I spent the better portion of yesterday with my friend Cindy. We met ten years ago when I was working at the hospital.
You know how once in a blue moon someone enters your life and from the very beginning you know they're going to be someone special to you? That's Cindy. We bonded almost immediately.
As I mentioned a couple days ago, when she learned I'd been laid off, she offered to hire me to set up her daughter's tech and help her retrieve photos from a bunch of old hard drives.
So mid-morning I drove out to her house thinking we'd just dive into it. But she had other plans. "Let's just sit and talk for a bit." She wanted to know exactly what happened so I described (to the best of my knowledge) what had gone down and she said, "Well there you go. You stuck your toe out of your box and they cut it off." She then went on to say that her own experience in healthcare—and she assumed it was the same, if not worse—in government work, taught her that most of the people who work in those fields are perfectly happy to work inside their own little boxes, never deviating from the proscribed script. Considering that "think outside the box" has become such a corporate cliche, the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance when confronted with what actually happens is absolutely deafening. Do NOT think outside the box. Stay in your lane and don't deviate. And WHATEVER you do, don't make anyone else look bad—ESPECIALLY if they're higher up the food chain and you know more than they do.
That certainly describes my experience since moving from Config and Deploy to PC LAN support eighteen months ago. Instead of "continuous improvement," the motto at that place should be "If it's broke, don't fix it."
Interestingly, we both feel like this is ultimately going to be a good thing. I was ready to quit more times than I can tell you over the past six months, but never did anything about it because I hate interviewing. But frankly the reaction to being shot down a second time for finding a solution to an ongoing problem was my breaking point and swore that was the last time I was ever going to share anything with the team. Fuck 'em.
"You've only got a few more years in the workforce," she said, "You shouldn't be miserable every day for those remaining years."
We both admitted a hard-to-describe feeling that something good is coming from all this. After the initial shock, disbelief, and panic wore off, unlike other times when I've been laid off, I'm actually feeling pretty positive about the ultimate outcome.
Or maybe I'm just whistling past the graveyard, but I refuse to go there.
I remember many years ago telling another friend (who has a much more reactive, rather than proactive personality) that if you know changes need to be made in your life and you don't do anything about it, the Universe will step in and make those changes for you.
Whoopsie.
"You teach best what you need most to learn." ~ Richard Bach, The Messiah's Handbook