The Inevitable Inevitable...

Was a pretty busy week around here.  

I'm busting my tail parts in a short-term job, not because I expect it to turn into something else, but because I am doing my job.  

I read a couple of articles this past week talking about something called "quiet quitting."  I figured it was where people might just stop showing up to work, or maybe it was folks who let their supervisor know they would be leaving the job, but did not want to let their co-workers know.  

Nope.

Turns out it's apparently a practice where people choose to stop working excessive amounts of overtime, taking on additional duties, and basically turn to doing the minimal amount of work they can.  Because they feel unappreciated. 

I get that.  I've worked for some pretty good employers, I've worked for some good employers who hired terrible supervisors, I've worked for some below-average employers, and I've worked for some employers who were hard-pressed to remember my name, or what it was I did or where I worked.

Before I bore you to tears with any of those stories, I will tell you that I do have a fundamental character defect deep within me.  I do the job I have not because I'm being paid, not because it's the job I have, and not because it's the greatest job in the world.  I do it because it is my job, if I do not do it, no one else is going to be able to do it like I do, and I do it because doing the job assists other people who rely, in some way, on the job I do.

Now there are a few of you scratching your heads and wondering just how the heck a job in retail was that special.  No, it did not overly tax my mental or physical abilities, aside from the occasional need to balance a stack of eight boxes of bagged salad mixes on my head as I climbed a ladder (one hand for the ladder, one hand for the stack on my head), in order to get it to the top shelf of the refrigerated storeroom.  Or keeping my mouth shut when I used my big toe to stop a literal ton of turkeys on a pallet because one of my ... we will say "less experienced co-workers" decided to cut in front of me because they did not see me pulling the pallet to the sales floor.  

Yeah, I know, me in a bright white butcher's coat, towing a pallet of turkeys stacked above my head, yeah, I kind of blend into the background.  But there were jobs where I was literally out of sight.  But because I was able to figure it out, I was able to tell my employer's clients how to secure their computer networks but also maintain the ability to replicate databases across multiple locations.  Of course, I also failed to make a persuasive-enough case to my leadership that a new backup strategy was needed due to the growth of the data we needed to save and the inability of our then-six-year-old tape backup to handle the database tables that at the time were in excess of five gigs of space, and our backup only backed up half a gig at a time.  

So that one was on me.  But the doing of the job is what I do, and when I am no longer there, I do not want someone to look at the work I have done and say "well, that's terrible."  I don't want people to look at what I've left behind and think "we could have done that better."  

I know there are situations where I could have done better.  I could have been more persuasive, I could have communicated more clearly, I could have had more knowledge.  But as the old saying goes, Experience is what you get when you wanted something else.  Most of us learn more readily from failure than from success.  I do think that success is fantastic.  But for most folks, the peak of success is represented and supported by a lot of choices and decisions that came before that weren't quite right.  But that's how we know what works - what didn't work obviously did not work, and is not being used.  But what did work, worked, because we figured it out that way.

So yeah, I'm still looking, I'm about to kick the job hunt up several levels due to the end of the gig having been extended.  I was due to end September 4th, but I was asked, due to my performance, to stay to October 2nd.  And I've also signed a document offering me a small retention bonus if I do say.  Before you get all excited for me, it will, in the end, turn out to be about a week's worth of pay.  But it's a week's worth of pay.  Which will add onto the eight weeks of severance pay and the three weeks of vacation which I've earned, and not yet taken this year.  

So I got that going for me, which is nice.  Now to find a new job.  Onward.