Effective June 1, I am promoted at work to Tier 3 technical support. This is a good and bad thing. Good in that I get more pay and more capabilities in the datacenter. Bad in that I have more responsibilities and will be in the on-call rotation. I should be happy about it. Really, I should, but I’m just not feeling happiness for the outcome. I’m a guy who wants to go to work, do his hours, and go home to find some meaning in his life that is not tied to his job. I feel like I should be proud about the promotion, like I climbed a rung of the ladder on my own merit, but that’s not exactly the case. Due to a handful of people leaving the company this month, it’s essentially a battlefield promotion. “Your sargent stepped on a landmine, so congratulations, sargent!”
Because our staff has lost both of our overnight guys (among others), management has reactivated shift rotations for all eligible employees, me included. So this week I’m going to graveyard shift for a while. Here we go again. Time to hang the black plastic over my window and retrain myself how to sleep in the afternoon and be even more alone than usual. It was nice having that day-shift stability for the past five months, but nothing is forever. Nothing.
They also want to put me on the team that deals directly with our preferred customers. That’s great, I guess, but that means I’ll have to sit on conference calls and answer emails with customers who know my full name and direct number. I’ll be their guy, the man on-point to troubleshoot problems and contort to their custom whims. I should be proud of all this, but I’m not. The only bright spot here is that once I’m on this team, that will cement me back onto the dayshift because that’s when the special support hotline is open.
I just can’t be happy, eh?