There Is No Meat In This Hamburger

I'm far from in the flow, especially work-wise. I mean I'm not at all in the state where I'm fully immersed and focused on my tasks and projects.

We are facing another reorganisation. It's the forth affecting me directly in 4½ years (if I counted correctly). Each had as the side-effect that it got more difficult for me to perform my tasks - that is, the organisation got more complex, I had more interfaces to deal with and landed between more millstones. Yes, if you can do it more complex, my caring employer does it.

Rumours had been floating around for a while. Finally last week I've been informed officially that there is another round due in a month. Our team will be dispersed to four different departments. We are still supposed to work together in the project but four more line managers will have the chance to play silly games with us. In our organisation, line managers are far more powerful than project managers. In addition, the processes will be more complex, more people will be involved, which increases costs and decreases productivity. A certain portion of my salary is profit and performance based, thus this reorganisation will have direct negative consequences on my salary.

In this mess, I'm offered a position with an impressive and flashy title, however, I do not see that this position comes with the competences needed to do the job, or in other words, there is no meat in this hamburger.

There are nice projects on the horizon, but right now it's just digging at the coal face. Is it time for a transition?

Wtf?

It might be just utter carelessness, however this week the brass of my caring employer's engineering department went one step too far. An engineer showed up in my office and demanded to be told about the project I'm working on since the beginning of this year and I'm supposed to work on for about the next 5 years. I'm the engineering project manager and also responsible for the systems engineering. It turned out that bloke was told that he has the same role and he should inform himself. Screw-ups like that don't just happen, do they?

Toño called it an early night and left me sufficient wine to get into a good mood. So here is a picture from 1993 when I was in a seriously good mood:



I dare to cite an older post of mine:

# On Kamchatka, I was told that the flight back was postponed by a week due to lack of fuel.

# I then bought some smoked salmon and drunk a bottle of vodka, which the salesman offered because he never had a Swiss customer before. There is photographic evidence that I then tried to teach my dead and already smoked fish to smoke a cigarette (not that I remember this).

# Thanks to bribery, we got a flight three days later.

# The first money given was rejected because the dollar bills were not clean and new enough.

# At the bottom of the stairs to the plane we had a fistfight, because we bribed more than others and were given access first. The ones who bribed less did not liked this. There were no boarding cards.

Cutlery - Revisited

There is not every thing just fine here in México. There is a constant lack of decent cutlery. Like today when I was given a nice sirloin steak for lunch which I was supposed to eat with a effin plastic fork and nothing else. I had to wrap the meat in some tortillas and had to bite pieces off it. wtf?

Swisscom is synonym for lacy bunch of liars

In November last year, I decided to go 3G on my mobile service and to get rid of my landline. I went to a shop of my (not so) service provider Swisscom to get my questions answered and the transition processes rolling. One of my questions was if I could keep my email address if I went forward with these changes. The shop girls answer: Yes, you can keep it forever. I should had recorded this. The question was particularly important to me since this is my main a-side email address.

A few days later, one could not reach me over my landline any more, although I had to pay for further two months. I didn't mind, since I did hardly used it anyway and did not complain. However, when the landline service finally and officially run out, the email account was blocked immediately too.

On the same day, I went to their webpage, and filled the appropriate form to complain. I got an acknowledgement of receipt and since then absolutely nada.

By the way, it took Swisscom more than three weeks to swap my mobile service to 3G.

To look a bit on the bright side of my Swisscom experience, this is the landline hardware I got rid of:

Early Appreciation

I cycle to work and the first thing I face when entering the premises is to cross 6 rails (that have been out of operation for almost a decade) while turning to the right. After parking the bike, I have to walk along 16 parking fields for cars to reach the entrance. Especially the first step is great fun at sub zero temperatures (I did break some bike parts due to this some years ago).

One of the values my caring employer has proclaimed itself is appreciation. So I always get a good impression of the appreciation that is show towards cyclists before I even clock in.



Picture taken with Hipstamatic, equipped with Helga Viking lense, on Blank film. Hipstamatic has been introduced to me by Borstal Boy.

Happy Advent

We could light the first candle in this year's Advent. At this point we Swiss gave up on being festive. First, we failed to turn swords into ploughshares by saying nay to put a ban on arms export* into our constitution (sorry World Peace). Nevertheless, we still managed to mess things up even more seriously by saying aye to put a ban on minarets into our constitution. We are still allowed to export arms but a significant part of the arms market is probably not all to keen to ask for ours. Besides now, carrying a Swiss passport will be the same as painting a bull's eye on the forehead when travelling certain countries (Hi Americans, we are now in the same boat). Blatant racism is not only complete stupidity, it puts us into the centre of cross-hairs. And these are the people who said aye to registered partnership for The Gays™ a few years back? I actually thought my compatriots were not so unreasonable. Fail!

* I actually am quite happy about this, since exported arms are my bread and butter.

Jammed by Visual Pollution

Sorry, another work related rant... but I just lost an hour of my precious life to visual pollution.

I was called to a compulsory course on my caring employer's new appraisal system. It lasted an hour, which is still better than the one about the new wage system which took four. The course was set at 8am, a time where my receivers are still quite far from operational. However, they were completely jammed when they detected that the presenter was dressed in worst 80es style combination: too long jacket left unbuttoned, shirt, tie and jeans. It did not help either that the jeans were so unfitting they could turn you straight and that his hair was touching the collar.

The day can go only uphill from here.

PS: we have also a new tool to submit/associate our worked hours to project accounts. The button you have to press to submit the data is labelled "Interrupt". Wtf?

I'm all right Jack, pull up the ladder

I'm a bit in a funk when it comes to work right now, or more in a rather indifferent après moi, le déluge kind of mood. Because it seems that doing a decent job does not solve anything. The mess is only get bigger.

The German idiom the fish reeks at its head describes it quite well. Things are rather badly organised around here so that you are given only quicksand under your feet.

One of the best teachers I've ever had was in organisation. He taught me the Hamburger Job Model: A good job is organised like a good hamburger. The buns and the meat have the same diameter and there is a balance between the amount of bread and meat:



The upper bun represents the tasks, the lower the responsibilities and the meat are the competences to get from the tasks to the responsibilities. Whatever, the real life Job Hamburger looks more like this:



You have got certain tasks, have to put your neck on the line for like everything and are not served any meat at all. How I'm supposed to achieve anything on that diet?

Keelhauling

This might be the end of this blog. I'm not about to quit but the there is a significant likelihood that I might be dragged along the keel of a warship this Monday.



We are about to install new software. Since such systems can bear danger to life and limb, they are subject to severe testing. So we will be at sea for the entire week carrying out those tests.*

Of course, the customer expects all known open items to be closed and will but emphasis on testing them. Well, as project life goes, there are delays, key engineers are not available and you haven't finished the job on time. This is bad, but when you are honest with the customer those things can be discussed. There is even a formal way of telling him.

Such a document had been sent to the customer. Since I'm the one who will face the customer on Monday, I'd asked for a copy of it, which I finally received yesterday. In the evening, when I was collecting my things for the trip, I breezed through it:

1. Essential still open items are not listed as still open.
2. I am supposedly the author of this document, although I had not written this concoction of lies.

There is no way to rectify this before Monday and there is no way the customer will not find out. Since I'm both the alleged liar and the messenger, I'm completely fucked and not in a good way.

Should I be loyal to my caring employer present me as an out and out liar or should I be honest with the customer and present my caring employer as an out and out liar?

*better steer clear of the Baltic Sea.

Added Later

"It's about trust. I can overlook flaws, but if you can't trust someone, they're worthless." Patty Hewes - Damages, Season 2