I’m not having a good time

Of or pertaining to work…

I had an employee give notice this week.  Luckily, and with significant effort, I was able to salvage it.  Score one for the home team.

HR decided not to review all of the résumés for my open position, so I've been inundated with almost 200 — all at once.  Guess who has to weed through them now just to determine if they meet the minimum qualifications, let alone if they're a candidate I want to pursue?  Oh, that would be me.

We acquired a new processing center in California.  We also acquired many employees who already worked at that site.  We (my group) just found out about this yesterday.  And they went live four days ago.

The company is in the process of realigning job descriptions and positions.  I'm concurrently attempting to hire a new employee.  While my existing employees haven't been transitioned to the new categorization, the new position is already classified accordingly.  It's visible.  To the world.  And my existing employees.  You do the math.

I took a week off more than a month ago, yet I've been unable to catch up on all of the stuff in my e-mail inbox.  Add to that the >140 résumés for my open position which just came to me today.  Oh, and recruiting didn't review them at all because our recruiter is on vacation next week, is indisposed today and tomorrow, and has had them for more than a week.  Just no time, they say.  So what does that mean for me?

I have a very problematic employee who should have been fired two years ago.  Instead, due to issues beyond anyone's ability to foresee, I was given the pleasure of dealing with the situation — a situation which has continued to spiral out of control each and every day that has passed since our reorganization in early January of this year.  And this problem child creates hell in its wake, regardless of what it touches.

Someone somewhere wants to perform a major e-mail migration of one of our subdivisions, but they want to do it between now and the end of the year.  By the way, my staff is so overwhelmed that this migration project lands entirely in my lap.

Our local telephony expert has given notice and is outta here in two weeks.  After Blindf8th left in June, my team has struggled to maintain some level of service in light of the overwhelming workload being thrown at us.  He was the fifth IT person to leave by that time.  That count, of the people to leave IT since January 1, 2005, is now up to 12.  There are only ~40 people in IT.  Do you think anyone has noticed that there's a problem?  Of course not.

Our corporate office needs far more babysitting than anything I've ever seen before, so we're transferring a significant portion of our workload directly to that office in order to accommodate all of the political assholes who can't see beyond their own anus to understand the company is much larger than their personal endeavors.

Procurement says we're not completing certain activities on time, so I'm responsible for fixing their process.  Oh, and it means more work for my team just to save someone else's lame ass.

Another division just moved out of our local office, but they left a mess.  And facilities management decided to sublease the space they occupied.  That's space we use for equipment storage.  The division that moved out left a significant mess.  Someone has to clean up their mistakes while also managing the inventory of spare equipment that now cannot be stored.  The company will lose money by having to excess the equipment.  Oh, and inventory management has no list of the equipment that has to be disposed of, so guess who is now responsible for ensuring we account for this crap?  That would be me.

Shall I go on?  The list is now more than 193 items long.  Sound like your job?

Editor’s note: Yes, I'm in that kind of mood.

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