It’s the end of the week and time to write something. After two weeks of being forced to take holidays, I have finally returned to work. And everything seemed under control. My current manager gave me a performance review written by my old manager. My old manager never liked me, so I had to stop myself from laughing when I received it. Considering the attitude and work that I have done in the new job, my manager pretty much negated it. Let me explain.

Things were hunky dory about my job when my old manager had come along. I would perform a survey every week to reflect on how well several appeared in the eyes of our customers. If people hate filling out surveys as much as me, then it was really shown in the results. People didn’t know what we did, or they would use it as some kind of platform to complain. All I really had to do from the beginning was to send out the survey and collect the result. At first it was each month and then it became each week. It was a chore. And not a great one among the many other things I had to do at the time. So one day, my manager says: “I want to automate this.” I said, “Great. (because I couldn’t say “Fucking A”) When it’s automated I won’t worry about it.” The idea was to attach a generic survey form to the closure emails that were sent to users when their computer problem cases were closed.

Except there was a catch. This was that our version of Outlook, didn’t match the version of Outlook of our customers. So the Outlook developed forms didn’t work for our customers. Damn. One might think of handing it off to our software developers. Because it’s their job to think of a solution. No. Instead my manager wanted me to receive every closure email, find the user to which it belonged and then manually attached a survey form.

I’ll wait a second while you read that again, because when the manager (the old one) told me this in a email (his preferred method of communication), I had to read it three times. Then I had to make sure I wasn’t batshit insane and get a work buddy to read it too.

Then I wrote a reply. I wrote a professional reply, checked by another work buddy, before I sent it off. And that’s when the shit hit the fan. The manager wanted me to do this. What he didn’t know is that we raised about 250 cases on average per day. This means I’m manually composing and attaching surveys about 250 times a day. My argument was that it was not automation and a step in the opposite direction. Some people I talked to about this said that why should I complain, I get paid to answer emails all day. My point was that I had skills, specific technical skills that would be going to waste answering emails. I had a degree for god sake. More importantly, I developed two years worth of skills and I wanted to do more advanced things. I was not one of those people satisfied by shutting off my brain, taking some dead-end position and performing some mind-numbing task until I’m about as institutionalised as a life-termer.

And that’s about the point where I lost faith in the old boss’ skills in management and relationship building. I would not depend or agree with someone that would happily make a skilled and valued (at least I thought I was) person performing a task that could be performed by, well, an automated process.

This will be the last time I will mention this. The people I have told this are probably sick of it now. Anyway, the old boss still doesn’t like me because I wouldn’t follow his batshit insanity. Plus he is douche. He one time poked fun that owned a MacBook and then turned around wanting help with his iPhone – if I had any apps to save his precious mp3s off them…

Anyway moving, overall this week has been oddly good. While I really didn’t need the time off, I’ve managed to relax and learn that everything was handled at work while I was away. My pile of books is becoming more like a skyscraper of books. Hopefully it’s doesn’t become the Burj Kalifa of books. I have a feeling that would kill me.

I was recently sent some photo’s from Dr Jerm, Elmo and (Edit: Damn I’ve forgotten the third person)’s road trip. They stopped in a place called Mudgee.

For those who are wondering where all the fiction went – Yes, I’m still writing fiction. Yes Magpie has been edited and I’m slowly processing and correcting the many mistakes I made. Yes, there will be new fiction uploaded soon, but it will be more in the form of excerpts and such.

Either way I have to get back to work. Enjoy the photos.