A Working Vent

The last month has been by far the busiest in the over three years that I have worked at my current job. I don’t want to sound as if I am complaining, I like being busy but at this point I am running on fumes. Each day I go into the office with a box full of voice mails and a “to-do” list that I know I will be lucky to get half way through. I have resorted to working most nights when I go home and on weekends. This is not a good thing as I am turning into the stressed out zombie I was during my last days at the bank.

Again, I am not complaining so much as venting. A nice part of being busy is that my day literally flies by. I will look up and be amazed at what time it is at some point. However, I also have this feeling of drowning. It seems no matter how much I do, I can’t seem to catch up. I don’t want to bore everyone with the mundane day to day details of my boring job. But, for some perspective, I will give a little update.

We are now short three people. One person we lost due to downsizing, another quit and another moved onto another department. We have a hiring freeze so, we can do nothing to replace the resources we lost. That leaves me and one co-worker to support a region that five people used to support. Even with a lot of layoffs in our company it is still a huge burden. On top of that we are going through two huge projects. We are merging offices and updating all our government offices with new equipment while updating the backend of some rather old networking configurations.

Trying to balance my day to day work with the projects is a Herculean task at this point. I am keeping my head above water but barely. I start traveling again real soon to exciting cities like Rock Island, Illinois, Ft. McCoy, Wisconsin and Crane, Indiana. The problem is that when I am on the road my day to day tasks get put on the back burner and when I get back to my home office in Downers Grove the work is piled up to my neck. It doesn’t help that the clients in Downers need a whole lot of hand holding. I don’t mind that, (I mean that is part of my job) but I just simply don’t have the time to spend with each client that I would like.

So, right now I am just trying to do my best. That is really all I can do. Thankfully, I have a tremendous boss who totally gets how over worked I am. He gets it because he is equally over worked. I know that by putting in the work now, it will get rewarded later when salaries and hiring gets unfrozen. (Hopefully, sometime before I turn 50.) I know this because my boss has always been honest with me and has treated me fairly in this job and my last spot. (I used to work for the same boss in my days at Harris bank.)

One of the reasons I left Chase was that I felt that I busted my ass and did some solid work and then was told how much I sucked if I messed up one thing. I don’t need to have my inner thigh stroked or anything like that. I just don’t want to hear about some nonsense when I am doing 99% of my job effectively. That should buy me some slack when something does happen to go bad. That and the bank basically sucked the life force out of me.

Also, I don’t want to hear “At least you still have a job.” You see that attitude is part of the problem. I know a lot of people out there who lost their jobs. I feel for them. I think it royally sucks. I get that and I do know I am fortunate that I am still employed in this environment. The problem is that in this market companies basically have got you by the balls. Because everyone is thinking “At least I still have a job” they can do whatever they want right now and know most people won’t complain no matter how fair or unfair they are being treated.

It seems like it is a vicious cycle. We want people to start spending money and spur the economy on and yet corporate America keeps laying off more and more people. How much money do you think people without jobs are going to spend on goods and services? Plus a lot of the people still working are worrying about their employment situations and when you are thinking like that you basically put off any purchases except the basics.

Anyway, I am personally just trying to ride this out. I know soon this project will be over and eventually we can hire someone to replace one of the three that have left. Until that time, Nick is going to be very busy. I don’t mind working hard, never have. I just don’t want to cheat my clients that I support by not being able to spend the appropriate time on each issue. I feel like I am band-aiding everything right now. It is frustrating from not only my end but the users end as well. Hopefully June is better than May was.