Don’t Feed The Crazy People

I’ve been meaning to stop by for weeks now and let everyone know that I’m alive and well.

(Ironically when I tried to stop by to leave a note, the server was down… grrrr)

Lots of changes going on around here, lots of stuff to deal with.

I’ve had my surgery now. It went very well. The surgeon said that my gallbladder was very inflamed and, of course, full of stones when they removed it (through my belly button — how?) and that I was lucky they removed it when they did. Well, duh! No one listens to me.

My recovery also went very well, except for my mother’s apparent obsession with my personal plumbing. It did take me about 3 or 4 days to get everything going again and I admit that was quite painful and uncomfortable in the meantime.

My mother, being the taskmaster that she is, the nurse who never let me stay home sick as a child, had me hanging curtains in the guest room 3 days after surgery. So, I didn’t really start resting until after she went home a week after surgery.

I have to say that the two weeks of recovery that I spent at home away from the stress of dealing with all the crazy people at work was the best medicine ever. I really needed that break. I came back so incredibly relaxed and with an entirely different outlook.

The environment at work is incredibly different now. During the month(s) leading up to my surgery, things had gotten completely out of control, Lord of the Flies out-of-control.

I have mentioned on this blog how frustrated I was about my problems with FW and in particular MJ and how unprofessional their behavior was to me. The closer it got to the deadline of our project — Daylight Saving Time (March 11th), the more certain I was that MJ was actually working against me, keeping me from getting my work done. Looking back now, a month later, I don’t know that she consciously did it, but I do know that I still feel that she didn’t support me and didn’t help me and certainly didn’t give me the respect of a peer. I know that she didn’t treat me the way I would have treated her if things had been reversed and I have come to realize that more than anything this so-called team, works more against itself than together.

In fact, I specifically asked GE on one occasion to help me with testing after he told me he literally had nothing to do because his projects were on hold and he was just sitting at his desk reading articles. He actually told me “Hell, no.”

My project didn’t make the deadline because of lack of support within my own department. It still is sitting waiting to go live, waiting approval from another division within the department. Every other person who needed to sign off on it has — all outside of this department — but our own department couldn’t make it a priority to meet our own deadline and my director who I report to won’t push the subject with the manager of the person — the manager reports to him. Yet, this project was my director’s priority. Suposedly.

I was so completely stressed out that I literally wanted to quit on March 10th. I just felt like a failure because I hadn’t made my deadline and no matter what I did I couldn’t get my project to budge forward for weeks. Then it suddenly occurred to me — I had done the best job I could do; I can’t control anyone but myself. All of those other people are outside of my authority, out of my control. All I can do is know that they are crazy.

That made me feel a little better, but still I needed a break and the two weeks I was recovering from surgery and didn’t have any contact with anyone helped.

GE has become come some sort of self-appointed hall monitor of the interface engines, making up rules for how he wants things configured and set up and childishly harassing the rest of us through nasty emails until we do things his way. He has also said some pretty nasty things in email about people on our team, not on our team, and even our boss and cc’d pretty much everyone and then he was sent to training and told no one about it until he got there. There was quite a bit of resentment on the part of the rest of the Interface Team because everyone has been asking to go to training for over a year and no one could get a straight answer out of our boss, who is the department director. (Note, our “team” does not have a manager to report to.)

Somewhere in there, there was a procedural disagreement between GE and FW that turned into a very childish argument that turned into a tattletale email where GE recounted the whole conversation with a so-there attitude and demanded that the director make this tiny procedural decision. Mind you, that one of FW’s biggest complaints is that the director hasn’t made an actual decision concerning us in a year and FW commented that the director would never make a decision about coding procedure. Well, he did and he made it in GE’s favor. Fifteen minutes after that email went out, FW quit.

His last day is May 18th. Now we’re trying to sort out FW’s projects, which GE sent an email saying he absolutely would not take on (right before he went to training without telling any of the rest of the “team”, which is why everyone is pissed off that he’s being rewarded for bad behavior — he gets to go to training so he can not work some more?), and how we’re going to divide up his duty officer call. There’s talk about how we might try to hire someone from with-in and train him.

There has even been a demand by MJ to our director that we be given a manager. She can get away with saying a lot to him because he’s married to her sister. Apparently he told her that he got tired of dealing with the Interface Team’s “personalities” so he’s been avoiding them and she told him that when you ignore dysfunctional personalities, they get worse in a cry for help. MJ and FW both tried talking to the director and tried to say that they were willing to make an effort to discuss the dysfunction in the group and talk about getting the group a manager and FW is willing to stay if an effort toward change is going to be made, but the director appears to be doing what he does best, which is ignoring the real issue.

Mind you, they aren’t the only ones who’ve been to talk to him. In the weeks before my surgery, I went to the director and I told him that the working situation was making me ill. I talked to him about the need for some sort of management involvement with the Interface Team, but he was at that time, unwilling to get involved himself.

So, FW is leaving. GE is getting my new project load. MJ is getting one of FW’s projects and I am getting FW’s biggest projects. My Daylight Savings Project remains unfinished — I sent another email yesterday reminding everyone involved that I’d like to complete it this week and it’s waiting on them. My current attitude is watch the crazy people but don’t get involved.

tags: gallbladder surgery, work

4 comments

1. on April 10, 2007 at 8:17 pm

   Cameron said:

   Glad to see you’re still kicking. Hope things are going better for you now.

2. on April 14, 2007 at 10:21 pm

   Carlyle said:

   I happened upon your blog, and I had to laughed. I am a displaced liberal Northerner living in the South about to have gallbladder surgery. I am looking forward so much to the peace away from my insane and unsatisfying officemates. My theme has been–”One Body minus One Gallbladder equals One Week Off of work. YAY!”. Thanks for posting this bit…and post a recovery blog (which is what I was really looking for). This was better.

3. on April 17, 2007 at 7:27 pm

   Omni said:

   I’m so glad that your surgery went well!! xo

4. on April 27, 2007 at 11:14 pm

   Laughing Muse said:

   I haven’t been back for a while. But I am so glad to see that you’re back in action, but more to the point, that you’re feeling good!! I’m so glad your surgery went well!!!

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