Don't Call it a Comeback.

What a six months!

So I think I'm back now. I'm not exactly sure that I'm back, but I think I'm back.

My professional life has been a nightmare since July because of a change in leadership in my department. I have purposely been avoiding posting on here because of my tendency to engage in long-winded (but well-argued) rants about people I don't like and I didn't want to have any fodder out there should things really go tits up. Well, I signed my "parole document" today transferring me to another unit through the end of my contract. I feel as giddy as New Jack at the end of the Heatwave 99 pay-per-view.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how incompetent people can land a job and then continue in that job for more than a few weeks. This is especially true in a radically difficult economy. For the past two years, my unit built up a small operating surplus of just under 100K, all of which carried over into the current fiscal year. This was while other units were laying off people, implementing across the board hiring freezes, and pulling printers out of people's offices to save paper and power. To show an operating surplus and still be effective, which upper management repeatedly told us were were, was amazing.

So things are good and then this yahoo comes in and the first thing they say is "We can't show an operating surplus! If we show that we have excess funds, they won't give us any new funds from central accounting!"

I went absolutely nuts, especially since I was pretty much responsible for running the tight budget and building this up in the first place. The new boss was not affiliated with the institution (and I'm being purposely vague here) before but was well aware that the budget cuts had been going on for the last few years. They were hellbent on doing acting like Andy Dick in a titty bar. Even though I argued against it until I was blue in the face, it happened. Two things came out of it:

1) I was tagged as "resistant to change." I became "the cloud that ruins the entire office and brings everyone down." I made it on to the "list" of the new boss, who turned out to be an extremely vindictive person and didn't really care if anyone under them kept their jobs or not.

2) They spent our entire operating surplus in roughly 6 weeks. We have an amazing new color copier that we don't need that will damn near press a suit and stir a martini. We have some really great remote control presentation mice. Some employees got some good travel perks. We had to really struggle for things to spend this money on, and some of it was completely absurd.

Then guess what happened?

Central Accounting didn't fulfill the new boss's supplemental budget! Well of course not! This is the same institution that cut janitorial services to three days a week and you think they are going to give you money a) after you blew a sizable chunk on shit we didn't need and b) they barely have any money for basic operations to begin with!?! I was absolutely livid when this came down. We were damn lucky that they didn't cut us an additional 100k because we weren't good stewards of company funds. If they had done that, I really couldn't have blamed them.

Of course we had pointed out that this would happen, but hey, the new boss knew more than we did because they were the new boss. They liked to tell us that on a regular basis.

So we all got off on the wrong foot. This was especially true when the first staff meeting under their tenure took 2 hours. We have five people in the meeting and it took 2 blasted hours. That in and of itself is a criminal offense, but it went on by.

Then, their ego started coming in. This person literally (with completely no hyperbole) had to be the center of the office. All of our existence at work had to run through them and they had to be involved in every decision no matter how small. Every morning started with this elaborate ritual of greeting where they came by our offices (or if we walked by their office early in the AM) and they would go through this exaggerated "GOOD MORNING! HOW ARE YOU?" in the fakest-ass voice you can imagine. There were at least two moments that I had a physically noticeable cringe reaction when I heard it. If you were having a bad day or you just didn't want to chat they MADE you chat with them. If you didn't, you might get tagged as being a "cloud in the office," which was apparently a sin right up there just above murdering the pope. The boss wanted you to know that they were there, they were ready to tell you exactly what to do and not listen to any feedback, and you had damn well better like it. If you didn't talk to them, you got put on the list.

I think I stayed in the number 1 spot on that list from roughly mid-August through November. It didn't help that they also cut/transferred two of my colleagues nearly immediately. I'm the third one out the door, and I'm tickled to death.

I'll have more stories about this later, but for now, I'm back.