| I had a meeting with the Big Boss this week. He likes me. He really likes me. LOL. Seriously, though, the conversation went well and started off with him asking me to work on a major project for the department and each of its sub-groups. A lot of his ideas for going forward are things I had wanted to implement when I started but it wasn’t the right time and I am thrilled to be asked to take the lead on rolling them out to the organization.
However, we also had a talk about current boss and my insane workload. Wouldn’t have done that except boss threatened me with “black marks” and “dings” on my review on Wednesday based on delays on certain projects (most of with were due to his putting off key decision-making meetings or were otherwise beyond my control). I’ve been working 12+-hour days for the past few months so that just killed me. I told him straight out that if I saw a “black mark” on my review due to delays, I would be writing a formal rebuttal explaining the facts.
The conversation with Big Boss (initiated by him) was very productive and positive but I’m not sure how things will shake out. I’m hopeful. Hard to say, though. The day after our conversation, my boss came down to talk about my workload and told me to just tell the people in my group to go away when they need something and make them wait. He wants to sit down Monday to discuss my project load. The frustrating thing is that he has a very unrealistic expectation of the time that projects actually take. I am fast (really) but I also want to be accurate. And he just keeps loading more and more on me and telling me “just fit it in”. Of course, Friday he was back to his “don’t work more than 8 hours; just put things and people off where there are no firm deadlines” speech. Um… yeah. Been living in this passive aggressive nightmare for almost two years. He will tell me that and then get mad when things aren’t done. I tried to explain to him that not having something due that day doesn’t mean that I don’t need to make progress. I can’t “put things off” in order to only work 8 hours. Dumbass. Not to mention the fact that everyone in the group comes to me and he’s telling me to put them off. Um… okay. They will love that. Bottom line, I need a clear job description with my responsibilities. You can’t assign me responsibility to oversee at least four simultaneous programatic initiatives that only involve me and key stakeholders/executives and ALSO assign me to support a team of five attorneys on their initiatives, then tell me to tell the attorneys they have to wait. Or you can but you have to assign the support tasks to others so that the attorneys don’t fail in their missions. Grrr.
Anyway, I’m supposed to talk to my boss Monday to review my current task list. Ha. We will see how that plays out. Fortunately, yay, Big Boss agreed to pay for a professional certification course that I’ve wanted to take so at least I feel like there is some silver lining no matter what.
