Life Happens

Life happens whether you blog it or not.

Only yesterday the plowed snow was higher than my crabapple trees and I thought it was going to be July before it all melted, but here it is the middle of May, my garden is overgrown with weeds, and my yard is dotted with dandelions and unidentified white and purple wildflowers amidst the overly tall grass blades. Bees are happily busying themselves in my rhododendrons while my neighbors’ cats stalk my bird feeders.

So much seems to have changed and yet nothing seems to have changed, just life moving on and evolving.

My job has finally evolved into the kind of work I always thought work should be but secretly suspected was a myth. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been swamped with time-filling, mind-challenging projects. I feel creative and useful and inspired. It’s not at all the sensation of day-to-day mind-numbing busy-work I’ve felt I was doing for pretty much 15 years. Until this week, there wasn’t a single day that I went into work that I actually did what I planned to do that day. There were a couple of weeks where I would work for 15 minutes on one project until someone from another project called or emailed me and then I’d work on that project for 15 minutes until someone from another project called or emailed me and then I’d work on that project for 15 minutes until someone from another project called or emailed me and then…and so on. And the last two weeks I didn’t even read half of my email on any given day. In fact, for 3 days, I only worked on Production Issues — 1 was a million dollar billing issue and the rest revolved around a really bad system go-live (what happens when you barely test a patient care system because you want to stay on budget).

And I really feel like I’m actually accomplishing something. It’s been a very exciting change.

I could have done without the drama of dealing with GE for two months though. He had some sort of meltdown back in February and decided that I was going to be the focus of dysfunctional malfunction. The whole thing only served to prove to me that when dysfunctional people around me go full throttle, it sends me into overdrive myself. I absolutely cannot stand it when someone refuses to “behave” appropriately. GE refused for two months to read my work emails. As a result, since he is the sys admin for one of our interface engines and we are the Integration Team and I was elbow deep in a high priority (read: sponsored by the VP) project on the fast track that required changes to the server, I was having extra special trouble getting my work done. On top of that if someone emailed the four of us and I answered and then GE answered, he ignored my reply and then the original person would be confused if I had answered with a decision-type answer that conflicted with GE’s. Repeated requests to the Director of our division were fruitless as he is a conflict-avoider and we have no manager, something we have been begging to be rectified. If I asked GE anything in person, he would literally stare blankly at me with these pale blue eyes and then without answering turn away and go back to staring at his computer. The whole situation was only resolved when our Director suddenly took a project GE was working on away from him and gave it to me; suddenly GE was as pleasant as punch.

What GE couldn’t grasp was that the project that was taken away is sponsored by the CIO and is a state-wide initiative. It was taken away because he had actually written a rather tactless (not uncommon for him) email to the CIO about why in his opinion the project should not be done using the method he had been instructed to use and in fact he didn’t think it was a good idea to do the project at all. (It would be a good idea to note that by the time this email had been written, the project had been on the news and in the newpaper — state-wide.) There was apparently a meeting with the bigwigs and our Director met with GE and told him to do the project such-n-such way. GE refused and phoned the CIO to explain why this was such a bad idea.

So, now I am working on this really interesting state-wide initiative that really isn’t such a good idea, in my opinion, but I wouldn’t say so. The only reason I think it’s kind of a poor idea is that I think the whole state-wide plan is really too much at one time; they really should try to take things a little more piecemeal rather than trying to attack the whole thing at once. And the whole reason I say that is because we’ve tried to do this same project in-house two or three times and have never pulled it off 100% successfully. But I’m not going to tell the CIO that or anything. That’s not my job. My job is to do what the big guys want me to do. That’s what I get paid for — take the data from here, beat it up, shove it over there. That’s it.

I just can’t understand how someone gets away with telling the CIO he won’t do his job and with refusing to read his team member’s email for 2 months and causing communication problems and he still has a job…and this has been going on for 6 years. Dysfunction.