Punching Out

As you know, I have a day job in addition to the writing. I don’t often write or talk about it there’s no need to give any employer stuff that can be misconstrued or misunderstood, no matter how much you strive for accuracy and clarity in your writing at least as far as your blog goes.

But the simple fact of the matter is that for the last couple of years I have been far from happy in my current job. This on top of having to take several months off to deal with stuff in regards to my autistic son and his needs as an adult. But that’s a story for another day.

The thing is, I actually really enjoy my job. I get to build things and in the building these things I get to figure stuff out and I get to work with other people that are also really good at what they do. Where things have always fallen down for me is in the internal politics that every company big or small suffers from. Smaller companies, you can sort of deal with that kind of thing face-to-face. Which while uncomfortable at least allows for quick resolution of problems. My current employer at least for the next 13 days or so is not a small company. In fact the administration and the owners are in another province and like any long-distance relationship it makes things a bit more difficult.

Of course it doesn’t help the customers in the fields I service want a lot more for a lot less than they’re prepared to pay. But then that’s any company anywhere in the world. It used to be that you could come to an agreement or an understanding at least with any client as to how far you were willing to go in regards the ridiculous demands.

Things have changed now, and to be honest my last three projects just about broke me.

So I had decided, come hell or high water that this last project really was going to be my last with my current employer. It didn’t help that on a particularly low day I was contacted by one of our competitive companies, who has been after me for a few years now. And yeah, I agreed to meet with them and see what they had to say.

Little did I know that other events within my current employer were also at play. There were a series of terminations and reshuffling in upper management in my division. These events when they occurred, directly effected my current project and not in a positive way. I was literally left swaying in the wind with no support, and yes, there was fallout.

After a week of really not knowing what the hell was going on, the Senior VP flew out to fill us in on our new reality and to promise us that things were about to get so much better. All this was reinforced by the surviving members of upper management that had been reshuffled into new positions. After this general meeting, I was called into a private meeting with the visiting VP and offered a promotion. It should be important to note that when you offer somebody a promotion you should probably mention an increase in pay (not that money would have changed things for me at this point) after all a promotion meets more responsibility at least that’s how I usually see it. Instead I was offered a trip out of province to see how things were done at head office.

I like Kool-Aid is much as the next guy but this offered cup wasn’t for me. So I basically said that more than likely at the end of my current project I would be leaving and seeing how I had effectively quit at least in my mind, I as is usually the way I deal with things decided, “Fuck it,” and proceeded to weigh out what I saw was a few key failings of upper management in regards to how our division functioned. I got the feeling when the VPs right eye started to twitch that perhaps most people he dealt with weren’t quite so honest and forthright in their dealing with him. I guess he also forgot about every other meeting we ever had where I was almost always a voice of discontent with some policy or whatever they were trying to ram through regardless of its impact or contravention of current labour laws in our province.

Personally, I figure he’s more than glad that I’ll be leaving. I’m sure I was impinging on his happiness with his job.

I obviously can’t say yet what I’ll be moving on to but I will say that it is exciting and it will use a lot more of my skill set than I’m currently using and that’s always a good thing.

 

As always you can find my thrillers, Devil’s Gambit, and Reliance on Amazon in both print and kindle formats.