Projected

While it is slightly nice to have a project at work that requires some thought, it would be even nicer if it were not the exact same project of which I said, when I heard about it being proposed a few months ago:

• “christ”
• “that’d take, oh, half a dozen people working full time for nine months”
• “it’s horrible hacked-up legacy code that nobody understands, as well, it’d be incredibly frustrating”
• “you’ll never catch me doing that, I’d go bananas”
• “if I’m asked to do it I’ll say no”

But then if you don’t actually ask someone and just assign them to it, they can’t say no, can they?

To be fair I am the obvious choice for this (it’s a data migration thing, I’m not going to go into the details) and, you know, it keeps me off the streets. I spend a lot of time complaining that I have nothing to do; is it reasonable to complain when there is something?

Well, sod reasonable, quite frankly. I don’t see why I should have to be reasonable about this. I don’t want to do it and I can think of many things I would rather do, I’m quite capable of doing, I’ve asked to do and I’m not doing. Basically, bugger them. Should I feel guilty about talking about predicted workload later on this year when I’m quite aware that I’ve got no intention of being there later on this year? Who cares? I don’t. Do I get accurate information about the company’s plans for me and my job in the future? No, of course not, we get fed an enormous quantity of lies and “we’re so great and you’re such saints for working here” bullshit. We get bloody adverts aimed at us during supposedly informational sessions, for christ’s sake – we’re not the bloody customers, we know this is just a business, not a worldwide crusade (in fact, most of the customers are completely aware of this too). It’s a wonder we don’t have a company song.

If anything infuriates me it’s this fake morale-boosting stuff. You don’t make people happier by pretending to give them information and showing them videos of cute kids, and the mortgage/salary trap doesn’t work on me – debt-free, child-free. Try offering a reasonable career path, the opportunity to learn things, develop, a few tasks that aren’t codemonkey work and provide more intellectual stimulation than the quick crossword.

This all sounds very stupid because of course there’s no real interest in doing that in the first place. I know this. However – and I freely admit it – I was briefly sucked into the corporate hardman idea, the Company-Of-One, go-getting, work-hard-play-hard ideal that’s a setup for later dysfunctional debt-slavery. I started to believe the idea that the company and I were on some sort of equal footing, the rational players in a free market beloved of delusionary economic theorists, buyers and sellers able to make mutually beneficial bargains, without fully understanding how much better at it they were than I. Stupid. Yes. I know. It’s an attractive idea when you’re young, confident but slightly insecure in your position; you get to believe in yourself but simultaneously hand over some control to another entity, on the basis of this assumed bargain. But if there’s one thing that can inspire more hatred than simply being fucked over, it’s being fucked over plus self-loathing.

This has been today’s fridgemagnet job rant. Tomorrow I will be teaching people to use a system that they don’t want to use but have to. I will endeavour, in the spirit of the bloody Protestant work ethic, not to inject too much sarcasm into the presentation.

Funny stuff will return at an indeterminate date.

Oh, and I broke the flower off my plant.