Sunday, February 15, 2004
been awhile
Haven't been here for a spell. Seems lots of things have been happening that have kept me away from here. First, the job has turned into work. I can remember a time, not really that long ago, when my job was really cool. I actually enjoyed going to work and doing my job – and I was good at it. Basically, I’m a tech writer for a telecom company. My main job was writing online documents for the users of our product. The docs are written using a proprietary (which means if I tell you what, I have to kill you – or take your stock options away) form of XML. The engineers change the rules and the subject of my docs on random and usually unannounced occasions which leads me (usually late on a Friday night) to have to figure out what they’ve done and how to change what I’ve done in the past to work with what they’ve given me in the future. However, as much as I gripe about it here, it’s been a blast and really enjoyable to have to figure out how things work and how to make the format do what I want it to do and not what the engineers have wanted it to do.
Over the last year or so, however, things have changed. I now spend most of my time writing internal documents about procedures I’m not familiar with and can’t do anything to determine how they work. Besides that I’m supposed to describe how to use software I can’t get on operating systems they won’t let me have to do things I can’t try to do. And of course when I do do it, it needs to be reviewed and disapproved and then held in a supervisory limbo of indecision. On top of that, the whole company has changed – for the worse I think, but what do I know. It’s gone through a bankruptcy (haven’t all telcoms done that?) and reorganization (seems like it happens quarterly) and in my case I’ve gone through three radically different supervisors in the last few months. And comments on them, I’ll keep to myself for now. The end result of all this is that it’s work now. I’m being boxed into this tight little corporate box with oodles of arbitrary rules and regulations and it’s really obviously no fun anymore.
But why should I bitch I guess. At least I have a job and get paid fairly well. That’s more than a lot of folks can claim. Basically, I just got to suck it up and do my nine daily hours (one for lunch) of Dilbertian cubicle hell and keep my sanity until another weekend appears on the horizon. Monday through Friday, I’ll pop my depression and high blood pressure pills, suck down generic alka-seltzers and herbal tea, toss and turn in bed and hope I keep my sanity until Saturday morning.
2fers: Dilbert and Alka-Seltzer
