White Collar Blues

I work pretty hard at what I do. I’m generally recognized as the subject-matter expert in my field- sometimes to the point where people from other organizations call me up for help or advice. I’m the senior person in my section, which does not mean I am any sort of a supervisor. It just means I’m the person who’s been at the job the longest. My supervisor- who actually looked like Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss with a beard and glasses- was known for frequently throwing temper tantrums whenever my co-workers mentioned that they had discussed some matter with me.

That supervisor has now departed for another job in another city. Not only do we now get to blame stuff on him, but now there’s a leadership gap in the organization. Perhaps I should say the table of organization shows a gapped leadership position. We never managed to get a lot of leadership from our titular supervisor. Actually, there are two empty leadership slots. Our supervisor and the Department Head. A time-serving empty suit that management has been trying to get rid of was dropped into the Department Head spot as a “temporary measure” sixteen months ago. This “temporary appointment” was only supposed to last 3 months, but HR just keeps renewing the appointment rather than advertising the position and hiring someone qualified.

Human Resources actually published my immediate supervisor’s job, and got 45 qualified applicants. But then the empty suit pulled some sort of bureaucratic chicanery and plopped one of his buddies into the job. This buddy can’t be called an empty suit, because he doesn’t wear suits. Other than that, the description is quite apt. He’s been running the Facilities office for fifteen years, where his sole contribution was to avoid spending any money on anything unless the Executive Director vaguely hinted that he might want something. At that point, no expense was spared. Calling him sycophantic is an insult to worthless toadies. He is also totally clueless about the work he’s supposed to supervise, which means I end up doing most of the work.

So now I am doing the work of the Branch supervisor and the Department Head- as well as trying to get my own job done. I should also mention that we’ve been working with about 50% of the manpower we’re supposed to have to begin with. Under normal conditions, I could expect to spend no more than half of any given work day at my desk. Under our current manning, I’m lucky if I get to leave my desk to get some lunch. Deadline get dangerously close before any of us worker bees are able to drag ourselves free of the swamp of suck that surrounds us and get our deliverables out at basically the last minute. That’s assuming our empty suit “leaders” don’t decide to run every document past everyone within sight or hearing and get their buy-in. In triplicate.

Note that I am not getting paid for any of this extra work. Neither are my coworkers. As soon as the Facilities guy was declared to be our new supervisor, every last one of us updated our resumes and started looking for better working conditions. Oarsmen on a Roman galley might be a pleasant change.

 

Current status- Exhausted

Current music- Bandidos by the Refreshments