I have been having a difficult time with at work lately. Not that the work is difficult rather I'm feeling extremely undervalued, I feel so unimportant in comparison to my coworkers. I have often say and believe they could hire any homeless person off the street to replace me on any given day and the company wouldn’t know the difference as long as they did the work. Perhaps the quality of work would go down (maybe it would improve) but I am sometimes pretty anal in somethings so those specific things might not be improved or done better by my replacement but then there are other things I feel like are not important, things that many others hold in higher regards. I don’t know exactly how to put it in words but I feel somewhat useless at times. I definitely not as smart as many of my coworkers, they are much better educated, and it fact I would say in comparison I'm down-right dumb. A lot of my role deals with a large amount of monotonous support type work which although mostly done on a computer the functions and repetition could quite honestly be likened to Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz in the I LOVE LUCY series when they are working at the candy conveyer trying to wrap the candies as they past by going faster and faster and no matter how hard they try to keep up with the flow they just can't and then things get even worse when the boss walks in and sees even a minimal of success and yells "Speed-er up boys!" so they have to wrap even faster. I'm need to come to terms with the fact that I'm here to do a job, not get "atta boys" so as long as at the end of the week the company is satisfied with my work and I get a paycheck that should be enough for me. But my work seems so unneeded. I don't understand why I feel like I need more satisfaction. I should just be grateful I am working.
Little will my routine changes except every now and then we go through audits of our facilities and part of my job (the mostly monotonous part) is to collect the material that is used in those audits. When I was first hired for the role it was a great deal more important and had a lot more potential that my previous position and certainly more than it does now. What was supposed to become a much higher role in regards to responsibility and status actually diminished after my company merged with another company and new management took over my team. About 50% of what I used to do, the fun, thinking stuff, was taken from me and divvied among three other people, they became the supervisor at the candy factory yelling "Speed-er up boys!" and I was left with wrapping the candy on the conveyor.
My participation in the audit process went from doing nearly all the work and being praised for the results to being utilized in only those areas that the others did not want to do, the boring list making and records matching and afterwards when accolades were distributed (not monetary, I mean just the old "atta boy" I was talking about, I was no longer included when those peers of mine with the word "Senior" in their titles were congratulated regardless of the outcome (which of the few audits we've been through since have not resulted in as positive since the change-over, of course I can't take credit for that but I do credit the creators or my program, my previous management that developed the program we currently use, its the changes by the current management that have resulted in the less than favorable outcomes). But with our current and most recent audit things have changed a bit and I'm being utilized a bit more as I had been prior to the merger of my then and now companies not to mention how my hiring manager had originally described my role to me during my interview and after he hired me.
Because our last two audits did not receive the praise that any (ALL) of our previous audits had received during my last review my boss told me he was going to start using me more to develop the audit packages so they would resemble and be more consistent with the successful packaging of years gone by that once done and presented for review were praised as being so top-notch the auditors indicated they should be industry standards. I do have to say though, regarding my "Senior" peers the results are not so much my groups fault as much as the bureaucratic changes and involvement of departments outside of our group (like legal for example).
My point here is not to say that my work was better than what it being produced now, rather I am saying that I'm happy to be utilized in a manner other than the previously mentioned candy drone. I have finally been allowed to do some “thinking” work again and I have actually found the process and the work itself more entertaining (not that work is supposed to be entertaining but it helps if it is distracting enough that you aren't counting the minutes and waiting for your day to end. I still cannot say this is work that I "love" (very few can say they “love” their work and I absolutely do not love mine, See: I Love My Job) I had a good day at work today and I'm hoping will have the same results going forward. I got a lot done and I’m feeling really good about my results but at the same time I am worried and feeling really insecure about it because my boss had indicated that he was relying so much on how our previous audits have concluded. If you have read anything I've written you know it is my nature to worry.
I was originally going to get into all the details of what I am doing in regards to this audit but think that would lead us too much into the weeds not to mention bore any reader even more than they must be already if they have resorted to reading anything at all in regards to my life. Not to mention since this is anonymous the less said the better.
Even though I really don't want to say anymore though, I need to admit that another reason working on this particular audit excites me is that I believe it may have the potential to lead to a promotion. I have one more audit package to develop and it is for a brand new standard on which we have never been audited yet so I get to be the first to take a stab at it. I’m very excited because I think with this audit process I will be proving that I have done and am doing everything that my "Seniors" are doing and since my boss did mention last year the possibility of a promotion (and never brought it up again) my thinking is that my involvement in this audit to this level qualifies me for a promotion not to mention that my company has a well known unwritten policy (and it actually may be written in some groups within the company) after five years of a person being in the same position unless there is some reason not to give them a promotion (say a bad report or something they've done wrong at some point) then they should be promoted.
The promotion rule is not written in stone so it doesn't mean that you automatically get a promotion after 5 years, your boss still has to go to bat for you, but in my case there's no reason I shouldn't get a promotion. I already do everything that my peers do, I call them peers but they have the word “Senior” in their titles and they are above me in regards to the amount of pay they earn and obviously they get bigger bonuses and still we all do essentially the same work with some variations. Mine are more administrative than theirs are as they go to a few more meetings, I do more of the "grunt" work than I but if all it takes is just a little more effort, a few more hours, an extra meeting here and there then I'm certainly willing if the pay is reflective which I already have been told by coworkers that their bonuses because of their grades are 5% higher than mine.
So as I said I do pretty much the same kind of stuff that my peers (or the seniors) in my group do and I think since I am now going on I think 7 years (I think I'm six and a half years) in the same role it's time and I deserve to be considered for a promotion especially since I always get higher than average evaluations and my boss (who really might tell this to everyone in during their review, how am I to know since I am not a fly on the wall) am one of his top two performers. He (my boss) told me last year that he had talked to his boss about the potential of a promotion to which his boss agreed saying that we only have to show proper justification and then…. nothing more has been said since. I think that it's time that after this audit (should it be successful) I will broach the subject once again in my annual performance review which should occur in March when they hand out bonuses. Now I feel funny boasting about my belief I should be promoted because as I noted in the beginning of this post what I do compared to some of the engineers and scientists that work only a cubicle or two away is much more menial and doesn't involve stuff like calculus or physics as their work does, but when compared to my "Senior" peers and my time with the company (and at least on of them has even less education that I) I really do believe that its due time.
I worry all the time (hence the stress and anxiety) that something might go wrong with this audit and if that happens everything I just said about a promotion goes out the crapper (I mean that would be if it is reflected on my work) and then I can possibly scrap any ideas of a promotion and who knows even scrap the idea of continuing to keep my job if the results are bad enough. I doubt that would happen because I've been with the company 12 years now and I proven myself over and over. I've never gotten a rating of less than three or four mostly and I have even gotten 5’s and if fact there is at least one report where I got all fives which is the highest you can possibly get. I've never gotten below a 3 (and I know a 3 sounds bad) but 3's are considered "performing as expected" and usually the 3’s I get are in areas that you just can't really excel in like safety and those type of things especially when you are when stuck in an office and don't have much room for wiggle to show that you've done anything in excess of what any other office person might do to comply with or to be safety conscious. (See: Today was a Good Day)
This concludes the boring details of my job, have you ever been to a party and the people start talking about work and their eyes gloss over because they just can't wait for you to shut up. Well I'm sorry for rambling. But I want to mention one last thing: I dreamed last night about my my male Shepherd that recently died. He was alive but looked different not really even a Shepherd breed anymore but in my mind he was still my dog and he could walk and he was happy and I was happy and I woke up and he was gone and I was sad (See: Good-bye to my Beloved Pet).