office – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: office

  • Insane in the Office

    This is a story about vacation…

    Pixelated

    It’s been pretty much four whole months since I saw my colleagues face-to-face in the office. As the lockdown wore on, my hair got longer and longer. Working from home, I’ve tended to wear scruffy clothes instead of wearing a smart shirt. These things make a big difference.

    Business attire is important. There are plenty of useless idiots in the working world, commanding high salaries simply because they wear a nice suit. Wearing the right clothes is an effective way of getting people to respect you and to value you, and your opinion. Without the visual cues of the business attire, people can only judge you based on what you say and what you do, which they are hopelessly under-qualified to do.

    Being face-to-face is important. So much of nonverbal communication – such as reading a room, or looking for body language – is useful to know if you’re rubbing somebody up the wrong way, and therefore to know whether to back off; to let something drop.

    In the office, a vast amount of the working day can be eaten up by simply moving around the building – looking for meeting rooms, walking to the toilet, walking to get a sandwich, walking to get a drink – plus there’s a lot of opportunity for ad-hoc chats with colleagues. At home, I’m alone with my thoughts for most of the day. I’m incredibly bored. When we have a meeting I’m desperate to talk to somebody; so isolated and lonely.

    At the office, if I’m acting a bit strangely, somebody can have a quiet word in my ear. “Is everything OK?” they can ask, kindly. At home, nobody really checks in on me; there’s no human connection.

    I’m so bored.

    I get through all my work so quickly, because there isn’t enough to do, and I’m alone with no distractions.

    The autumn, winter and spring are going to be incredibly hectic, stressful and high-pressure, so I’m keen that the workload should be managed effectively; expectations have to be set appropriately. I find myself being very forceful, trying to protect myself and my colleagues from being overwhelmed; overstretched. I push back hard on the insidious scope creep; the relentless push to overpromise and underdeliver; an army of soft-skilled fuckwits saying yes to everything because they’re yes-men; people-pleasers who don’t actually have to do the work themselves – it won’t be them who have to work late into the night and over weekends in order to deliver the undeliverable. Nobody thanks you when your project is late, you don’t deliver everything you said you would, and the quality is atrocious.

    I should stop caring.

    Not my circus, not my monkeys.

    I should just take the money and keep my big mouth shut.

    It doesn’t make sense to rock the boat. I should be diplomatic. I should smile and take the money, and ignore the problems; ignore the disaster that’s brewing. I know it’d be better for my bank balance to just keep my mouth shut.

    It’s difficult. My mental health is not compatible with office jobs working for huge organisations, but it’s easy money. It’s a LOT of easy money. Hard to turn down that kind of money, even if it’s toxic to my mental health.

    I haven’t taken any time off since the start of the year. I have been working as hard as I possibly can. I just want this atrocious period – of financial insecurity – to be over.

    When you’re going through hell, keep going… and go as fast as you can!

    I opt for ripping off the sticky plaster as quickly as possible; a short sharp shock.

    Except this isn’t short and sharp… it’s prolonged.

    Interminable.

    I’m not sure what I’d do with time off anyway. UK citizens are not exactly welcome in a lot of places, given that our nation is riddled with deadly disease. I hate travelling alone.

    I do need some time off though, before I have a breakdown; before I get too sick to work. It’s strange, my mental health is very bad, but I’m still very productive. I assume that I’m very difficult to work with at the moment though, but I don’t really know, because I don’t get any feedback; I don’t have normal interactions with anybody. I’m completely isolated and losing my mind.

     

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  • Hard to Count

    This is a story about beans…

    Cray

    IT projects routinely go over budget and fail to meet their deadlines. IT projects routinely fail spectacularly. The worst projects of all are government IT projects, which very often get cancelled, having failed to deliver any value at all.

    Anyway, on an unrelated matter…

    IT projects that I work on are a bit different. I like to deliver things; I don’t just want to work and not worry about whether anything useful is getting done; I’m not happy to let projects fail. It’d be easy to get carried away with my own ego and delusions of grandeur, but I make a difference to whatever organisation I work for, on whatever projects I work on.

    Sometimes I get the sense that I’ve over-estimated the value of my contribution. Sometimes I feel like maybe I’m the tiniest of tiny cogs, and my contribution is negligible. Perhaps it’s a co-incidence that I can get big complex IT projects over the line, when more usually they waste a heap of money and then fail. Perhaps I’m getting carried away with mania, which is deluding me into thinking that I do anything useful at all.

    A colleague of mine repeatedly says that it’s easy to create a great piece of complex software if you’re the only person who designs and builds it, but I think he’s wrong. Sure, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to have 100 people working on a piece of software that could – and should – be written by just one person, however, a lot more can be achieved by a small high-performing team than a single individual.

    A commonly recurring theme with my bipolar disorder has been episodes of irritability, impatience and general intolerance for asshats in the workplace. Quite regularly, when tight deadlines loom and I’m feeling exhausted, my desire to work with “dead wood” people who make things worse, not better, reaches its limit and I really want the ‘team’ members who are slowing everything down to butt out, back off, step back and watch the professionals at work.

    What about this ‘team’ stuff then? Am I even a team player?

    I refer you back to what I said about small high-performing teams. In order for a project to deliver a high quality end product on or before the deadline, it’s often necessary to have fewer people, not more. It’s the bane of my life, having dead wood in the team. I’m absolutely a team player… I just don’t want the dead wood around the place, messing things up and slowing everything down.

    I should qualify: I’m fine with team members who are there to listen and learn; I’m fine with people who are developing their skills; I’m fine with people who are quite junior and in the early stages of their career. If you’ve been doing software development for decades and you’re rubbish at it, then no, I really don’t want you in my team. One thing that particularly irks me is very highly paid consultants who are rubbish at software development. If you’re slow and dreadful at your job, despite being massively overpaid, stay the f**k out of my way and don’t slow my projects down.

    Is it so hard to hire good people? Is it so hard to identify the underperformers, especially when their output is out of alignment with their remuneration? Surely it’s a simple cost:benefit analysis, where some individuals are nowhere near worth the money, and in my opinion are actively damaging to both projects and morale.

    I wonder how much better things would be in the workplace if highly paid consultants who aren’t worth the money were booted out, and the projects were delivered by underpaid graduates who are little superstars, producing huge amounts for very little cost. Actually, I know the answer because I’ve worked on those teams – with the right guidance, the graduates will deliver every single time.

    The lack of meritocracy and the ageism in the working world is particularly galling in the IT industry, where archaic knowledge and experience has zero value. Perhaps my young graduate colleagues might benefit from a little senior leadership and a good architect, but whatever mistakes they might make are irrelevant because they’re so damn quick. It’s criminal that an overpaid and underperforming consultant might earn 5 or 6 times more than a bright and productive quick-witted graduate; graduates proven to be 5 times more productive.

    Why do I learn so much from my graduate colleagues, but so little from overpaid consultants? I have learned lots of quicker, more efficient and more modern ways of doing things, when my older colleagues are just doing the same dumb s**t that they’ve done for years. Sure, it’s been uncomfortable to have to re-learn vast swathes of stuff, but the benefits are obvious, having bitten the bullet and decided to take my younger colleagues seriously; to treat them with the respect they deserve.

    What about respect in general for my colleagues? I respect my colleagues who have decided to take permanent jobs and be underpaid. I respect my colleagues who’ve chosen to avoid the cut-throat and stressful world of the job market, and instead opt for long careers with a single organisation. I respect that there are different life choices and needs, that some people need job security, and that very few of us had the opportunity to learn IT skills as a child, to the point of those skills becoming innate and instinctive. I respect that it’s a very good idea to hire highly paid consultants, in order to upskill your permanent members of staff. It’s part of my job, to train, coach and mentor my colleagues who are permanent employees of the organisations I work for. It’s part of my job to be patient with the permanent staff members and to help them reach their full potential.

    I spend a lot of time worrying about whether I’m just telling people what to do, and whether I should take a more pre-considered approach where I allow my colleagues to think for themselves, rather than just being typists while I dicate instructions. Is there any value in me instructing somebody to do something I could do myself in a fraction of the time? Should I just race ahead, and then spend time explaining what I did and why, once the deadline is safely dealt with? Would it be better to simply let my colleagues watch me work? I know that it’s very hard to think for yourself if somebody is telling you what to do, and that if I was doing people management I would avoid any micromangement like the plague, because it discourages independent thought, learning and initiative-taking. I know that the kind of people I want to work with are ones who can work independently and solve problems for themselves, but I work in an unusual situation where there are tight deadlines, but I’m also expected to train my colleagues to be self-sufficient to some extent, which is impossible in the timescales.

    Explaining to management that more people does not equate to more productivity, and that the deadlines are not realistic to be able to get all the work done AND do all the training and handover that’s necessary to make me completely redundant, is an impossible task. I’m eternally plagued by the mistaken notion that one day, there won’t be any more need for IT professionals because all the IT work will be finished and the IT people will all be redundant – this has proven to be the most ridiculous nonsense, but an enduring fantasy of f**wits in every organisation.

    I should qualify that I really like my colleagues, although I’m a bit frustrated with one or two very highly paid consultants who aren’t worth the money. I should qualify that I really like the organisation I’m currently working for. I should qualify that I really like the project. It’s all interesting and people are nice and even the management are pretty good, which is rare. There’s not much pressure and the deadlines are not realistic, but they’re achievable, which is usually a miracle for an IT project, especially in the sector I’m working in. I have no real complaints or criticisms of any colleagues or the organisation and its management team, not that this would be the place to air those grievances, of course.

    I write a little tongue-in-cheek, because I know that colleagues from two different parts of the UK are reading this from time to time, and I wonder what they will think if they happen to read this particular post. I cringe of course at my arrogance and my delusions of grandeur, but I also struggle to know whether I’m making a significant contribution, or whether I’m just a tiny insignificant cog in an incomprehensibly huge machine, so I’m prepared to poke the bear a little.

     

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  • Adjustment Disorder

    This is a story about provocation…

    Pathway

    I suppose the reason why my episodes of mania synchronise perfectly with periods of high stress and exhaustion, is some kind of defence mechanism – perhaps an evolutionary adaptation; something deliberately left in my genes, because it’s served a useful purpose during unsettled times throughout the history of humanity.

    It’s problematic for me to work in an open-plan office at the moment. It’s problematic for me to be surrounded by so many mild-mannered and quiet individuals, who seem happy to spend all day looking at their email inbox, waiting for something interesting to appear.

    How my colleagues manage to cope in an environment that’s pretty stale and ultra-conservative, I don’t know. Big personalities and loudmouths are not the kinds of people who become long-serving members of my organisation. In fact, a girl I dated from my office said she cried when she got her security pass, because its expiry date was 10 years in the future. “Nobody would choose to work here” she said.

    It’s not that bad.

    I like it.

    I’m just not so sure that everyone who’s within earshot of me is my greatest fan. I have a foghorn-like voice in two situations: 1) when I’m scared and insecure, and 2) when I’m manic, like I am now.

    I suppose I knew that mania was cropping up – rearing its ugly head – but it served a purpose. I needed to find a place to live and make all the necessary moving preparations. I needed to continue to work hard at my job, while also finding the extra energy and the motivation to do something I hate: Moving.

    The mania has propelled me to move very fast, but it also causes my brain to speed up dangerously. A colleague told a joke about friction coefficients – a classical physics joke – and I said I could come up with a better one about quantum mechanics, in only a few seconds. According to my colleague, it took me no more than 15 seconds to invent a “XXX walks into a bar…” type joke, which was actually pretty good considering I thought of it on the spot AND it involved two really fundamental things about quantum mechanics. Nothing to do with Schrödinger and his cats, but actually to do with Planck and his constant… but I digress… both jokes have a very small audience who’d appreciate them.

    I’m fizzing and crackling with so much energy at the moment that I’m physically uncomfortable to be around. I think I’m literally giving people near me headaches.

    One of the first things I said this morning was “do chairs really exist?” which was supposed to be funny, but my colleagues reaction was to tell me it was too early to start talking about philosophy.

    I didn’t get to sleep until 3:30am or maybe even 4am.

    Does the lack of sleep cause the mania, or is the insomnia a symptom of the mania? It’s impossible to know.

    It’s not like I couldn’t sleep, but I can’t see how else I can fit everything into the 24 hours of the day, without some late nights. I know that I need regular bedtimes. I know I need lots of sleep. But, there’s so much to do.

    The busier I am, the more productive I am, strangely. Today I did all kinds of horrible jobs that I wasn’t looking forward to, like buying a washing machine, booking a van to move my stuff, arranging to have broadband internet installed, arranging to have my post redirected and a zillion other admin jobs, but I also managed to do a piece of work that I’d been putting off for days and days.

    Where I’m finding the energy from to maintain my daily writing, as well as the development of NickBot™ and the migration of my website from one hosting provider to another, I have no idea, considering that I also have a demanding full-time job and I waste at least 50% of my time saying stupid things out loud and distracting people.

    I guess I was wasting a lot of time and energy on a bad relationship, so escaping that has released me from a lot of pointlessly exhausting nonsense. I was very trapped. I was very miserable.

    I’m very stressed now and I felt momentarily like I was very alone, but perhaps that’s what prompted me into a frenzy of activity, sending out lots of messages to people I care about, trying to surround myself with people who care about me. There’s a horrible period of stress approaching rapidly – moving day, and subsequent days – but I’m pretty well prepared for it, which I’m surprised about, because I can often become too overwhelmed by anxiety to even leave my bed. I’m surprised that depression hasn’t laid me low.

    All of my psychiatric problems can be considered acute: i.e. they have been spontaneously provoked into existence by the extreme set of life circumstances that I’m simultaneously dealing with. This is adjustment disorder which is just another way of saying “your life is hell right now” and that quite rightly, my brain and body are compensating for the extreme demands placed upon me.

    I’m pretty terrified right now, of screwing up the good relationship I have with my colleagues and my workplace. People have been patient with me, but that patience is wearing thin. It’s unusual for a manic episode to last so long, but I’ve managed to keep myself sustained for periods of 6, 8 and even 13 weeks before… but it always led to a horrible crash. There have always been disastrous consequences for allowing too much of my mania to overspill into the open-plan offices which I work in.

    I try to rein myself in. I try to put my headphones in and keep my head down. But, then somebody wants to ask me something. Then I overhear something and my red-hot brain which is travelling at a million miles an hour immediately sparks off and I’m talking – interjecting – with something which I think is profound, but nobody can keep up with me… I’m just acting a bit weird and annoying, from the point of view of my colleagues.

    I’m working from home for a couple of days. I’m going to try to pace myself and remind myself that I’ve got a nice long overlap of my tenancies, so I don’t have to move everything all at once. If I forget anything, I can always make more trips. There’s no need for me to put so much pressure on myself.

    I’m pushing hard in every area of my life, simultaneously. I want my colleagues to think I’m a brilliant genius who can do anything. I want my perfect house, fully furnished and looking beautiful. I want to feel instantly at home in a city which I’ve barely visited. I want my side project – this website – to make a giant leap forward, in terms of technology.

    It’s too much, and there will be a price to be paid.

    I need to be super careful.

    I can’t afford to lose my job, for example.

    I can’t afford to lose anything, in fact.

    Everything teeters dangerously on a cliff edge.

    But, I’ve kind of gotten used to living on the edge.

    If nothing else, at least this period is quite life-affirming and I’m coping remarkably well. Even when I got in trouble with the big boss the other day, I managed to rescue things very rapidly and get back on good terms. Even when I wasted days and days procrastinating, I caught up very rapidly. Even when I felt that there was too much to do in too little time, to move house without dying of stress and anxiety, everything seems to be falling into place.

    I’ve written twice as much as I meant to, of course, because I can’t quite rein myself in; I can’t quite pump the brakes and slow myself down.

    So long as I keep doing what my colleagues are doing, which is mostly killing time looking busy, then I’ll probably get through this difficult period without doing too much damage. Less is more.

     

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  • Crumbs on the Keyboard

    This is a story about lunch breaks…

    Pret a Manger sandwich

    I’m struggling to get to work on time. I’ve suffered periods in the past which have felt like agonising torture, getting up early in the morning to go to the office, but I’ve also had periods where I managed to adjust my body clock to become more of a morning lark than a night owl. My body clock seems to be driven by my stomach.

    I never used to eat breakfast – there simply wasn’t enough time, because I was always late for work. However, I’ve found that breakfast is the best way to tell my body what time it needs to adjust itself to, so I can cope with “normal” office hours. Unfortunately, the breakfast trick hasn’t been working for the last couple of weeks.

    I spent a whole month drinking wine every night until 1am or 2am, and not getting out of bed until midday, so I guess it should be expected that my body and brain would complain loudly about the rude intrusion of the working day upon my pleasant slumbers.

    I also had a very unsettled period where my delicate brain chemistry was sent haywire by a combination of drugs, insomnia, lack of food & drink, drug and sleep-deprivation induced mania, plus a breakup and some other madness, all of which completely destabilised me. I’m quite lucky that I managed to put the brakes on that particular period of instability and resume working without doing serious damage to myself, my finances, my home or my career… I’ve managed to pick up pretty much where I left off, minus the girlfriend of course.

    I feel bad that I turn up late to work and I want to go home early. My working days are mostly excruciatingly boring – I don’t have enough to do, to keep me busy and my mind occupied. There’s no torture quite like having to get up early to go and sit at a desk, watching the clock until it’s finally time to go home, bored out of my mind.

    I’m trying to justify the fact that I’m not working as many hours as my colleagues, or being anywhere near as productive, because I’m new and also I only take a short lunch break. If there was work I could do, I would do it, but I always seem to tear through any tasks at breakneck pace and I’m left with nothing to do again. I need a really huge project to completely immerse myself in, but instead my paymasters are quite happy to have me sitting idle – they really don’t seem to care that it’s an enormous waste of my productive capacity. Of course, nobody knows just how awful it is for me to be bored too; just how terrible it is to feel alone with my thoughts for 7 or 8 hours a day, trapped at my desk with no distractions.

    At home, I can read a book, write or watch TV/films. At home, I can distract myself from the constant noise of my brain. At home, I can easily waste time. At work, I’m simply getting paid to be present. At work, all there is to think about is how much I earn every day, every hour, every minute… every second even. Tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… that’s 2 pence… tick… another 2 pence…

    Yes, if I saw a penny on the floor it wouldn’t be worth my time to stop and pick it up. I would quite literally lose money if I watched the pennies. If my job was literally to pick up pennies that were covering every inch of the floor, and put them in my piggy bank, I would be earning less than I am now, assuming that I had to pick each one up individually. My job isn’t to watch the pennies. My job is to sit at a desk doing nothing. It pays very handsomely to be bored doing nothing.

    Things aren’t as bad as they were back in February, when I didn’t even have any colleagues to talk to. Things will get better as my colleagues start to get to know and trust me, and they ask me to do more and more stuff; bigger and bigger bits of work, hopefully. I want to be swamped with work, so that I don’t have to sit at my desk bored with nothing to do.

    My brain’s a bit broken and I feel stressed and anxious; on edge. I’m acutely aware that I’m in a lot of discomfort during most of the working day, despite the fact that it seems quite enviable to be highly paid to sit around doing nothing. At the end of every month I submit an invoice, and each invoice makes a considerable dent in my debt. By all “normal” people’s standards, I’m rocketing my way from poverty to wealth and the timescale seems like nothing… only a few more months and I’ll be getting on top of things. There’s got to be something wrong with me, because time is passing so painfully slowly.

    That’s all I’ve got to do: sit and do nothing, and everything gets sorted out in my life… at least financially.

    I feel very anxious about the fact that I’m not being productive or working the expected number of hours in the office. I’m acutely aware that my colleagues might become resentful of the fact that they’re at their desks for longer than I am. I go to bed and wake up with a horrible feeling of dread, knowing that I’ve got another working day tomorrow – and for months and months more – where I’ll be bored, underworked and overpaid. It might sound like a nice problem to have, but I promise you that you’d have walked away already if you experienced what I’m going through.

    What can I tell you? Maybe I’m a spoilt brat. I really don’t think I am – I’m a mercenary who’s figured out how to make a lot of money very quickly, but my task is not one that sits comfortably with my soul, although at least the work is not as immoral as it was when I was working for the investment banks.

    I skip breakfast, eat my sandwich at my desk, and try to stay at the office for as long as I can possibly can, before the boredom becomes unbearable and I have to escape to somewhere where I can distract myself for a short while, until it’s time to do it all over again, and again, and again… ad nauseam.

     

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