The Job Thing

Now that Labor Day has come and gone, it seems as good a time as any to explain my job situation. On the one hand I still remember being an extremely naïve fifteen year old who didn’t necessarily know what he wanted to be when he grew up but knew for damn sure he didn’t want a job in which he would wear a suit, go to an office and work at a desk. So yes, growing up and selling out, the soul crushing, obligatory Office Space reference, all of that. But the current circumstances of my employment are, I think, worthy of a moment’s consideration.


(I just typed out a fairly exhaustive overview of my various job responsibilities over the past couple of years but it was lobotomizingly boring. I’ll try to keep it brief and punchy this time.)

I work for a government contractor, on a team that handles one of the thirty trillion miniscule little tasks that need to be done to keep the government chugging along. Years ago, someone built a custom web application to facilitate this task. The rest of my team uses this web app to complete this task, but if the web app breaks they don’t know how to fix it. I was brought on to the team to fix the web app when it breaks, and potentially to program enhancements for it down the road.

There were a couple of things not working right with the app when I joined the team, and I fixed those fairly quickly. Since then the team has been happy to have me around but have yet to really give me anything else to do. I’ve been told many times that a wishlist of changes could be coming my way, as soon as it gets reviewed and the items on it get prioritized, but the list has yet to materialize. I’ve been asked to review all the code and clean it up where necessary, and sometimes I work on that open-ended chore, but it has no deadline and no one can really ever check my progress anyway. I’ve been asked to give some technical insight about an upcoming server migration, and I’ve cheerfully done so, but the new host service is performing the actual migration so it doesn’t actually add to my workload. In fact, if anything, it lowers my workload further because no one wants to mess with the app too much leading up to the migration. Basically I’m on a contract where it makes sense in theory for me to be there, but in practice no one quite knows what to do with me.

On top of that, for various gears-of-government reasons, there’s never been any attempt to physically integrate me into the office where the rest of my team works. They’re all on-site in a government facility, while I’m out at the corporate HQ, sitting at a spare desk in the IT Help Desk room. You could say my work falls within the broad field of information technology, but I don’t know why you can’t see the network printers, nor can I reset your e-mail password, as many people have been dismayed to learn when they mosey into the IT area and get halfway through explaining their computer problems before I can inform them that I’m just borrowing a computer and I’m sure a real Help Desk Guy will be right back.

And this has been going on for over three months.

So that’s basically my gig. There are supposedly Great Changes in the offing: the contract has recently been renewed, and the aforementioned server migration is going to be finished by the end of this month, and I was originally stuck in the IT Help Desk room because no one knew if I’d stay on this contract long-term or go back to my previous contract after a month or so – now that I’m a permanent team member for the new contract I’ll supposedly get moved to a different corporate location (though not, of course, to the government facility, that would be CRAZY). But for now, I’m still off in my own isolated little world, ready to jump into action if I get a call or an e-mail but much more likely to spend days on end trying to outwit the capricious internet filter pixies for my own amusement. Perhaps the dictates of karma will see to it that by mid-October I am swamped with work as my team finally realizes how to utilize me. I’ll let you know.