I used to wake up and be excited to go to work. I know, insane right? But it’s true. I used to get up and go to work and I’d solve problems and help people all day. I’d come home tired but happy. The work was always varied and, more importantly, I had the tools and access needed to actually fix things. And, if I couldn’t fix something, there was a team of professionals who had a deeper understanding of the systems who could solve it. At most, it would be a few days. We knew each other and respected each other. Our lives intermingled and we knew each other.

A few years later the group split to better dedicate to specific, complex, and separate projects. I had worked both sides and was working on the complex side because I prefer complexity. Still interesting to go to work but I had little interaction with the professionals with the deeper access. Rifts and rivalries began to form.

A few years go by and it’s decided that what’s needed is a middle team who will work with both teams and bridge the gap. Still ok as I personally knew the people there. They had come from my team. But others did not have the same experience and the gaps were beginning to show. It grew to us vs them. And that’s never a good thing, when all are supposed to be serving the same ends.

A few years later and all of those small personal teams are merged under a shiny new department. And that department is headed by? An outsider who knows no one and regards people as numbers and cogs and has no idea how the company and its services function. You’d think he’d learn and adapt his style to suit the existing environment. Meld two into a more cohesive whole. No. Instead he begins to implement policy that imposes his structure on the existing one. And each step he carries it forward is another step that twists the original teams away from capably serving the companies customers. Treating those customers like a given input rather than a fickle variable.

A few short years later and my boss. A hardworking, caring, professional, and personable man is forced out of his position and moved to a window office. Watching the world go by with no power in preparation of forcing him to retirement. I’d seen exactly this before. This is what the company does to competent troublemakers who have the foresight to tell people that their idea isn’t going to work.

And who should appear but the micromanaging numbers guy. The guy who knows what asses to kiss. The guy who’s all smiles while he’s stabbing you in the back.

And he proceeds to do the same twisting of the section I work for that he did with the other one. And by this time, we have multiple systems that are breaking due to neglect and a new system that was created by people who don’t understand what they were creating or who would be using it or, really, how one complex piece needs to interact with these 10 other complex pieces.

So it’s a shit show. And not the fun kind(if you like that kind of thing). I still like my job. When I’m allowed to do it. But now there’s layers and layers of bullshit to wade through and even then, a simple fix to one table variable can take a week because there is this ignorant bureaucracy between what is needed and what is happening and the ones doing the fixing have never actually used the system. It’s like trying to fix a car when you only work on boats. There is some crossover but not much.

So I wake up and I think, I don’t want to go to work. But, I’m high level by now in a specialized field. I’d have to completely start over. And I’m not sure I want to do that. Or even how to.