The Big Mean Scary Guy is gone. Let’s call him Vice-Admiral; he was not an Admiral but he was a vice, and it gives a vague premonition of his stature in this global, multibillion dollar company. The rumor is that Vice-Admiral was told not to get on the plane for the trip he was planning. This transpired while the Vice-Admiral was here, in our town, inside the plant he had threatened to lock up with his own hands. There were a few poignant days as the rumor circulated around and settled in.

The termination of his employment came as he was wrapping up one of those theatrical events wherein the top brass show that they have a strong connection with the common man by working alongside him. Of course the common man mostly continues to do the work as the attendents of the honorary present a bounty of colored charts and expert opinions, but I digress from my point.

The Vice-Admiral had been keel-hauled by a congregation of distributors for the way our promise dates and delivery dates fluctuated independently of one another, so that while our promise dates were near our delivery dates were far, and vice-versa. To rectify this malady the Vice-Admiral had instituted an absolute policy of set lead times, so that we would not ship anything before we promised it and would not promise anything before we could ship it. The lead time was to be long enough that we could ship no matter how high the waves or strong the winds. In the course of events we still found several kinds of calamities severe enough to prevent us from meeting this lead time, but the general effect was to promise the product much later than we ordinarily needed to ship it, and to refuse to ship it sooner (on pain of our lives!).

Whatever song had been sung at that august gathering of distributors, the clamour raised by customers in general as we refused to ship product we had in boatloads (because our set lead time had not yet elapsed) reached into other branches of the Admiralty. The Vice-Admiral himself was persuaded to some moderations of the policy, first reducing the set lead time and then even granting better dates as the inventory allowed on the most popular items. This latter policy, I have recently learned, he condemned as contrary to his express directive, not admitting to any part in the discussions that had lead up to it.

May you trouble these waters no more, Vice-Admiral.

In keeping with this policy on lead time, all manner of new processes and reports were invented to support shipment by our promise date. Our manufacturing software allows for three dates: The date the customer wants the order, the date we say that we will ship the order, and a third date that actual schedules the supply chain. This third date, which I will call the schedule date, can be aligned to either of the other two dates. Before the Vice-Admiral reinvented our business, it was aligned to the customer’s date, which was generally the same as the date of order entry. This paid no heed to how long it actually took us to manufature the product. For example, if a widget takes three weeks to manufacture, you could wake up in the morning and be three weeks behind schedule because the customer ordered a widget last night. Scheduling was impossible.

Under the Vice-Admiral’s new rules, the schedule date was aligned to our set lead time, which (one hoped) always gave us enough time to manufacture. But by nature of it being a fixed amount of lead time, if we happened to have the widget in stock already the customer still had to wait three weeks. And our inventory levels are readily visible to a large number of our customers.

If you have not already deduced this, the Vice-Admiral’s replacement wants to replace all the sails and rigging and go right back to using the customer’s date. This reverses everything we have been fighting for over six bloody months; remember that our ship’s Captain was one of the casualties. Many of the crew are reluctant to take up the new Vice-Admiral’s wishes before they are expressed in a ironclad command.

There is a third way. We can continue to tie the schedule date to our promise date, but allow our promise date to fluctuate as our supply situation warrants. This tempers the evil of the promise dating heading east while the delivery date heads west; while we might still miss our original delivery date, they will at least tend in the same direction. It also removes the evil of refusing to ship to the customer while stock languishes on the shelf.

The one flaw in this compromise solution is the factors considered in floating the promise date. Certain considerations, such as scheduled work orders, are not necessarily reliable data in our system. In short, if we accept this floating logic we will miss significantly more of our promises than we do currently, and since we have been getting only a passing grade on our promise dates as it is we are terrified to make that change.

It is necessary and proper that we do. Then, we feel the pain of the problems with the system and we have constant motivation to improve. Remaining with our set lead time lets the customer in for a larger share of the dissatisfaction and allows us to be happy while they are disgruntled. If our grades drop but customers complain less we are in less real danger than we are if we have perfect scores and unhappy customers. With low scores we will face constant questioning from the admirality; with high scores and unhappy customers we risk sudden death.

My day ended today after my regular work hours as I watched the Captain and the First Mate decide to cut our set lead time in half for certain spare parts that our suppliers are supposed to ensure are always in stock. I argued as best I knew how for the floating promise, as described above; but who am I?

I just checked to see what I had last written and found I have been even more delinquent than I had imagined. I did not tell you anything about my multi-state tour to set up my little invention that so pleased my boss: the On Time Delivery Bridge. It keeps track of lines that we ship late and helps compile the reasons why so we can review the results and say “Oh! We have a problem here!”

But that story is for another time. I am going to try to be brief and my moral for today is: just because you have an emergency doesn’t mean you are doing something right. We had some very high level people in the plant recently (you can only go one level higher I think), and we were all told after they left that they were concerned because they didn’t feel a “sense of urgency” in the plant.

I figure what they really found lacking was a sense of purpose. Nobody has any confidence that the leaders as a group really have any idea or agreement about where we are going and how we want to get there.

But let’s talk about having a sense of urgency. Let’s talk about what it taking about half of my disposable (I choose what to do) time: expedites. Here’s how lame this situation is: We were instructed to use certain set lead times, not dynamic lead times, so that we would have consistent delivery results and a consistent measuring stick to check our consistency on. This has worked reasonably well for our tools–although there were a lot of issues until we got a set lead time that was almost tolerable for the market. But we based our set lead time levels on how much of a product we had shipped. When we applied this same model to our spare parts, any part which hadn’t shipped much wound up with a long lead time (more than two calendar months).

Not because it takes us that long to make the product, mind you. Because the model showed that “not many” customers wanted the product, so we didn’t have to ante up for a faster delivery.

So, customer places an order for a part he needs, walks away for a month. Comes back, wondering what the heck happened to his order. It’s still there, promised out another month or so. Customer gets mad and wants to have his part now. Oh, okay, that will be another two weeks because that’s how long it actually takes to make. . . you could have had it two weeks ago but we were waiting for our set lead time to elapse.

Or you can have it right now, we have thousands of those gizmos in stock, we were just waiting for our set lead time to elapse.

This is causing friction with our customer base. When we get comfortable with the month of November we are going to look at the whole policy and see if maybe we can fix it a little.

Meanwhile, when the customers call their service reps and start swearing and screaming because their order is so late, the rep sends the expedite request to me. I’m supposed to examine this request and make sure they have filled in all the little details and given a proper, adequate, and justifiable reason for the expedite request. There’s a little seed of a good idea in here: if you change your schedule every time any customer says, “I want my stuff,” you wind up with no schedule at all. It is necessary to put the brakes on some requests, especially when the customer, via the customer rep, says “You have some, I want it now,” and we really have to hold onto that stock to fill another, earlier order. Those situations sometimes come up.

Most of the time, though, the customer has either already waited weeks, or they are seeing a date that is months out. And I’m supposed to make sure all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. If I don’t, I make the production team mad with the frivolous expedites and disregard for supply chain realities. But I can’t spend too much time checking on the details because the expedites come in at a steady clip and most of them just need to have that ludicrous set lead time overridden so that the order can ship before I start collecting a pension. And the more often I do that, the more I get expedites that “must” ship the next day–really just feeling me out for a real lead time.

Sense of urgency? Sure. I am working frantically, urgently, to try to tear through all these expedites, especially so that the 20% or so that really are urgent will be looked at, and the 5% that are truly urgent and I can easily fix will get on their way without further delay.

I got your sense of urgency right here, and it’s not because I am doing my job so well but because the decision-making leadership is doing their job so poorly.

As I go through this story you will get a sense of the drama that has contributed to my silence here. When the stakes get high I get a little more cautious about publishing what I know, even in the semi-anonymous form that I follow.

Early in August, the plant manager’s boss scheduled a visit. In anticipation of this event the plant manager and all his staff prepared intensely. Although the plant has been progressing steadily, nobody had forgotten the visit in early May and the threat of drastic consequences if our delivery metrics were not improved. The staff all felt we had satisfied the ultimatum we were given, or got well enough on the way to it, that we were not in any serious risk with this visit. Nevertheless, the plant manager came in early on the day of the visit to put finishing touches on the presentation.

When the time came for the meeting and the corporate boss was ready and waiting, the plant manager was not present. The staff got underway without him, but nobody was quite sure what to make of it. The boss had talked to the plant manager when he first arrived, but he made no comment on the manager’s strange absence.

By the end of the day, when he had not shown up at all but remained in his office, even a naive youngster such as myself suspected there could only be one reason for a sudden change in priorities. And on the second day, when all the staff were paged by the plant manager’s secretary, it had practically been spelled out. But since I am naive boy, I was still confused. Everyone seemed to be getting more and more cheerful and chipper and cavalier. How could this be? Surely I was missing some piece of the puzzle.

But no. It was privately confirmed to me that the plant manager had resigned. In fact, in the official announcement stated that he had given notice of his intention to resign a month earlier. Even I was not naive enough to believe that, but there it was anyway, as a kind of social lie, a lie not ever meant to be believed but merely to indicate some remaining respect for this man who had worked for them for so many years in so many positions, who now was not wanted.

Although the plant manager kept every appearance of satisfaction and politeness until his last day, when he went around the plant and began admitting that he might have liked to stay longer. After work at his farewell party, after being toasted by his choked-up secretary, he said that it was easy to leave a company, and hard to leave people; and as he said so he had to be careful to keep his composure. He was the last person who had worked for the company at that level since Big Scary Guy joined the company and began scaring people.

His replacement was announced once he had left; he had been seen in the plant as early as April, when Big Scary Guy gave his ultimatum.

—-

Sometime in July my own boss had asked myself and several others on his team to work to create a standardized database so that we could all report consistently on our various facilities. At the end of July he also told me to begin tracking every line item we ship late out of our plant–specifically, to identify why it was missed. This explanation of lines shipped late constitutes a “bridge” between our on time delivery and 100% on time delivery.

My boss is headquartered at a warehouse facility; of its nature it is less complex than our production operation, although the volume of shipments is much greater. At the headquarters he had one of his team spending about half a day going through this kind of analysis. I knew there was no way I could get any helpful and accurate analysis of the misses out of our production facility on my own; I would need help from others in the plant. And I knew, from past projects, that a collaborative spreadsheet would result in a jumble of inconsistent information that would have to be arduously compiled, cleaned up, and rechecked by me.

Without feeling like I had any better alternative, I hastily assembled an Access database to keep track of the information with a form to make it easier for the less Access-fluent to understand and use the system. The forms and the attendant Visual Basic for Applications code was the only difficult part of that, but getting that interface put together in three days was a pretty good feat, I thought.

It impressed my boss enough that he wanted it available for the other sites as well. When I told him in a team meeting in July that half of what his team in the headquarters was doing could be done automatically, he really liked that idea. But I said it would have to depend on having the same foundational database in all sites, that project that we were already working on.

As August drew to a close my boss was getting impatient with our progress. I thought we had made progress with the foundational database, although I felt it had been slow; but the further we went with the project the more I felt that one of the other team members was dragging the project down. At first I thought we just didn’t communicate on the same wavelength. I have been accused before of being obstinate, a poor listener, and too absorbed in the details. All true in some measure. But more and more it seemed that C.K. just didn’t understand the spirit of the project. As I had understood the project, we needed to provide a common platform to support the work of all the team members. As C.K. seemed to understand it, we needed to regulate what the rest of the team did and restrict them to running approved queries–and even then it would never work, because the rest were an undisciplined group who did not understand the proper way to do anything and would not follow any rules.

When I talked with my boss, usually for other purposes, and he asked about the project I would mention that we had some difficulties but I thought we were working through them. But C.K.’s dismal view of the other team members finally put me in a position I did not feel I could work through; he was supposed to be representing the entire headquarters team, and he did not think any of them would properly use or appreciate the project once complete. And we had come to the point where the needs of the team had to be well represented to deliver a useful product.

So I went to my boss and said we needed others involved in the project, and explained why. But when I was talking with the team supervisor in the headquarters (we site-local team members and the data team report directly to the manager, but the headquarters team has a supervisor), explaining that we really only needed to load the queries the team needed into the database format we had agreed on, she said that she was not comfortable having C.K. do that.

C.K. is one of the two data specialists on the team, people who are focused specifically on the extraction and manipulation of data. Everyone on the team has to work data, but these two are meant to be the experts that the rest of the team could rely on. When the team supervisor said she could not rely on C.K. to build the queries her team used into a format that our project team agreed on, and she would rather have me travel there to do the work, I realized we were saying that C.K. should not hold the position he had.

And it came to pass that I was called to headquarters, along with rest of the team, to finish the project. We were given a week to finish the foundational database and the automatic bridge I had offered in concept a month ago. I knew our chances of completing that bridge were slim, but I drafted a schedule to aim for it. After the first day and a half I scheduled myself in a breakout group frantically working on that project, which only I of the team could envision and understand. That interface with the VBA code was disowned, disclaimed, and decried by C.K., who pointed out that this “Bridge” was too complex for anyone else to maintain, and would utterly depend on me, and was thus high-risk for a sector-wide tool. All true enough. But the person on the team who should have been ready to learn what I had done and prepare to support it was C.K. himself, along with his junior peer who had recently joined the team.

Before I got on the plane to travel to headquarters, I had given my manager, at his request, a written statement explaining my concerns with C.K. My manager had also made it clear that I was not alone in having difficulties with this member of the team and indicated that he was about to take decisive action to resolve ongoing issues.

So this was the situation I flew into. It crackled with tension, as C.K. was still on the team but, from my understanding, we were all there because he was not adequately fulfilling his role. And in that first day, when I had to leave the room, he took one of the critical queries off in a direction completely incongruent with where we had been taking the project. He said the whole team had agreed it would be best; but later when I talked to the individuals they said they did not remember discussing the matter at all.

For the rest of the week my job was basically to distract, divert, and occupy C.K. while the rest of the team finished the foundational database. I was also supposed to be working on the bridge, but I found I was much distracted trying to explain to C.K. the concept we were trying to achieve with the queries he was assigned to build. I think I had to explain four times that I wanted data refreshed with delete and append of rows rather than deletion and recreation of the entire table; he did not seem to grasp this relatively simple concept in database construction.

During this time when I was attempting to explain to him the concepts of database design as I had learned them I was not getting much done with the bridge, but I was building the beginning of a rapport with C.K. If he goofed something obvious to both of us I tried to put him at ease by recounting how often I made the same mistake. If he talked about some other project he worked on I listened and expressed appreciation. In short: I was nice.

As the week wore on–and it did wear, one 12 hour day after another–the team leader and I grew more and more frustrated with C.K.’s constant drag on the project, tugging whatever he was a part of in a direction different than what all the rest of the team agreed on. When we needed to use some functions within our queries, he immediately washed his hands of it, declaring it far too complex–and yet I managed to write it correctly on the very first try, because it really was not complex at all.

Thursday afternoon the team supervisor left the room to call the manager to tell him that C.K. was simply not effective. When she got back C.K. was summoned to talk to the manager (by phone, since the manager was at another facility the whole week). “I’m nervous,” the team leader confessed to me; we both thought this might be the end.

But when C.K. came back, it was not just to collect his belongings and leave. Instead he said, “Apparently some people on this team have told our boss that I am not cooperating with this project, so I’d like to ask everyone: what do you want me to do?” This was a most unfortunate conclusion because we actually wanted him to do nothing; he had not lacked for volunteering to do anything, he just did not understand how to do anything in a manner compatible with the goals and methods of the team.

It was an awkward moment. But we continued to be, as ever, as nice to C.K. as to anyone on the team, and yes, perhaps nicer. To his face we were as sweet as sweet tea.

Would it have been better for me to tell C.K., “I don’t think you understand what we are doing and I would rather if you’d just go back to your cube and do whatever and let us finish this ourselves?” No. And neither would it have accomplished anything good to treat him in any other way than with respect and courtesy. Yet it still felt wrong to treat him as nice as could be to his face while we told his boss we couldn’t stand working with him.

I thought he might be fired this Monday, but he remains in the employ of Acme, still my official liason to the headquarters team for the data projects. Only now he has had such conversations with our manager that he must surely suspect that we are all against him and saying awful things behind his back, no matter how sweetly we talk to his face.

Little children, do not trust the nice people.

The plant manager resigned. Very likely he was given some incentive to resign. Here’s a tip for detecting a sudden departure before it’s been announced: everyone who knows about it is having a good day. If they told you they were having a bad day you might ask why and they would have to think of an evasion or fabrication, so instead they are all having a good day.

And yes, they will lie about what they know. You can ask, but if you have to ask your chance of being told are slim. But don’t believe the rumor mill every time, either; there are about a half dozen people rumored to have been fired last week who are still showing up for their jobs (none of them is important enough to have a transition like the plant manager is getting).

The official deadline for our last ultimatum comes at the end of this month. At this moment it appears we will meet the requirement by a hair’s breadth. It also appears possible that the plant manager’s transition was planned for prior to when the ultimatum was delivered. Note that doing what you were told you had to do to keep your job does not mean that you will keep your job.

For the last three months the intense and exclusive effort has been on delivering product on time according to our promise to the customer. This is the explicit mandate we were given. We have made steady progress and have developed some long-term strategies to help us sustain this progress. This past week we found we were a whisker’s length from having the most important part of that foundation, that kept all the different disciplines in the plant synchronized, jerked out from under us–certain configurations of the plant software. Evidently the customers who told Big Scary Guy that we could deliver the product however late we had to deliver it, as long as it arrives when we promise it will, are now saying that we have to deliver the product a whole lot sooner or they will leave us. Again, we as a plant followed explicit instructions and made measurable progress on those instructions; but the entire apple cart may yet be overturned on us.

I think that will do for a brief summary of the adventures at Acme.

Sadly, I score about 80% on the faint-of-heart quiz.

The last job I had was basically self-managed and I didn’t start to relax in that one until they brought on someone who functioned as my manager (even though he technically wasn’t). My manager in my new job is based several states away. He’s done a good job of keeping in touch and responding to issues I have, and has been very careful to make sure my priorities are clear and I feel I can manage them. Kudos to him; not complaining about him here at all.

The reality of day-to-day work, though, is that after I’ve come in and taken care of routine things I have to do every day, I have to decide what needs to be done next and when my assigned priorities have to bend to urgencies of the day. Although I report to a man hundreds of miles a way, I work where I am to support the local facility–and in particular, because of some intense pressure on the factory, supporting the local facility is one of my boss’s top priorities for me. So I feel I should take care of any requests from anyone in the plant staff as expeditiously as possible.

While I am thinking along those lines, I am trying to manage “fallout” from other processes. I call it fallout because none of these things should warrant my attention if you just looked at my list of priorities. But they are issues tied to major efforts inside or outside of our plant, and there are other people involved who can’t or won’t just sit back and cool there heels about the issue. If I know that the issue can best be addressed by someone else I try to send people on their way with a tip for best results (i.e. this is how you know to ask this person, or be sure to have this information on hand when you ask that question). But often enough I believe I am the person best able to deal with the issue, and if I am not involved the problem will not be resolved correctly, completely, or in time; or it might possibly be resolved completely, but other people will have to go through extra effort and do some guessing and asking while I am confident I can get the relevant information much more quickly.

I don’t like to pass a problem along if I know the person I am giving it to could benefit from something I could add. So there are many things that, if I had an extreme situation on hand, I could just shrug and say, “Sorry, can’t help,” but if I am just busy I know the next person in line is too, and I don’t want to slack off what I could provide.

One of the things which is not my top priority is coordinating expedited orders. But even though this is not my top priority, if you don’t take care of an expedite in a timely fashion it is not being expedited, is it? And usually you will hear about it again until you get it taken care of, anyway. So that goes onto the must-do list, and while I am opening those e-mails it is hard not to check the others.

Most of the stuff I nominally should be doing the people I am supposed to be supporting are not all that interested in, and most of the stuff the people I am supposed to be supporting want me to do I nominally should not be doing. They are constantly pushing the boundaries of what my boss and the rest of the corporation have set as business policy.

For most of May and June I have been working frantically every day, but at the end of every day and every week I am not sure what I was working on. I don’t know what I am doing. I know how to do every particular thing that comes up for me to do, but in the larger picture I don’t know what I am working to accomplish, who it is benefitting, and if it makes any difference what I did by the next day or next week.

I have been able to relieve that somewhat in the last week or so by documenting what I am doing as I am doing it. Often enough there are gaps in my log because I got carried away doing things and forgot to jot down a note, but overall I can look back at the list at the end of the day and say, “Well, that’s what I did. That’s where the time went.”

Today I started the day thinking my day was mostly free and intending to do some work to reduce the time taken in some routine chores. I never even began that, though, because during the events of the day I began to think that maybe a different project was more urgently needed to try to help sooth some issues of contention between the local site and my boss. I did manage to get started on that but by the end of the day I felt maybe I should have been working frantically on a whole different line of work which is really vain, because it accomplishes little that wouldn’t happen anyway–trying to force things to ship this month that would ship readily enough in another week or so. I try to avoid that, but the whole corporation is in an uproar about missing financial goals, and sometimes you have to just do the stupid work with the rest of the team.

My morale has been at a low ebb anyway because there doesn’t seem to have been any great disaster, or really much notice at all, from my leaving my last position and not being replaced. That will pretty well make you feel worthless. I am easily reached if there was some kind of crisis where my help was needed, and I have been flattered and somewhat cheered by a number of people outside the plant coming to me because they need something actually taken care of; but outsiders develop a knack for soft targets, and it is not necessarily my expertise that brings them to me as my willingness to jump through hoops and make work for other people in the plant.

And generally, that’s what it feels like I have been doing–in my current job and, in retrospect, in my previous job. There isn’t any actual work that is going undone with my departure, just all the drama and fanfare that went along with me helping with the work. You take out my excitable personality, leave some people a little more jaded and a little more willing to let things sort themselves out, and when it’s all said and done there’s not really any less accomplished.

I know a lot of this is the same all over. I know that even when you have a boss who’s right near by there are still multiple priorities, still the possibility of frantic working in circles. Better a boss far away than one who’s constantly pulling you from one thing to the next! Ultimately everyone has to manage their own time because all bosses will pile things on until you manage to get the critical projects done but not the lesser tasks.

I think I will learn to manage my work a little better, in time. Give me a few more months and I will start to wear grooves for myself in how I handle my job. Then I’ll start whining that I’m bored. Right now, when I’m not at work, my mind is still at work, fretting. It’s not productive thinking, just “What did I not get done today? What do I have to do tomorrow? What can I do tomorrow? How is tomorrow going to be different from today? What can I do differently than today? What did I not get done? What kept me from doing it? What should my priorities be tomorrow?” And on and on in endless questions, always asking the next question and never finding any answers.

I wonder if some of the reason I have worked so much over time is just to convince myself that it really is critical that I do . . .you know, the stuff I’m doing. But I know it was important, because if it wasn’t critical there’s no way I would have let it stop me from doing, you know, all those other critically important projects that haven’t been started for months without anyone besides me noticing.

Yeah, it’s just life, really. Not that special, and I’d complain I was bored if I knew exactly what I was going to do every day. But it’s got me in a tizzy, too distracted and disoriented to give any interesting commentary on what I am doing.

I have not accumulated a wealth of professional resources, but I know this one is a keeper. Evil HR Lady is the only professional blog I have read for hours at a time, and wished I was clearheaded enough to keep reading. She has one of those blogs that you are sure can explain the entire universe if you can just read everything that’s on there.

Evil HR Lady could be a boring blog written by a malcontent about how odious it is to make triplicate copies of everything. But it is not. It’s about what brings smiles and what brings frowns to the people who hire and fire–the HR people, but also the managers who work with the HR people to accomplish their objectives.

It’s like eavesdropping on the closed-door meetings that you normally hear about through rumor and speculation. All the identifying personal and corporate details are redacted, but you can still see how the process works. You can understand.

Take this autopsy of a botched firing. I can completely sympathize with the enquirer and yet, as the Evil HR Lady deconstructs, I can clearly see how things suddenly and unexpectedly turned out ugly.

I feel like this is the HR mentoring I have never received, and I’m trying to make up for lost time by archive-diving.

The original plan was for me to fly out of state to my boss’ headquarters and spend as much time as I needed learning the ins and outs of how his home-based department operated so that I can work in tandem with them in my remote location. One of the key items on the agenda was for me to show the team some of the things I was doing in Access to get more and better data.

About the same time our plant financial manager declared that the site he used to work at did not have the same difficulty with the shipping software that we were having, and someone should go see why. The shipping manager nominated me. My boss said that site was not far from his location so I could go ahead and include it in my trip.

It turned out that the Access expert of the main group would be on long-overdue vacation while I was in the area. I thought I could probably get what I needed from spending half a day in the factory the financial manager came from, a day with my boss’ team, and half a day in the central warehouse nearby. But my boss’ team leader, G.J., suggested I needed at least four days, so I left Tuesday morning.

The idea that the exemplary factory is “close” to the headquarters is indisputable when contemplating the interstate miles I had to fly in any case, but as it was over two hours of driving and travelling by air is only efficiently fast while actually in the air, it took me nearly the entire day of Tuesday to get to my first destination. Upon arriving I found my boss and several people I have worked with remotely all engaged in a project at the factory that I was conscripted into without preamble.

Since I was asked by my boss to stay involved for the entire day of Wednesday, the original plan of driving up to the management headquarters mid-Wednesday went out the window. So I began the trip of three hours or so at about 7 pm, having awoken at 5 am and not slept well the night before (due to general excitement; the hotel was blameless). I was making this trip utterly dependent on the navigational computer in the rental car and the address of the hotel printed on my itinerary. This navigational computer had not been able to properly locate the factory I went to first, but it got me within site of the place and I had a phone call on the way that gave me all the further help I needed.

Well, you have probably already guessed that my reliance on the navigator betrayed me. I pulled off an exit, drove past a cluster of hotels and shops, and continued on into abruptly empty countryside. I drove through an intersection that was marked off on one side, “Road Closed, Bridge Out.” And then, in the middle of nowhere, the navigator cheerfully announced, “You have arrived at your destination.”

That’s when I realized I forgot to bring a tent.

Now what shall I do? Everyone I might call is in bed. I could put an address into the navigator, but the only address anywhere in the reasonably near vicinity I had any interest in reaching was the hotel, and that hadn’t turned out too well.

I figured it was a quirk of the navigator and I had passed my hotel earlier, so I turned around and headed back. I thought I knew how to retrace my steps (although the navigator did not provide me with this option, at least as far as I know). But when I thought I needed to go straight through an intersection I saw the orange signs glowing at me saying “Bridge Out” and “Road Closed.”

Well, crap. I must have remembered wrong. I turned off the other way and drove on a bit, hoping I would suddenly realize my earlier mistake. But no. It looked worse and worse. I stopped again, panned the navigator around until I got an idea of where the highway was, and headed back. But the navigator showed only a small bit of map at a time and turned when I turned, making it hard for me to follow my own ad-hoc directions. Again, the orange signs, and no clear alternate route.

After wandering back and forth through the area a bit I finally realized that the signs I was seeing were slightly off to the side of where I need to proceed “straight” through the intersection. In other words, my initial sense of direction was okay, it was my night vision that was misleading.

I had discovered, when reviewing my itinerary, that the name of my hotel was not shown. It had an illegible logo and an address, but no name. This presented a great consternation because I had hoped the navigator would more accurately identify the hotel by its name than by its street address, but I could not even attempt it.

Finally I arrived at the hotel I had passed when getting off of the highway. I went in and said, “I am really not sure I am in the right hotel, but do you have a reservation for me?”

The answer was no. So I asked if they could help me figure out which hotel I did have a reservation for. Fortunately the attendant was willing to help–although actually the phone number was printed on my itinerary, though I had not noticed it in my urgency–and called, got directions, and sent me on my way.

Of course after the long day and disorienting experiences I was no longer sure I was following my new directions even when I was, but fortunately the hotel was clearly visible as I took the exit and when I went into this hotel and asked if there were reservations in my name the answer was yes. If there hadn’t been I might have asked for any vacancy anyway, to heck with the itinerary; I could not take much more wandering around in the night.

Normally I have been avoiding clear identifiers on this site, but for anyone who may be risking a similar commitment I will inform you that I was using the Hertz Neverlost on a Magellan navigator. I have heard of similar misdirections from a Garmin system as well. So my advice, for those who are considering a navigator: don’t rely on it. It can be helpful, but it is not reliable, and you should have a more proven back-up option available to you. Also, do plan to take the time to review the system, because they (or at least mine) are not quite intuitive enough to just jump in and start driving without mistaking the directions given a few times.

There’s an interesting metaphor in the whole experience, if I am not simply gratifying myself making it up. The main purpose of my trip was to complete my training for my new role in Acme at our site. The main attraction, for me, was the sense of importance and connectedness I get in unreasonable amounts from making long trips to work with people. In that vein, it only inflated my ego that I was diverted from my original purpose in the financial manager’s star site to participate in a project for my boss. I was treated in some measure as an expert, out of proportion with my actual knowledge or effectiveness, I fear, but all the same quite titillating. So there was a certain sense in this trip that I had arrived as a notable figure and a resource across sites within Acme, two years from being temp with no background in anything related to Acme or its business processes except some trifling experience with Access.

But all that takes a hollow tone in light of the conversation I had with my boss shortly before leaving on Friday. I am now to set aside the definition of my role that has just been fully delivered and give my utmost attention to supporting the local plant, because it stands in real danger due to poor performance. Should things come to the point where my services are no longer needed in this plant, I do not see where Acme can make me an offer I would accept, due to my geographic preferences–even if they chose to make an offer, as I flatter myself there’s a good chance they would.

Yes, it is rather like arriving at nowhere.

This latest job realignment is the most predictable thing that has happened in my short career, all prior changes coming to me from hitherto unguessed sources, so I don’t take the boundaries of my perceived probabilities as any fair judge of the future.

One of the overlaps between my old job duties and my new duties is monitoring an effort to improve our service to a key customer. As with a similar initiative about a year ago, I am frustrated with merely noting the problems we are having. I don’t think using extraordinary focus to compensate for systemic issues qualifies as a solution, and I don’t think making note of problems qualifies as fixing them. Without any administrative authority, there is nothing else I can do except try to improve the detail of my information and hone it to suggest solutions to those who do have authority.

The difficulty in obtaining detailed information comes from lack of time and access. The most revealing information is not available by simply querying the factory database (which I am good at). The real story occurs outside the awkward confines of the inappropriate computer system, and requires communicating with actors in other departments. The people in positions to actively manage these problems don’t provide any information helpful in understanding the cause of these problem by way of e-mail; by habit, or convenience, they will only give brief information on when the problem will be overcome (or worked around), not what caused it and what might cure it permanently.

When my new manager and his assistant for strategic accounts were planning to come up to our factory in the first full week of May, I began scheduling meetings with all these key players so that the locals were fully aware of the urgency and so my manager knew the personalities and difficulties I faced. All that went out the window when high-level corporate management decided to visit the factory in the same week. But just before that announcement came through, I got a brusque dismissal from the purchasing manager who could not understand why I wanted to bother him with yet another meeting.

Initially he declined my electronic invitation with a note asking what on earth I wanted. I went to see him in person and was told he was too busy for a meeting and that my manager’s assistant (i.e. someone more important than me) should just phone him. His terseness was not going over well with me and I was trying to choose my words carefully so as not to simply back-talk with something inflammatory and escalating, but in the end I walked out. I sent him a long e-mail to explain thoroughly and, I hoped, clearly why it was important that he meet, as this very important customer has gotten quite impatient and is asking very pressing questions, for which I must supply answers on behalf of our site.

That confrontation was completely sidelined with the visit of the corporate brass. After my new boss had explained my job to me during that week, I realized that I would need to give more time to following through on the questions I had for different departments, and I could not afford to indulge other people’s impatience or busyness if I were to do my job well. Late in this week I found I could put off talking to the purchasing manager no longer, and sent him another invitation, stating that if he could not meet at the indicated time to please suggest another time.

He sent it back refused without comment.

Now I had the choice of going to see him in person, again, and likely have him more riled up than the first time, or simply turning the matter over to my manager who outranks him. I did not want to run off tattling that Johnny doesn’t play nice if I could get through the problem myself, but I also very much doubted that I was going to get anywhere on my own. I also wanted to leave a little time for any follow-up messages from the purchasing manager that would suggest a new meeting time.

While weighing my options, the assistant for special accounts called me to get his daily update and I asked his opinion. He said to elevate it; take it to my supervisor and ask his advice. That fit with my general inclination and I was prepared to do it as soon as I got off the phone.

Before I finished discussing other matters with the assistant, though, the purchasing manager showed up at my desk. I was preparing myself for another tirade as I got off the phone, but instead my questions were answered thoroughly and without snarky remarks. I still detected impatience, but not liking something you must do is no crime if you nevertheless do it.

So I was spared needlessly aggravating a strained relationship. As soon as I try to start pushing the boundaries my job seems to become a series of well-meaning missteps, and this one, at least, was prevented. It was an appreciated blessing.

Some of my despair in anticipation of this past week proved unfounded. I had adequate time to talk with my new boss and get a clear understanding of what he expects from me. Various anecdotes from the four days he was in the plant also suggest that he has the influence and inclination to support me in the work he wants me to do, politically and materially. This should not be taken as settled fact until demonstrated, but the early indications are good. And a few of my key concerns were happily met, such as moving out of my current work area so I don’t cover functions of my old role by default.

I won’t be moving until I catch up on the backlog of claims. My boss said, and I agree, that the responsibility for the claims should not be passed off with as a big mess. But this presents a challenge since I have to get up to speed in my new role, which will include a trip near the end of the month. I will probably put in a lot of overtime.

My new role is to monitor the sales orders and report on all kinds of problems, including the number and age of past-due orders. Reducing the number of past due orders is my responsibility. Except I can’t actually do anything about it. As my boss said, neither he nor I have any authority over anybody (aside from his authority over me and his team); all we can do is present information on the problems and hope that the people in charge of the actual work take the cue to make the actual improvements. When I asked what would measure my job performance that I could actually control, my boss again said there wasn’t any good way to measure it and he himself was also in the same boat.

So I still have a job that wouldn’t exist if other people were doing their jobs, and my job is still fundamentally to point out how other people are not doing their jobs or could be doing it better. This is my third post-college job and every position so far has had this aspect of intangibility. Clearly I am being groomed for an out-of-touch management position.

Meanwhile, the Mean Scary Guy was back in town, the plant manager’s boss’ boss. He made it quite clear that our branch of Acme is not performing satisfactorily. Everyone is thoroughly scared, but I don’t think anyone actually understands what ought to be done. There is a chance, then, that whatever I present or suggest will be seized upon as a chance for redemption, but it is really more likely that anything I offer will be ignored because everyone is already trying to save themselves using whatever they regard as the best means.

Of course, as Mean Scary Guy put it, whatever they are currently doing is wrong because it isn’t working. But this is not sufficient to teach them what they ought to do. I think they will approach the same problems the same way, and just try harder and point fingers more desperately. I think you would need to change the composition of the management before you expect the method of execution to change.

I spent a considerable portion of the week angry, and in fact woke up angry Monday morning after dreaming about workplace injustices. I don’t care to revisit the details, but, like Western pioneers marking bad water, I will give a brief notice on these ill fortunes. Perhaps when some history has accumulated around these events there will be something useful to learn from them.

Since I found out that I have a new job I have been waiting to be taught what it is. At last I heard when my new boss would arrive to explain my new job: next week, present Monday afternoon and Tuesday. This was the gleaming light in the distance signalling a change of routine, a relief from boredom and an escape from the some of the daggers of role uncertainty being thrown my way. Positioned as I am within a department with inadequate (and recently reduced) manpower, I play a part in many roles but none with excellence, and so I am liable for criticism on whatever part of my job the critic things I should have done completely.

The inadequacies of this situation have been building up over time, especially since I stopped trying to cover the gaps with liberal overtime months ago. In recent weeks it has become more acute and I have been weathering the storm by telling myself a measure of clarity will be brought when my boss arrives and tells those various critics just how far my responsibilities extend. During this last week the attacks have gotten worse, more directly against my ally P.B. than against myself. But I have been hoping for a double advantage from my new role; one, in concentrating my duties to allow me to point to the actual source of the problems (which is not P.B.), and two, in cutting away some of the duties I have been partly fulfilling, prompt the hiring of a replacement that would relieve some of the strain on P.B.’s department.

I spent about four hours of overtime one night lining up meetings and preparing presentations to set the stage for my boss’ visit, planning to get him thoroughly acquainted with the personalties inclined to redefine my job and resist my execution of assigned duties. One of the key meetings on this agenda was with the plant manager, and I hoped that he and my new boss could reach a solid understanding of my role that would not be shaken by the blustering of lesser players. But I found out on Friday that the whole visit had been sidelined by visits in the same week by much higher-ranking personalities to discuss much more momentous subjects. Most of the people on the schedule of meetings would be preoccupied with these dignitaries and their strategy sessions, including my own boss; rather than being a principle focus of these two days, the question of my responsibilities is now a trifling matter to be taken care of in free time, as it is found. Undoubtedly many of the people in the factory who are most likely to cause me trouble will be unable to find any time at all to have their hands tied by some visiting manager whose importance is vastly overshadowed by the other royalty they could be courting.

So now instead of anticipating a few days to hammer out the finer details of my job, I am looking forward to a hectic week in which I receive more instructions that are not clearly defined in priority, and no clear obsolescence of existing duties; and when the week is over dealing with the same cast of characters who have their own notions of what I ought to do safely intact, so that I will spend half my energy convincing people that I have the right and responsibility to ask and to attempt what I do.

Incidentally, the big meeting is to discuss a mammoth backward step that some unenlightened potentate of the sales force has proposed to our order fulfillment strategy. So that’s the uranium lining to that dark cloud.