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Transitions
By Jay | April 11, 2008
Whew! What a week. Another week of 12 hour days. I found myself arriving at work around 9am, leaving at 9pm, without even taking a proper lunchbreak — every day this week. It’s not healthy. I’m used to working out three times a week, biking, rollerblading, walking a lot. I haven’t been doing any of these things. I’m just working like a dog.
It has been a crisis atmosphere at work. The financial markets are still bad, which unsettles everybody. Long-time employees have been laid off. Our systems aren’t working properly and the knowledge base for maintaining them no longer exists. It’s a bad situation. We have a small footprint in the US now, with most of the work outsourced to India. But things in India are good now and people there tend to work with our company for a year or two and then move on, along with their knowledge. My boss has been overly demanding, but then I watch what he’s dealing with — a blow-up or a screw-up of some kind every single day — and I feel more pity than anger.
One of the secrets to my job security is that I understand how a certain highly important compliance system works, that no one else in our group or even the firm understands. There’s some risk involved if there is a failure in this system, which makes it s something that no one else wants to understand. I haven’t been happy lately, and as I wrote in my last couple entries, I’m thinking about moving on. So today I told my boss that it is risky to the firm to leave this knowledge all in one person’s head (I used the old “what if I get hit by a bus” line), so we are going to start working on documenting what I do and training other people to take on parts of my responsibilities. By agreeing doing this I have just increased my workload exponentially for the next month, but once I have finished documenting my knowledge, I will have a lot more freedom. I know that I could just give my two weeks notice & let my boss and co-workers deal with the problems, but this wouldn’t be ethical. I have been protecting my knowledge and using it to my advantage, so now that I am thinking of moving on, the right thing to do is to make sure that someone else can transition into my responsibilities.
On another note, someone at work noticed that I look thinner. While I haven’t been exercising, I also haven’t been eating nearly as much as usual, and I have lost weight. I look forward to the next time I get on the scale.
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