Workplace Rant: The Epidemic of Management per URLs

It turns out (referring back to the previous blog post) that I most definitely did not get my manager into trouble, which is good. That said, I had asked for feedback from the head of HR and I got it.

While it was said in a friendly and empathetic manner, I'm experiencing the usual post-feedback crushed feeling.

One piece of feedback is that I write overly long messages, to overly large audiences, and don't just run ideas by individual people whom I trust first ... And some of these messages are totally irrelevant or unimportant.

Anyway, c'est la vie. I also received lots of other advice (a good one was to make sure that my team is an early adopter of new technologies, since apparently we put a colleague through hell when we set up our new laptops at the last moment). And I gained an insight into some of the challenges of HR, which are steep.

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I was fairly zen for most of the week until certain developments during the course of today, which were genuinely piffling but rekindled my irritation.

For example: It drives me absolutely bonkers that sending links to articles and videos is now the band-aid for every wound in the company.

I don't dislike all of the links and, because the wellbeing of my team is more important than my irritation and I am on the lookout for ways to serve it better, I always save the links for when 1. I am not too busy (a.k.a. overtime) and 2. the bile in my throat and/or feeling of disappointment at getting another gosh-darned link has subsided. I've shared a few myself. But:

Firstly, I still have the very unsettling feeling that a few other people and I are in the situation of Marge Simpson, going through an obstacle course when she was in a fictional police training academy in The Simpsons: she struggled to climb over a tall brick wall, while all of her fellow trainees were walking through a door in the middle of it. The more you try to really fulfill your professional duty instead of finding shortcuts, the worse you suffer.

Secondly, these links are really not that helpful. Rather than giving actual practical help ... here's an article! Rather than carefully listen, observe, experiment, and learn from the context of our company and especially test it on yourself before recommending to others ... here's an article! Rather than have relevant personal experience ... here's an article!

Also: struggling to have enough time to do your work, help your team, and acquire additional skills? Here's an article ... that will take up 5 to (especially if it's several nested articles in one) 50 more minutes of your time! ....... It really makes one despair.

A Cautionary Tale About Not Taking Holidays When One Should

The last week was a little horrifying but not without compensations.

I had a 4.5 hour meeting at the office about the results of a survey alongside a group of 10 others in a similar position, preceded and followed by 45 minutes of cycling to the office, plus a self-administered corona test, plus a bit of work in the morning, and a lunch and a dinner. It was not as stressful as I had feared on the day itself. And it touched me greatly that my mother and brothers had made sure I had marshmallows and chocolate to cheer me up when I was finally home again.

The day after that was likewise sort of horrible, however. I had 8 meetings and a long list of things to get through, and it felt like I barely had time to breathe. And in the end I just kind of sent a message of despair to the head of HR, saying that I really wanted to have regular meetings with a fellow team lead as well because I just no longer wanted to rely on the current manager I have. One thing I absolutely detest is 'telling' on someone, but it sounded rather like she took his point of view. And I am slated to have a new manager in January anyway, due to top management decisions in which I wasn't involved. So probably no harm done and I can do my best to make sure that is still true. The head of HR and I will have a meeting this week. On Friday I had a regular meeting with my manager and just mentioned that I was talking with HR because I did not want to be sneaky about it, and we finally had a reasonably blunt and forthright meeting about fairly small things.

One of the worst things about being a middle manager is being in this work-team-and-top-management sandwich. I can try to take good care of my team, and I can try to take good care of my work. But one thing I have never mastered and likely will never master, is taking care of the people whom I report to, at the same time. One thing I fear is 'sucking up.' There is also the very real risk of the top manager making impulsive changes, based on our conversations, which would adversely affect a lot of people. The best form of this relationship so far has been conversations where we trade observation, news, and advice, in a way that I try to make sure represents the company quite broadly; and the advice feels like a neutral, take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing.

On Thursday my appetite finally came back after a two-week absence, because of all the food for St. Martin's (which we celebrated with a much smaller circle of family only, and not even all family, this year). And I no longer look as gaunt as I did. Over the weekend I also caught up on my sleep, twelve hours or so per day.

On Saturday I went for a long bicycle ride on a sunny and slightly chilly day, first to visit the bookshop where my aunt works, then to visit a market hall in Kreuzberg. Unfortunately the bank machines hadn't been in order earlier that day, so I couldn't make a transfer or (apparently) pick up cash, and ended up scrambling for the coins to pay for the persimmons that are now in stock. An orange pumpkin had to go back in the crate with the others due to lack of cash. Then I bought two Christmas presents and a bag of ironwort herbs with my debit card. It's the second weekend of my 'appreciating modern times' project, which will continue until I am out of the 1930s and early 1940s in my historical project.

Although I played the piano over the weekend, I still haven't warmed to the last movement of Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata and apparently have projected some of the frustration and anger from work onto it. But gradually I am beginning to be able to read and listen to online books for leisure again: in a weird form of aversion therapy, I actually began to be stressed just looking at them because of all the times in the past weeks I've tried to turn to books to relax me and they didn't help.

On December 24th and 27th the whole company will have two days off. Aside from all the people in my life who have not inadvertently caused me a lot of frustration lately, and the specks of friendly feeling I feel from and toward even the people who have, this is a big consolation.

To help when books are not enough to relax, I've launched on a new project, which is to try to write something set in the Middle Ages about dragons. So I've created two massive Pinterest boards full of pictures of landscapes, art, historical figures, manuscripts, architecture, animals and food from medieval Iceland and Norway, and will move on from there. That said, I want my dragons to be fire-breathing, which means that some historical inaccuracy is inbuilt into the project.

Ensuring That No One Eats a Dead Mouse

Yesterday was a tumultuous day.

I had many meetings, a new request came in every ten minutes. I changed my messaging status to show that I was busy, which as far as I knew had zero effect whatsoever. Some of the meetings were ambush meetings that I had not asked for, and one of them resulted in a massive new task being heaped on my plate. And one of the meetings was plunked straight into the first half of the hour which I had actually planned to spend cycling to eastern Berlin for a nice restaurant visit with colleagues.

Then it turned out that due to a Covid case, 3 colleagues needed to cancel and the office seemed to have been semi-evacuated. Which meant that I had no idea how to make it to all of my meetings (the conference rooms at the office being my best option for handling the last calls before the restaurant meal) and still materialize at the restaurant in the appointed time. But more importantly it was a little doubtful if it was safe or purposeful to proceed at all. So in the end we called it off.

By the time that was done, I was so tense and frustrated by the bombardment of tasks with massive consequences, and on the verge of tears, that I called in sick for the rest of the day. The team, as always, was lovely, expressed concern, and offered practical help.

I think the analogy for the current way my fellow team leader and I are being treated is this: It's like trying to use a new operating system to get a task done on your computer and figure out if it's working for you. But people are constantly harassing you with advice to use another operating system, or upgrade to this version, or research that tool ... They might mostly all be right. But the task never gets done and you now also have dozens of hours of additional research on your plate, and no real idea how effective your current operating system is. And the lack of respect for time and effort already invested is totally galling.

In one case, the dynamic even feels (and I'm being pretty satirical here, so take it with a grain of salt) like interacting with a two-year-old child who nudges me in the middle of doing something else and wants me to eat something. You have to pay attention, to see if the 'food' they're altruistically offering in their grimy little hand is a dead mouse, a dishwasher tablet, or legitimate food, before someone is poisoned. There are people who specialize in these types of situations. But I'm not a kindergarten teacher.

It turned out that my uncle came over to visit, so we hashed out some of my workplace concerns. Pursuant to his advice, I've tried considering the 'stakeholders' outside my team as clients, and treating them accordingly. Which I think is needed, because in the absence of personal trust I need to make sure that the professional trust is there.

Then I had a long call with another colleague, which calmed me down considerably too.

I stayed awake until after 3 a.m. watching a series of videos released by my parent company, not related to technical things but rather to industry ideals. Then I woke up at 8:30 a.m., I think. My stomach still felt tense and I was so physically exhausted that I was tottering around for a few minutes when getting out of bed, and wondered (melodramatically) if I should pull up my laptop to my bedside and work from there.

But I've temporarily made my peace with things. While I feel that anger is not a nice emotion to have, it is sometimes justified; and if I try to escape it I will wimp out of reacting proportionately. One thing that is not good, though, is actually losing sleep about it.

That said, the things that are happening lately are so absurd that I laughed at them even during the height of the storm yesterday. The colleague of the long video call emphasized that they were not funny ... but I laughed again.

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In artistic news, at any rate, I angry-played a few German Dances by Beethoven yesterday, but decided not to reach for a Rachmaninov prelude. So things aren't that dramatic.