Yesterday my unit held a much overdue meeting to divide up our work plan for the year. The year that started 7/1/08. I found that the course I had been told to work on was now back up in the air as to who was going to own it. It is an elearning course so it should be mine since that’s supposed to be what I do (well it’s really been just lip-service up to this point no matter how I try to push for it). I had already done some research on it. Now I’ve offered the research to whoever ends up with the course. I thought about contradicting my boss in the meeting but just didn’t feel like it.
Then we talked about some other courses and one of those is, in fact, mine–has been since I developed it from scratch. A co-worker offered to take it over so that one additional paragraph can be written. The paragraph is coming from a meeting the co-worker and the boss are having today with someone from our client organization. I was told about this meeting after it was scheduled and remarkably on the day I’m not at the office. Any mention of speakerphoning the conversation? No. I told the co-worker since I’ve been shackled with the course, I’ll continue to write it.
Then I mentioned again how the course should be elearning. Both of them disagreed but their arguments are as unheard by me as my ideas are unheard by them. It’s a course that touches people who perform on-call duties. If you are only performing those duties infrequently, wouldn’t it make sense to have a resource that you could go back to and refresh yourself? Instead of actually acknowledging that I may have something intelligent to say about the subject they start talking about how these on-call people should take the week-long course instead. That’s not our call and so I’m not even sure why it was brought up. Except to beat me over the head with their HUGE knowledge of the social service system. Which is something I’ve been very respectful about and have never questioned. I feel like I’m beaten with it like a dead horse.
So, for the next nine months I get to perform basic maintenance on a handful of courses, develop an online component for a system refresher course (I won’t be developing content–just taking what’s given to me and putting it into an online framework–this project will be “live” by February), reviewing one course and writing up a detailed explanation of why it should or shouldn’t be moved to online and sitting with my thumb up my ass. I broached the subject that this is not nearly enough work for a year but was shut down.
Furthermore, I also brought up the fact that we’ll have a captive audience of a group of people we never get to see in a system refresher course (the same one I’m turning into an online course) and we could possibly take 5 minutes at the end of the pilot sessions or the actual sessions to ask these people what they need to feel supported in the training environment. Shot down again. I pointed out that we’d have them in a room in small enough numbers that we could direct our questions to specific items and why not see if we can partner with and play to the strengths of system refresher course. Shot down. Then my last ditch effort was to point out we can capture their names off the course roster and then do whatever the fuck they want to do.
I was given some advice last week that I need to have something else in my life that I look forward to and love so that I don’t dwell so much on this hell on earth known as my job. I think there’s some wisdom to that and so I’m really trying to get back to my “I’m a rock in a stream” philosophy (the water flows by–as does the BS, but the rock may also change the course of the stream) and focusing on school and some as yet unidentified thing. By the way, the rock in a stream thing was eye-rolled by my boss. We’ve started to eat our young at work…a great environment, don’t you want to come work here too? How is it that I can like my boss and at the same time want to tell her she’s a shitty supervisor?