Bless your heart!

For reasons I’m mostly in the dark about, they’re asking me for paperwork, from months ago, when I was doing the job I didn’t even want to do, when we were in the middle of a move and that I’m not even sure didn’t get packed away and lost. — I’ve just been informed that if we can’t come up with this paperwork, we’ll get “in trouble”.

My response? “Well bless your heart!” — translation: I really don’t care. Not that I want to get anyone in trouble, but the cynic in me asks, “What can they possibly do to me now?” I think about the only being that would consider our workspace a “step up” would maybe be some animals over in the National Zoo. And when I really think about it, they do have more personal real estate but even less privacy than we have.

I never used the phrase institutional knowledge before coming to this job, but I use it now all the time. People are leaving, and while they’re documenting a lot when they go, they’re often teaching what they know to others on the team… who then leave. To geek out for a moment, we’re good, but our web team members aren’t TARDIS’es, except in terms of patience, we aren’t bigger on the inside and stuff gets lost. Normally I mean knowledge, but in this case, it’s two pieces of paper that I know I got. I just don’t know what happened to them, and now that I think about it, I was never told they had to be retained in the first place. It was around the time when we were told to reduce the amount of paper we had on hand as our new workspaces would have much less storage space. So while I think it didn’t get tossed out, there’s no telling if a stack of paper that was meant to be thrown out ended up on top of it and I chucked the lot.

No one that was on the web team when I started is here anymore, by that I mean our physical location. Two members are still “here” but they don’t sit with the team. The social environment has changed, the professional environment has really changed — or more likely it was always like this and I never noticed out of sheer denial. I know I should move on, but I’m trying to keep some stability in my life somewhere because I’m working so hard to get other areas in shape. Plus I’m too fat to fit into my Interviewin’ Suit. I was about 160 when I had it tailored, and while there might be material to let out, it’d take a miracle worker to account for 40 gained pounds since then. Ok, 41.4, but who’s counting?