Where was I?

[mousme]

My kingdom for better organizational skills.

Peggy is growing like a weed with teeth. She is still ridiculously adorable. We experimented with puppy daycare, and unsurprisingly she LOVED it, but alas came home with a case of Bordetella (kennel cough). Luckily she's vaccinated for it, which has made it a very mild case, even though it didn't protect her entirely. She's had it for just over a week, but she seems 90% better today, so I am hopeful she will be all better in another day or so. She's been bored out of her skull staying home and resting, and a bored puppy is a puppy that gets into mischief, moreso than she usually does.


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The rest of my life has been a lot less adorable (although Peggy more than makes up for it). Work is a shitshow. We are incredibly short-staffed, and we are hemorrhaging people, because our management is terrible. I and at least four other people are looking for work elsewhere (some more actively than others). I can't really actively look for work in mediation until I take four courses in Third Party Neutral mediation. I wanted to take them this summer and ran out of money, and NOW the damned Canadian Institute for Conflict Resolution is stubbornly offering every course EXCEPT the first one, so I can't even start. Argh. I will also need to have a certain number of mediations under my belt, but I plan on volunteering at the Ottawa community mediation centre and hope that will count.

I got spoiled by my previous management. They were involved and knowledgeable and actually cared about their employees. My manager was just the sweetest man who had twenty-plus years' worth of knowledge about our job, so we could count on him for good advice and help when we needed it. His boss was a no-nonsense staff sergeant, and even though she and I didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things and she was a bit of a micro-manager, she was a bulldog when it came to fighting for us with higher level executives, and she knew our job intimately. She came downstairs (management offices are one floor above us) regularly, and actually sat down with us for several days learning the systems and the day to day operations, which in turn allowed her to make informed decisions about our section.

Current management? Not so much. The manager is there in an "interim" capacity, though the organization shows no sign of actually opening up the posting so that actually qualified people can apply. She is a police officer with no managerial or even supervisory training, and with next to no knowledge of what we do. She still has more knowledge than our current staff sergeant, who has refused all of our suggestions to come and learn about our daily job, because he "doesn't need to know that." The new director, while he seems to have a better attitude than the manager and the staff sergeant, has so far been more or less absent, and willing to rely on what his management team tell him, so that doesn't help us.

So after bragging to us that they were going to "support" us and about the huge budget they got approved for us this year, they've... cut the amount of support we get. They've arbitrarily reduced what should be minimum staffing on the floor from three to two. This, let me assure you, is unsustainable. Three people minimum is skeleton crew, and two for us is crisis staffing. We can do it every so often. but asking us to do it on a continual basis all but guarantees they will burn us out.

When they came in they changed the composition of all the teams, and shut us down HARD when we politely suggested that we might have actually been able to give helpful input, since we know our people best (by "we" I mean the supervisors). "We are under no obligation to consult you." Well, the new composition of the teams ended up being the two newest employees being put on a team with the newest supervisor, on a team on which the supervisor also changes every 3 months because we're training the more experienced employees to be supervisors. That means supervisors with next to no experience and two employees who each had less than a year's experience at the time. It also placed two employees who are extremely anxious about their jobs on a team with a supervisor who is known for being absorbed with her own projects and has little time for coaching and advising.

I expressed my concern about this, but they dismissed me. It doesn't help that a previous supervisor, now thankfully gone, started spreading a rumour that I was incompetent (let me assure you, I am not), and somehow about half the staff took the bait hook, line, and sinker. And this spread to the management team, who treated me for six goddamned months like I was a slow-witted child who couldn't tie her own shoelaces. At one point my manager was on the floor while a small crisis was happening, which I managed because that is literally my job, and then I helped her with the work she was trying to do while coaching an employee through a difficult task.

"Wow, you found that really fast!"

"You seem surprised that I know how to do my job."

"Oh, no, of course not! I knew you were really good!"

Excuse me while I roll my eyes so hard they roll out the back of my head. Anyway, since then they seem to be slowly changing their minds in the face of the evidence, which is that I actually do know how to do my job, and I do it quite well.

This weekend was especially frustrating, which is probably why I'm complaining about it now. We had an important system go down, an application manager than allows us to access our contact list database, log messages, and keep a daily log of our activities. Another supervisor and I created a workaround (it was ugly but allowed us to do everything but access the contact list) and opened a ticket with the Central Help Desk. So far, so standard operating procedure. Since it wasn't restored by Sunday night and my manager is on vacation, I emailed the Staff Sergeant to let him know what was going on, for his situational awareness. He responded in an inbox that I don't regularly monitor, and so I didn't see his response until the next morning when he called.

"You didn't say what [Important Application Manager is] nor what the risks were in not having it operational," he accused me.

"I... didn't think it was necessary? It's a fundamental part of how we operate."

"It may be obvious to the people who use it every day, but not to the rest of us!"

I just. *beats head on desk* He's been with us for six months. Slightly more now. HOW DOES HE NOT KNOW THIS? It's basic operational stuff, which he really should know. You have to deliberately remove yourself from any kind of operational knowledge in order to not know this. It's willful ignorance, nothing less. And he made it sound like this was somehow my fault. Jesus Fucking Christ.

This is a huge part of why I want to leave, and why we've lost four employees in the past six months. Four. We are a team of twelve, on a good day. Right now we are ten people, including a guy who's been with us for exactly two weeks and is therefore going to be in training for at least another six.  Having someone in training effectively takes someone else off the floor in order to train them, which brings us down to nine people for four teams. We have a casual employee that we have contracted for 90 days (that means he can come in for 90 days throughout the year, not three months straight), and they are continually refusing to bring him in, so that it's now the end of July and he's only come in 22 days this year. The budget for him has been approved and earmarked, and yet they are STILL refusing to spend it on him, preferring to keep us at crisis staffing levels at all times. This literally why we have him, so that we can ensure the work gets done without burning out any of the employees, but they're just... not doing it. Not surprisingly, he is talking about leaving for a better job, one that will actually use his services and therefore pay him.

It's all so frustrating and stressful. I didn't realize just how much we were protected by having a good, supportive management team until we no longer had one. I have been in jobs before where management was terrible, but five years of good management made me forget how bad it could get.

Anyway, enough complaining about work. Apart from that, things are going just fine. It's just that work is a huge part of my life, and therefore occupies a lot of my thoughts. I try to leave work at work, but that hasn't been happening in the past few weeks, which is in and of itself a red flag.

The next thing I have to do is figure out how the hell to pay my tuition, because it's $1,500 more than what I budgeted for due to the fact that SURPRISE! full-time students get charged for a bunch of things I don't need, like a transit pass and insurance. I have a car, and I have insurance through work. I am going to see if I can get those knocked off my bill, because holy Hannah that is a lot of money.

I will be back with more Peggy updates soon, I hope! In the meantime, she is back in her crate with her lunch, because she was getting very barky with the cat and, bless her, she is incredibly shrill. So she gets to have a time out with some toys and her kibble and some treats, not that she views it that way. This way, though, we all get a break: her, the cats, and most importantly, me.