Destination unknown

When I got to work this morning I was met in my cubicle by one of my colleagues before my computer even had a chance to finish booting up. He wanted to let me know that, once again, noises are being made that I might be physically relocated. No, seriously, for real this time. Like, within the next 90 days, max. So close to actually being on the cusp of totally happening no joke that I should start putting together some Formal Documentation of what I would need in order to make it happen. So I’ll be spending part of my day list-making – and, of course, as usual, questioning the strange and surreal circularity of filling the role of the person who makes sure to tell other people what to give me and when and how so that I can do my own job.

Just to recap, for those of you coming in late: I’ve been working on this particular contract since June of last year. Originally I was supposed to work at a corporate office and only go into the government offices occasionally, as needed. But coincidentally I came on board as the web application I am supposed to be the lone technical support for was going to be moved from one host to another, and coordinating that transition was so much easier when I was in the government office that I just started going there on a regular basis. I sit at the same computer in the same cubicle every day but it’s still considered a temporary seat for me, for various reasons:

• The contract between the DoD and my employer states that my role is not an “on-site” role


• The DoD agency we are contracted to is always hiring and might at some point need to give my seat to a new full-time employee

However, I have been going through the motions as if it were a permanent seat, for other various reasons:

• Even without the major transition project, it’s easier for me to work with my colleagues if they can swing by my desk to ask me questions, we can look at the computer screen together to identify problems, etc.


• When I was at the corporate office I was stuck in the corner of the IT Help Desk room and that was kind of a drag, a situation I was in no hurry to get back to.


• At this point, I have been away from the corporate office for so long that it’s highly likely they’ve reassigned the laptop I was using there, or that someone else is sitting at the temporary desk in IT, or that in any number of ways they are not expecting me to ever come back and it would require more than just showing up one morning at 8 a.m. to segue back to the way things were in August or so.


• My corporate boss has always been looking for a better location for me and thought that he could get me a real, permanent desk at the main corporate headquarters building, as soon as that office completed a move which was supposed to happen around New Years and then got pushed to the incredibly specific timeframe of “spring”. Still, I was staying put at the government office until the hq seat was ready for me rather than uprooting and going to the other corporate office and then uprooting again from temporary digs to permanent once the move was complete.

Now, however, it seems that the government may be forcing our hand by in fact exercising eminent domain over the cubicle I’ve been borrowing and assigning it to a new hire, leaving me to set up shop elsewhere. Maybe. Probably? I have no idea. So far I’ve been asked to come up with a run-down of things I will need in order to do my job remotely (and before you ask, I wish “remotely” meant “from home” but that’s pretty unlikely, unfortunately) and I will provide that information to the powers-that-be, but in the mean time I will keep coming in to the government office until someone tells me a specific date to stop, and where to go after that.


Honestly there are a lot of upsides to being displaced from the government office. Corporate has a more casual dress code, and a few more perks both inside the office building and in the surrounding neighborhood (no matter whether I end up at corporate hq or the other office). Getting relocated to hq might even mean that I wouldn’t need to use Metro on my commute at all. I would miss the reading time a lot but it might be better for me in the long run. Metro is becoming increasingly hazardous to my physical and mental health. The system is still in the news now and then with more dire pronouncements about the budget woes and leadership in flux and whatnot. I swear just last week there was a story on the radio about an announcement made by Metro that they would soon be starting a database to track accidents and mechanical failures and other malfunction incidents in order to better respond to such situations. Take a moment to let that sink in, and then allow me to scream the implication inherent in that statement: METRO DOES NOT CURRENTLY HAVE A DATABASE TO TRACK THEIR PROBLEMS. Given the many and varied ways in which Metro sucks I can’t say I find this completely surprising, but COME ON, what is this, 1972? That info-bite probably hits a little closer to my geeky home because I work with databases every single day and I can’t fathom life without them, but dang.