This fucking place

[muckefuck]

Even before monshu's fateful office visit a year, a month, and a week ago my interest in work was flagging. It peaked modestly during our 2015 reorg, which I saw as an opportunity to move into new areas, but the response from my new boss was that she basically wanted me to continue doing the the same job I've always done. I wasn't thrilled but I also knew that, given all the uncertainty about my husband's future, this wasn't the time to make any sudden moves--a conclusion which is short order was 100% validated.

Last year my focus was anywhere but at my desk--a situation that my boss and überboss were completely sympathetic to--so this can got kicked to the end of the year. I quickly stooped to pick it up, thankful for a complete change of pace and a chance to get involved in some group work again. But at the last minute, I drew back and gave it another toe-nudge. At the time, I blamed grief. My domestic worries--the flood, the rats, the fridge, the finances--were becoming overwhelming and it was tough to find brainspace for anything else.

In time, those tides have receded as well, exposing some nice firm beach...that I still have no interest in racing over. Things turned up a bit last month when I was draughted for translation project and started getting excited about development opportunities for me and other staff again. I still didn't feel particularly engaged, but I could see a future where I would be.

And now this. Yesterday, after a stimulating workshop, I dallied with a couple colleagues and learned in short order that:

1. a recent hire I was reasonably fond of had been let go two weeks ago without so much as an acknowledgment
2. the only remaining representative body for professional staff had been killed
3. a complete reorganisation of one of our major public service programmes had been carried out in secret by the upper administration.

In conversations with other colleagues today, I learned that however bad something looks at first glance here, upon closer examination, it's worse. Not even those collaborating with the firee on specific projects had been told; one spent a week working on a presentation before getting the news from a back channel. And admin had actually convened a task force on the public service programme which spent a year-and-a-half assembling a report, all of whose major findings were ignored in the reorg.

In other word, SSDD. The whole two-year initiative to "change the way we do business" was the giant farce we all feared it was and the new hires (including my überboss) who we considered on board are just as head-in-ass as the old guard. Communication has gotten worse and some of our most reliable workhorses and best advocates for outreach and collaboration are eying the exits.

Which I guess I should be doing, too, but that toxic inertia which has seeped into the rest of my life is still very much in my veins whenever I walk in these doors. I have stability and security here and a lot on my plate for the coming year. (Tomorrow's condo meeting is reminder enough of that.) So yeah, there has to be a reckoning, but does it have to be now? Not if I put my head down and my hands over my ears, no, no there doesn't.