I spent Sunday morning completing work for a colleague. Why? Because I promised I would deliver. The result: what I thought would please them. A polished and compliant end product, ready for them to take over. Were they satisfied? Of course not! Instead of appreciation, complaints and criticism. Which rather hammers home all that my …
Have I been heard at work? Don’t get your hopes up. Everyone made the right noises, but I have been here before. All the proposed solutions have been mentioned repeatedly, only to go nowhere at all. I won’t consider it progress made until I see action in place of words. Until then, it’s all just talk.
I’m starting to think I could be a Head of something. I have far more skills than the Heads of around me. Though, admittedly, that is a very low bar to surpass. This morning, I taught a Head of how to copy and paste text from a web page.
One day, while tidying up the office, I came across my manager’s notes from my job interview. At the top, she’d scribbled, “Overqualified?” It turned out that I was. On my first day in post, my manager sat with me and went through my job description, stripping out everything that had attracted me to the …
Maybe I should take three days off every week. I’ve just had the most productive two days’ work in ages. Back to my usual self.
Dear world. I am not a fraud, after all. I just get stuck in a rut sometimes. Today, I have had a productive morning of meetings, supporting clinical teams, and as I listening to myself, I remembered, actually I do know my stuff and do add value here. It’s just often I get sucked down …
We can be heroes. Just for one day. Did I just save our organisation £xxK by doing work touted to take Xteen weeks by external supplier in about 4 hours in-house? Maybe I did. Savour the moment. It won’t last.
We are the untrainable. It doesn’t matter how many times training is repeated or reinforced. It still won’t be translated into practice. But then, of course, I knew that during the training. For even in the midst of a session delivering the guidance needed, I could see they were not with me at all, but …
At this stage, I’m twelve years into the role as solo operator, looking after all web infrastructure — internal and external — for an organisation with over 6000 employees, serving 1.5 million people annually. Therefore I’m neither surprised nor particularly disappointed that my case for increasing capacity has been rejected once again. This has been …
Quarter 3, and we’re back in the, “It’s a great idea” phase of responding to my team proposal. At least this time the source of that remark was Chief Finance Officer, thanks to the intervention of Chief Information Officer. Progress? Well it’s been added to the Executive Board’s papers for discussion next week, so at …
I should really take the entire winter off work. Or—why not?—forever. My brain does not cooperate.
One more reason I don’t regret not accepting an invitation to act up into my former manager’s role: the insistence on the exec team on in-person meetings which could just as easily—and effectively—be conducted online. So it is that the poor chap who took the role must set out on a two-hour jaunt from a …
We’re stuck, failing at jobs we hate because… We have bills to pay, mouths to feed, futures to fund… Forget the midlife crisis. Even the midweek crisis. This is the daily existential crisis, during which we wonder what we’re doing with our lives. We’re demotivated and drained, staring at screens, egging our work on to …
It only took about six months, but the service finally came around to what I suggested in the first place — though only after trying everything else first.
I am honoured. The Chief Information Officer reached out to me today for a wee chat. Though no credit to me; this was prompted by a conversation they had had with the budding apprentice I’d tried to support months ago. After a friendly exchange, they asked me what I was doing for succession planning. I …
