Office Space

It keeps everything from happening at once.

Only twelve days in and it’s already been an interesting year.

I had a job interview last Friday with a firm that has been head hunting me for over a year. They’re a good company, a vendor that provides an essential web-based application to the organization I work for now. Smart people, progressive, both in the small and large sense, who understand that it’s what you produce not what you wear while you’re producing it that matters. They recognize the benefits of keeping their employees happy. In a lot of ways, they embody the best of the mentality that came out of the dot com era: work hard, play hard, try to remember you have a life outside the office.

My interview was at 9am and I was told to allow for an hour. It took two. I find that the interview that runs over because you ended up talking longer is a good sign; generally if they don’t like you they’ve made up their mind in the first 20 minutes or so. We talked about my philosophy of tech support – communicate, communicate, communicate – and about side projects I might be interested in doing – um, yes, the HTML code that your application puts out is unstylable because it’s not standards compliant and even unrelated elements are classed – and about which comic book or cartoon character, past or present, I would choose to be if I could choose one (yeah, it’s that kinda place). And we talked about salary, which is the place I thought it would all go to hell. They were fine with my floor, and fine with my preferred starting point for negotiations which is $5,000 a year above my floor.

I would say it went well given that in the time it took me to leave their offices, get the subway, ride one stop, and walk to my office they made me a formal offer that included a week’s more vacation than I get at my current job, 6 more administrative days off (aka: public holidays) than I get now, and $5,000 more a year than my current stated salary. The only catch was the level of support they expected me to provide to my clients.

The job would have been supporting 10 or 12 of their biggest clients, and it would have required me to be “on call” until midnight every night. That would have meant not only would I have to actually see midnight every night – seriously, that 9:30 bed time I railed against in high school…little did I know that it was my mid-life future – it would have required me to take on the additional expense of an actual cell phone plan rather than the pay-as-you-go personal pay phone I carry around now.

The expense wouldn’t have been a problem. It was the time.

I am a little OCD about my job. It’s the way my mind works about any problem, really: take the problem in, throw it into the processing unit to be worked on in the background, and eventually find a solution based on the stated parameters – you can see this process at work every week if you watch House; when he has his revelatory moment during which he solves the case after all their floundering you’re seeing the end point of this type of problem solving. And because I am a little OCD about my job, I’ve spent the last five years very consciously drawing a line between work time and home time with clear markers (that’s why when I do work at home I actually get completely dressed rather than wearing my jammies; dressed means work time).

Being “on call” would mean that I could never relax, that I would always be alert for the phone ringing, always waiting for someone to throw a hand grenade at me so I could respond to it. And while I can do combat readiness, it’s no way to live daily if not absolutely necessary.

To put it more bluntly: the idea that a client could call me at any time of the day or night actually gave me a rash while I was thinking about it. Literally, big red splotches on my chest and neck.

So instead of doing what seems even in fourth or fifth thoughts like the smart thing and taking the job – more money, better holidays, stable company – I declined the offer to stay at the creaky, robbing Peter to pay Paul, Christ, I didn’t mail my paycheck until Monday I hope it clears, what do you mean we get MLK day off and not another holiday until the end of May? non-profit because even with the shitty holidays it does give on a daily basis me more of the only thing you ever really run out of.

Days of wine and gelato

Vacation can be about a lot of things: it can be about seeing new places, visiting family, or just not being where you normally are. Most of the time vacation is about relaxing which is why quite often vacation is anything but. People on vacation feel as if they “should” be relaxed and very little works less successfully than forcing yourself to relax. But when you scrape away all the ideas about relaxation and “de-stressing” and education and “quality time” with the family, most vacation is about changing your perspective.

Humans are creatures of habit. A study last year in Europe that tracked people’s movements via cell phone revealed that “[t]he vast majority of people move around over a very short distance – around five to 10km [approximately 3-6 miles]…” It stands to reason, then, that vacation is about breaking habits. And nothing breaks habits like being dropped in a foreign environment, especially one in which you are forced to deal with a different currency and a different language.

Traveling in a completely foreign environment forces you to be present and to engage with the world. The struggle to meet your basic needs – food, shelter, security, toilet – forces you to pay attention to what is going on around you and to really consider not only your choices but what you actually want rather than what is convenient, habitual, or what you think you “should” be choosing. It also forces you to prioritize what is really important and necessary and what isn’t.

One of my problems is that I get too wrapped up in my work. I’m lucky in that I have a job that allows me to work to my strengths. It requires creativity both of the traditional kind and the “we’ve got a cotton swab, five inches of string, and a piece of duct tape and we need to build a working rocket in 15 minutes” kind. Did I mention there was problem solving involved? Yeah, I get a kick out of that. It’s also one of the few white collar careers where at the end of the day I can point to something, even if it is something as fungible as a web site design or a bit of content that someone may or may not read, and say “that’s what I did today.” Since I work in a progressive non-profit I am, theoretically, “doing good” at my job. But even though I work some place where we strive to do more good than we do harm, the simple fact is that my job is not important, or at least not immediately, tangibly important.

How do I know this? Simple. I answered these three questions: If I fail to do my job, or I do my job badly will anyone:

suffer injury
be subjected to conditions which could make them ill
die

For me, the answer to all of these questions is no, and unless the answer to at least one of these questions is yes, your job isn’t important.

Now, a very rational argument could be made that we are all parts of a much larger system and that if you extend the impact of someone’s failure to do his job well far enough that eventually the answer to one of these questions is yes, but the reality is that extension of impact is an intellectual exercise and most of us do work that on a daily basis really just doesn’t matter.

This is not a bad thing.

Knowing that my work is just a way to finance the rest of my life is fine, but feeling it is something completely different.Â And I’ve been feeling it lately.

Actually feeling this will keep me from getting caught up in the artificial self-importance that seems to stank up every organization, non-profit or otherwise, but more importantly it will allow me to correctly budget without being unduly influenced the time I have in the face of way too many responsibilities.

With luck, practice, and concerted effort, I can keep this balance.Â And while I’m trying to do that I will keep in mind this lovely quote from Bertrand Russell: “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

Time vs. Money

In the work that I do I often get the question “Is it possible to….[fill in extraordinarily complicated idea here]” and depending upon the person asking the question sometimes I actually answer and sometimes I give them the standard, smart ass response: “With enough time and enough money, anything is possible.”

There is an axiom in my field that you can spend time or you can spend money but you can’t not spend both. I’ve talked a little bit about this before. In truth, much of life comes down to the time vs. money quandary.

Those of us not lucky enough to be born with trust funds are forced to trade our time and skills for money on a daily basis. The concept that we’re trading our time for their money is particularly easy to lose sight of if you’ve got an especially keen mind and an overactive work ethic. Your employer generally gets more work than is being paid for because you are driven to finish that project or to do better. This work ethic/desire/compulsion causes acute conflicts in situations where those making the decisions are making decisions that seem non-sensical and anti-thetical to things like an organization’s long-term health, simple, transparent business practices, basic human dignity in the work place. You end up having to remind yourself that they buy your time and if they want to use it stupidly, there’s not much you can do about it if the requests don’t violate your personal boundaries or morals.

Since, for most of us, our relationship with our employer boils down to an exchange of time for money, being given an opportunity to actively choose time or money is a strange, disorienting situation in which to find yourself. I was given just such an opportunity recently.

It turns out that the options for “voluntary measures” my company is offering included not only the ridiculous in concept and even more ridiculous in practice, “pay deferral:”

PAY DEFERRAL:

I am willing to have my pay reduced now with the understanding that I would be repaid by December 2009 provided funds are reasonably available at that time. I would agree to a deferral of: ” $______________ for the time period of ____________to ___________. I would like it to be a fixed amount per pay period, or ” ____day(s) of my salary per pay period.

[Notice how it doesn’t say what the repayment timeframe is if the funds aren’t “reasonably available” by December 2009?]

but also the slightly more reasonable option of “unpaid leave:”

UNPAID LEAVE:

I will take ______________days of unpaid leave (NOTE: you can’t use vacation time)

[Ah, the Naderfication of everything continues: Of course you can’t use vacation time; vacation time is paid leave.]

as well as the opportunity to give up our paltry, but “guaranteed” baseline yearly raise:

RAISES:

I will not take any raise for which I may be eligible from June 2009 – May 2010.

[My company doesn’t give raises based on merit as a rule. No, we give a small, but guaranteed “baseline” raise thereby institutionalizing mediocrity.]

If you look at this long enough, it appears as what it really is: an opportunity to trade money for time.

Not to whine about my job, but I am grossly overworked. Even without major projects I could easily work 50 hours a week every week without breaking a sweat. I serve upwards of 100 internal clients with no idea who is going to be requesting what on a daily basis, and, near as I can tell, I’m the only person in the organization who has to justify how I do my job to anyone who might have a criticism on a regular basis. I will also admit that I am, likely, the only one in the organization who has gotten the mythical merit increase in the past two years.

I sat down and I did the math. Giving up 12 days (that works out to a three day weekend every weekend between June 19th and September 4) works out to roughly slightly less than the raise I received last October. I figure I can live on last year’s salary for three months. So for me, giving up the money was worth getting the time.

My salary doesn't even appear on this bell graph. That's sort of depressing.

I also sat down and did some research and determined that if I’m going to get paid better in my next job, it might help if my title actually reflected my responsibilities: I traded this year’s baseline raise for a bump in title. It may seem silly now, but in a year or 18 months when I’m negotiating salary for a new job my new title will be worth $5,000 to $8,000 a year more in starting pay.

What’s most amusing about all of this is that in our discussion about my “voluntary measures” offer TemporaryBoss’ first question was “How will this affect work flow?” Clearly, they don’t recognize that they can have the time or the money, but not both.

“In this time of financial trouble…”

I’ve worked at non-profits of one flavor or another for over a decade now. Financial hardship and accounting and budgeting practices that would astound even the quants at AIG are commonplace so I’m rarely amazed at the monetary machinations around me. Right now, I find myself utterly stunned.

My connection to the grapevine is strong at work. My company is going to start doing “voluntary furloughs” in the next pay period. Except, management has no idea what “furlough” actually means.

What they mean is: You defer your salary per a written agreement until the “current financial difficulties” have passed and you keep working full time. Now, as much as I enjoy the tasks that I do at work and I like the people I work with, my relationship with my employer is basically transactional: I need something (money) and they need something (the skills I have + the time of the practitioner of those skills).

My first, gut reaction to this unreasonable request (seriously, is Visa going to “defer” charging me interest until later? I think not.) is to say “You don’t pay me; I don’t work.”

One of my co-workers says this isn’t the first time this has happened and that the last time it did everyone got paid back in full. And that’s fine and all, but something sticks.

If I didn’t need the money I wouldn’t go there every day. And yes, I could live on less than what I make, but that’s not the point. What shocks me is that Management would have the gall to say “Hey, we can’t pay you but give us your time and your skills and your smarts anyway!” That’s called volunteering not employment.

So while I am at the top end of the middle of the pay scale in my employer’s structure, I’m also a one-person department in a critical role: I will be one of the last people they layoff. I don’t want to be selfish – I’d be happy to take a “furlough Friday” every week this summer if that would help – but this time I don’t think I’m taking one for the team.

The witch isn’t dead exactly…

Strange days indeed the past few have been. In addition to suddenly feeling the need to mimic Yoda, I find myself loose and relaxed. Why? ScreamyBoss announced last week that he has resigned.

So yes, while he’s moving on to a better job that pays more money which will go farther and while he doesn’t really deserve all of those things – he is, after all, ScreamyBoss – the net result to me is still a benefit. He’s out of my face.

I expect that I’ll be boss-less for at least six months. Even though our FearlessLeader (aka: BigBoss) is “committed to keeping the department fully staffed” I’m sure that other senior members of the management team would like to be saving the salary in this economy.

Either way, it’s going to take a while for them to replace him which means I get to do my job without having to do the additional job of fighting my boss to do my job. And if they are smart they’ll hire my current coworker to replace him.

Even if they aren’t, right now this looks like a win.