Droning it in

I very seriously considered and came quite close to posting something back on Thursday that would have gone a little something like this, in its entirety:

One of the major differences between my current job as a government contractor and my old job as part of the tech team for a start-up internet company is that, at the old job, if someone asked “Would it be possible to [XYZ]?” it meant they were trying to be polite and not purposefully and onerously dump assignments on me which were physically impossible, but also that they had something that needed doing and they were trying to use the classic sales technique of getting me to start answering questions with “yes” before moving in for the kill with something like “Well let’s go ahead and do that. Can you get it done by Friday?” And therefore more often than not I would answer those questions with “Yes, it’s possible and when would you like that?” and I would get started on it immediately and people would more or less appreciate it when I finished it, especially if I finished early than expected and/or delivered more than the bare minimum necessary to meet the requirements. Whereas at my current job, when someone asks me “Would it be possible to [XYZ]?” it literally means exactly that and nothing more. It means the person inquiring is in the first footprint of the tortoise tracks that might actually lead toward doing something somewhere down the road, but all they want to do now, in total, is get a yes-or-no question to the “Can it be done at all?” question. And if my honest answer would be “I don’t rightly know, although I assume it probably is possible” and the only way I can determine the definitive yes-or-no-ness is to start poking around and, you know, seeing if I can actually do the thing, then by the time I have an answer the thing itself is no longer theoretical, it’s actually done. But what might in other contexts be considered a positive display of initiative is really, REALLY frowned on in government contractors.

Ran into a flagrant reminder of these differences again today. Sigh.

But seriously that final “Sigh” would have been an attempt at whimsying up what was really some serious institutional malaise and I couldn’t quite bring myself to pull the trigger. And then, as it happened, Friday was almost a complete reversal again as various people came to me with actual tasks rather than hypotheticals and I felt significantly better about my place as a tiny gear in the big machine, though I was a little too busy to blog about it.

In any case, the weekend seems to have purged most if not all of that week-derailing peevishness. Or maybe it’s simply the excitement of knowing we are leaving on vacation in six days. Still not sure if I’m going to try to keep up with the blogging from the beach or just make up for lost time in spectacular fashion upon my return, so I guess I’ll be keeping all of you in suspense until then as well.