management spoke with me for a few minutes, warning me of what amounts to a nefarious plot to destroy my reputation with the company, and essentially start railroading me towards a shitty yearly review and possibly being "asked" to leave the company. Pity that the manager in question didn't count on betrayal. I'm glad to see that, even though I was in part to blame, other folks recognize the key source of the trouble and will take a chance to warn me of the upcoming shitstorm. This will only add to my resolve to speak with our company IT director (step under our CIO) and inform him of my displeasure with the current state of affairs, my concerns about my manager's ability to focus, understand and direct myself and my coworkers, and various other nit picks. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't. I'd like to see my current manager ousted the way my old one was. Even if that's not reasonable, I'm going to give it a shot. I mean, if I don't try and communicate my issues, upper management will never know how peeved I am until my exit interview, right? Right. So, I'll have to try and remain civil, and make my case known. After that it's out of my hands....

It's late, I'm incredibly tired, and I need to sleep. Oh yes, do I need sleep.

Interestingly enough, I just found out I lead my group in number of tickets closed/completed... except for Laiza, who exceeds me by 700 tickets. I attribute this to the fact she was a Systems Engineer before, and that most of those were password change requests.

What do you call it....

When you find out your girlfriend quit her job (with possible negative repercussions for her, which makes you worry), your job is threatened, you work with cool equipment at your job, and you get home four hours late?

Why, you call it a normal day! Well, normal, except for the part about your girlfriend quitting her job. I'm a little bit upset about that, but it isn't my decision. It's her life and her choices, I need to respect that. I just hate to see anything bad happen to her, or have her walk away from this with even more problems hounding her. I hate that she has all the issues she has in her life as it is, with creditors, job searches, car troubles and the like. It makes me very, very upset that I don't have more of my current debt load paid off so that I might be able to offer her some financing to get these things addressed. Of course, she might not accept it, but I want to be able to help -- to do that, I must have the funds to be able to do so. *sigh* Anways, I can relate to where she's coming from when she says she just couldn't stand her current job any more. I had that when I was working at Best Buy. But even then I played as best I could by their rules and politics and was able to walk away with a few months of worthwhile experience on my resume. Hopefully she can do the same and walk away, unscathed, to a new job. I care about her too much to see her get hurt by bad decisions. :(

Work today was interesting. A member of middle management spoke with me for a few minutes, warning me of what amounts to a nefarious plot to destroy my reputation with the company, and essentially start railroading me towards a shitty yearly review and possibly being "asked" to leave the company. Pity that the manager in question didn't count on betrayal. I'm glad to see that, even though I was in part to blame, other folks recognize the key source of the trouble and will take a chance to warn me of the upcoming shitstorm. This will only add to my resolve to speak with our company IT director (step under our CIO) and inform him of my displeasure with the current state of affairs, my concerns about my manager's ability to focus, understand and direct myself and my coworkers, and various other nit picks. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't. I'd like to see my current manager ousted the way my old one was. Even if that's not reasonable, I'm going to give it a shot. I mean, if I don't try and communicate my issues, upper management will never know how peeved I am until my exit interview, right? Right. So, I'll have to try and remain civil, and make my case known. After that it's out of my hands....

It's late, I'm incredibly tired, and I need to sleep. Oh yes, do I need sleep.

Interestingly enough, I just found out I lead my group in number of tickets closed/completed... except for Laiza, who exceeds me by 700 tickets. I attribute this to the fact she was a Systems Engineer before, and that most of those were password change requests.

Tonight's sermon, ladies and germs...

Okay, perhaps that was a little too flippant, but I will use my current irreverent mood as an excuse to pardon it. Today was a day that I've been both anticipating and dreading. After I wrote my entry last night, I slipped off to bed. As bizarre as it might seem to some, I found myself rehearsing my conversation with Rich. This little ritual is what helps me prepare, helps me remember my lines and my cues. It does not entirely prevent me from looking like an idiot, not by any means. But it does help prevent me from looking like a total idiot, if you can dig it. So I went in and I spoke with him for fifteen or twenty minutes, I was pleasantly surprised. He was receptive, understanding, and humorous throughout the whole thing. He was supportive. He gave me a desire to try and stick with the company.

I spoke with Jen for a while on the phone last night. I'd gotten home from work late, she was upset and worried about her job, I was frustrated, so we just needed to talk. It provided a forum for us to sort of counsel one another. When I remarked on my plan to go talk to Rich today, she asked me why. I told her, Well, because I like my job. I love my work. I don't want to leave! Her belief was palpable even through the phone. "No, you write about how much you hate your job and how much you hate that company!" She had me there, for a moment. I didn't know how to explain it, then, suddenly, I did. "It's not the job. I love my job. I love working with technology, I love the exercise in problem solving that it gives me, the chance to meet new people and play with new geek toys. It's the environment I hate. Allen, he creates an environment for me... he attempts to railroad me, he ambushes me, he plays little mind games. Allen makes promises that I then have to attempt to fulfill even though his decisions are made on data that has absolutely no bearing upon reality. He makes it so I don't want to go into work each day. It's the WAY I have to work that bothers me, and that is a product of my environment. It isn't the work itself that bothers me. When I explained it that way to her, she seemed to have had the epiphany and understood my love of the job but the hate of the environment I was performing it in.

So, I'm feeling a little bit buoyed by Rich's responses to my concerns and disillusionment. But I'm also being lifted by something else, which is bringing me in a roundabout way to my real "topic" for tonight's entry... secrets.

Yes, secrets. When spoken of in this manner, they seem like such a small thing, don't they? But secrets really do command a great deal of power. Everybody has secrets. We each have some dark little secret we're hiding away from the rest of the world -- we hide things from our spouses, our parents, our insurance agents, our coworkers, our peers and sometimes even from ourselves. Secrets are the great equalizer, because while they can make us feel small and insignificant or uncertain, they also can make us feel very powerful. You surely remember what it is like to be a child with a secret. When your best friend told you a secret about how they had a crush on so-and-so, what's the first thing you did? You crowed it to your family and the other friends. "I've got a secret!" you cried. Of course you did, we all did it at one time or another in our lives. Heck, some of us continue to do it for the rest of our lives. Why? Because we get addicted to the power that secret gives us. That little nugget of knowledge, that we know and were trusted to know, and that nobody else knows. Our immediate reactions as humans? GO AND LORD IT OVER SOMEBODY ELSE. That's right, the immediate action that most people take when trusted with a secret is go use it to make themselves feel superior to other people.

Why do we do that? Perhaps to hide our own secrets, and to make us feel better about ourselves. We all have our "dark" secrets, our skeletons in our closets. Maybe it's that we secretly love watching the "Rosie" show. Maybe it's that we pick our noses. Maybe it's that we own a copy of Highlander 2. Whatever it is, we use this other knowledge to help push the darker things further into the shadows, and to make ourselves feel special. When we tell somebody else "I have a secret," we're in essence saying "I'm better than YOU are, nyahnyah!" Yep, we're holding it above them. What action do we, deep down, expect from such a taunt? Well, naturally, we're expecting them to demand proof that this secret is so great and so worth the trouble that's being taken to vaunt it. This is always the reaction. People don't like you lording that sort of stuff over them, so they challenge you. Do you really have a better secret than they do? How great can it be, if you're prancing around, singing about it?

Now you're faced with the next problem... do you tell, or not? If you don't, they'll demand you tell them, otherwise how can they know you really have a secret? It's a double-edged blade, isn't it? If you don't, you're lying, and you've painted yourself into a corner. If you do tell, then you've just helped make it less of a secret. People usually opt for the later choice because they feel compelled to save face and prove themselves to their peers. This tendency of human nature is precisely why I believe the best way to keep a secret is to simply not have any. The problem is, that simple truth just isn't realistic in this day and age. As I mentioned above, we all have secrets, for whatever reason.

I have a secret.

This one goes out to the one I love

Tonight's sermon, ladies and germs...

Okay, perhaps that was a little too flippant, but I will use my current irreverent mood as an excuse to pardon it. Today was a day that I've been both anticipating and dreading. After I wrote my entry last night, I slipped off to bed. As bizarre as it might seem to some, I found myself rehearsing my conversation with Rich. This little ritual is what helps me prepare, helps me remember my lines and my cues. It does not entirely prevent me from looking like an idiot, not by any means. But it does help prevent me from looking like a total idiot, if you can dig it. So I went in and I spoke with him for fifteen or twenty minutes, I was pleasantly surprised. He was receptive, understanding, and humorous throughout the whole thing. He was supportive. He gave me a desire to try and stick with the company.

I spoke with Jen for a while on the phone last night. I'd gotten home from work late, she was upset and worried about her job, I was frustrated, so we just needed to talk. It provided a forum for us to sort of counsel one another. When I remarked on my plan to go talk to Rich today, she asked me why. I told her, Well, because I like my job. I love my work. I don't want to leave! Her belief was palpable even through the phone. "No, you write about how much you hate your job and how much you hate that company!" She had me there, for a moment. I didn't know how to explain it, then, suddenly, I did. "It's not the job. I love my job. I love working with technology, I love the exercise in problem solving that it gives me, the chance to meet new people and play with new geek toys. It's the environment I hate. Allen, he creates an environment for me... he attempts to railroad me, he ambushes me, he plays little mind games. Allen makes promises that I then have to attempt to fulfill even though his decisions are made on data that has absolutely no bearing upon reality. He makes it so I don't want to go into work each day. It's the WAY I have to work that bothers me, and that is a product of my environment. It isn't the work itself that bothers me. When I explained it that way to her, she seemed to have had the epiphany and understood my love of the job but the hate of the environment I was performing it in.

So, I'm feeling a little bit buoyed by Rich's responses to my concerns and disillusionment. But I'm also being lifted by something else, which is bringing me in a roundabout way to my real "topic" for tonight's entry... secrets.

Yes, secrets. When spoken of in this manner, they seem like such a small thing, don't they? But secrets really do command a great deal of power. Everybody has secrets. We each have some dark little secret we're hiding away from the rest of the world -- we hide things from our spouses, our parents, our insurance agents, our coworkers, our peers and sometimes even from ourselves. Secrets are the great equalizer, because while they can make us feel small and insignificant or uncertain, they also can make us feel very powerful. You surely remember what it is like to be a child with a secret. When your best friend told you a secret about how they had a crush on so-and-so, what's the first thing you did? You crowed it to your family and the other friends. "I've got a secret!" you cried. Of course you did, we all did it at one time or another in our lives. Heck, some of us continue to do it for the rest of our lives. Why? Because we get addicted to the power that secret gives us. That little nugget of knowledge, that we know and were trusted to know, and that nobody else knows. Our immediate reactions as humans? GO AND LORD IT OVER SOMEBODY ELSE. That's right, the immediate action that most people take when trusted with a secret is go use it to make themselves feel superior to other people.

Why do we do that? Perhaps to hide our own secrets, and to make us feel better about ourselves. We all have our "dark" secrets, our skeletons in our closets. Maybe it's that we secretly love watching the "Rosie" show. Maybe it's that we pick our noses. Maybe it's that we own a copy of Highlander 2. Whatever it is, we use this other knowledge to help push the darker things further into the shadows, and to make ourselves feel special. When we tell somebody else "I have a secret," we're in essence saying "I'm better than YOU are, nyahnyah!" Yep, we're holding it above them. What action do we, deep down, expect from such a taunt? Well, naturally, we're expecting them to demand proof that this secret is so great and so worth the trouble that's being taken to vaunt it. This is always the reaction. People don't like you lording that sort of stuff over them, so they challenge you. Do you really have a better secret than they do? How great can it be, if you're prancing around, singing about it?

Now you're faced with the next problem... do you tell, or not? If you don't, they'll demand you tell them, otherwise how can they know you really have a secret? It's a double-edged blade, isn't it? If you don't, you're lying, and you've painted yourself into a corner. If you do tell, then you've just helped make it less of a secret. People usually opt for the later choice because they feel compelled to save face and prove themselves to their peers. This tendency of human nature is precisely why I believe the best way to keep a secret is to simply not have any. The problem is, that simple truth just isn't realistic in this day and age. As I mentioned above, we all have secrets, for whatever reason.

I have a secret.

This one goes out to the one I love