
		Current entry Archive October 2001

Behind These Eyes - October 2001

Entries:

Monday, 15 October

At times like this, when there's still so godawful far to go and it's been an especially bad day, you might wonder what keeps me going. Why don't I just pack it in, march down to HR, tell them to find some other sucker to finish this thankless task?

Maybe it's the satisfaction of a job well botched that keeps me going. It's a hideously complicated process when it's done thoroughly and right--runs to four pages of steps per mailbox, and that's without considering the extra effort required to schedule it at your utmost convenience--so of course with our artificially compressed timetable, corners must be cut, the process must be streamlined a bit. And it's just not practical to do a few at a time; we have to mass-produce them, and that inevitably means mistakes. I do get such a warm feeling from knowing just how badly I can blunder, omit, and overlook.

Well, maybe that's not it. What could it be?

Maybe the way you all treat me as the personification of the migration and of GroupWise, and take out all your frustrations on me. Or maybe the endearingly simple-minded way you all seem to have faith that if you (each) just explain, very earnestly, that you don't see the point in all this, that I, with my limitless power, will call off the migration.

On the other hand, it could be that I just enjoy working 24-7. I like working weekends, and evenings right up till I go to bed. It's so nice to be needed. Monday mornings especially. I didn't really want to have a life anyway. I came to England just to do this, you know!

No, it seems more likely that it's knowing I'm the focus of so much general hatred. You all hate me for doing this to you. IT in the US hates me for (ironically enough) standing up for you. They didn't want to spoon-feed you, you bunch of whining babies; 98% of your email is junk anyway and you know it. If we did it their way, you'd get an empty mailbox except for whatever happened to be in your Inbox. Contacts? Personal Address Books? Don't make me laugh. Just get a clean start and like it, pal. But no; we said that wouldn't fly, that people here really would prefer to keep their email, thanks all the same, so now they hate me for making things take so much longer. I therefore especially enjoy it when you complain about how your migrated mail doesn't behave perfectly, or that it's in an archive instead of your live mailbox. It really makes me happy I went to the trouble of saving it from the axe for you.

But then there are the little things. Your breathtaking ingratitude when we give up our weekends to migrate you, rather than disrupt you by doing it during your working day. The artfully not-quite-out-of-earshot, tediously unoriginal snide remarks. The delightfully childlike way you take personally every little difference from Outlook, and can't seem to grasp that after all it's just an email program. The way you complain about problems to all your friends and neighbours, but don't want to trouble us with them. (Heaven forfend, we might actually fix them!)

I have to admit, though, that there's a special satisfaction in knowing that all this misery didn't really have to happen, that it's all purely so that some statistics look nice, so that my boss's boss can show weekly progress targets being met at some meeting full of faceless people, all leading up to an artificial, randomly-set deadline that doesn't mean anything. Throwing my life into so much turmoil for no particular reason is highly motivating.

So many possibilities, and yet none of them seems like reason enough to keep plugging away.

Wait a minute.

I know what it is.

I'm just too damn stubborn, that's what. I can't bear the personal failure it would be to give up partway through. So I'll grit my teeth and press on.

End rant.

Created at 01:58