It's not like I didn't know this was coming. I mean, I've been to this rodeo too many times over the course of my career to not see it.
Several weeks ago, our division director retired. We were all happy for him, even knowing at the same time what a great loss it would be to our operation. While we're waiting for a replacement to be hired, , we're reporting to his supervisor—a woman who neither wants or understands the role. "What exactly do you do here?" was one of the questions she asked him about a week before his departure. At the time we all thought it was because she was deciding whether or not a replacement would be necessary, but the last week has proven she had no clue whatsoever what his role in the department actually entailed.
And we (or at least I ) did not fully grasp how much interference the man ran between our group and those above.
Two weeks ago my supervisor asked us all to start keeping a journal of everything we're doing during the day. I emailed him and said, "So now we're justifying our jobs?"
He said no, it was nothing like that. He just wanted to keep his supervisor (who was now reporting to Miss I-Don't-Want-This-Responsibility) in the loop. While I like and respect him and have one of the best relationships with a superior I've had in my career, I knew he was lying through his teeth because—as I wrote earlier—this ain't my first trip to the rodeo.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that for the past month or so, I've had surprisingly little to do. The number of tickets coming in has dropped significantly as people have finally settled into this new paradigm of working from home, and most of the problems that do not involve VPN access or the usual run-of-the mill desktop support stuff are related to back-end databases and home-brew application support, neither of which I've had to deal with as long as I've been on board with the organization. Those have been handled by either my supervisor directly, or my senior colleague who has been doing that stuff for an eternity. The remaining usual desktop tickets are—because they start an hour earlier than I do—often snatched up by my remaining colleagues even before clock in. (Or as I am constantly bitching to my boss, snatched up and resolved, without actually accepting, making notes, or closing the ticket out in our help desk software, leading me to think they're still open and me wasting my time chasing issues that were already resolved.)
Last Friday out of the blue in our weekly Skype, my boss told me that wants me to start taking care of all my senior colleague's open tickets because he was assigning him to a "special project." (At least those tickets that do not involve direct hands-on hardware intervention because he still doesn't want me physically back in the office for obvious reasons.) "Work with B (my other colleague) if you have any questions about something you don't understand, and of course I'm available to help you build your knowledge as well."
Now I don't know for sure if this is what actually went down, but based on her notoriety for micromanaging, I would dare say that Miss I-Don't-Want-This-Responsibility noted how little I was actually working on and wanted my boss to justify my continued existence in the department.
My supervisor fought hard to bring me on full time from temp to begin with, and I know he believes in me and my skills, so after speaking with a friend and sounding her out on this she said, "It's because he wants to keep you around, so don't think of it as punishment."
I appreciate that, but it doesn't mean I'm looking forward to this "knowledge building" exercise, but neither I nor my budget are ready to take early retirement, especially after committing myself to a car payment last March…