I’m sitting here at the very tail end of the weekend, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve completely wasted my time. Trying to find the words to say, to put together, to make myself feel like I’ve done something, like I’ve not let 56 hours of my life slip by with nothing to show for it. But it’s hard. There was once a time I could flood the page with meaning and passion. Once, I could fixate on a drawing and produce a thing of beauty. Now, I just want escape. Want to create without having to explain. Want to put out a chunk of creative output without providing a back story. Want to not be distracted. But in my middle age, all I can think of is my job and how, even though it’s great, I just want to turn off and escape it when I’m not at work. And when I’m not at work, I don’t want to work on anything; I just want to wander, to leave, to be unmotivated. And that is the horror of it all. That my motivation has vanished, and that I spent the last 56 hours of my life with nothing to show for it.
Diarrhea of the Mouth
A character flaw has recently come to my attention. Apparently, I have a tendency to tell stories from my life as an automatic response to memories triggered by the current conversation. You talk about being an english major, and I wax on about the three times I took the same literature class. You bring up multisided dice and I’ll unravel an other-people-story about my old gamer friends carrying suede drawstring baggies everywhere they went. If you say “hey, what’s up?”, I’ll rant about how my job stresses me out because I’m doing this hot project and my manager needs the numbers like yesterday and I really really need some coffee would you please serve me a small light roast I mean dark roast to go wait for here.
What alerted me to this was a conversation with an old friend who was chatting with me about a thing she did and how tough it was. She was venting about the circumstance and seeking some consolation. What resulted was me blabbing about a similar story from my adolescence. I fell into the pattern of the coffeeshop conversation, where you can sit and chat for hours and nothing is really said; it’s more like synchronized monologues. But other people know better than that. She called me out. Said I should write down my stories somewhere. Sell them, make money. Our conversation ended shortly thereafter once I realized I’d insensitively hit her tilt switch, and we haven’t talked much since.
If you notice me doing this kind of thing, call me out on it. Let me know in no uncertain terms that my behavior is annoying. Sure, it’ll hurt like hell emotionally to learn this lesson at such a late stage in my life, but I’ll learn. Eventually, I’ll stop talking and return to being the sounding board everybody wants in their life.
Roller Coaster
Technically, I am in-between jobs. As of Thursday, I am no longer a contractor, and as of tomorrow, I will be a full employee. And it’s about time.
But not without a thrillride, first.
See, on Tuesday, the manager responsible for my conversion got a call from Human Resources, and the message was to walk me out the door immediately. They got the results of my background check and did not like what they saw. That caught him by surprise, so he called my manager and told him the news. My manager threw the time-out signal. He remembered a conversation he and I (fortuitously) had in passing last week about how there’s another guy with my name in this state who’s apparently a criminal. So they immediately grabbed a conference room and phoned the HR staff again to discuss his conversation with me.
Shortly thereafter, he pulled me into the room for a chat, and HR agreed to have the background-check vendor send me a copy of the results. The determination that day was to keep me on as a contractor until a formal dispute could be launched and everything discovered once and for all.
So, Wednesday, that’s what I did. I reviewed the background check and found four notes regarding the criminal record of a man with my name, my exact birthdate, in Baxter county (where College Station is), who apparently has a major problem with drinking and driving and is currently serving the last of his 7 years in state prison for his third conviction. Coincidentally, he’s been in jail during the entirety of my time as a contractor. So I brought all this up to the HR rep, and he prompted me to call the vendor to begin the dispute process.
I explained to the vendor’s operator that I was not this guy, that I’ve had difficulties before with his name, birthdate, and felony record screwing me over, and that I have never been to Baxter county, so she took down some extra info like my driver license number and my biometric info (weight, height, eye color, hair color) and said she’d forward the info to the researchers for reevaluation. They’d let me know in three business days. After the call, it became a sit-and-wait game.
Luckily, they did their work quickly (because it really should’ve been a no-brainer) because they contacted me the next day to announce the other guy’s record has been expunged from mine, and that there’d be a note attached to my record (should they have to do another check on me in the future) stating what happened. I also got a call from HR telling me the head of security reexamined my case and gave me the green light to conversion, that the company apologizes for any potentially embarrassing (read legally-actionable) inconveniences, and that Monday would be my first day as a fully-badged employee with all the rights, duties, and responsibilities thereof.
And it’s about time.
I kinda feel like celebrating, but with the roller-coaster of this past week, I think I’ll hold off until I get my first paycheck. Just to be on the safe side.
Step Ladder
Friday I was presented an offer. Sat down in a meeting room with a member of the Human Resources staff, and he went over the paperwork with me, first presenting me with an offer of employment. The rate of pay is equivalent to what I was making as a contractor, but since the company sponsors most of the benefits (instead of the full amount coming out of my pockets like it does now), my overall net earnings will be more. So it’s like a raise.
I told him I’d take the letter home and think about it over the weekend. Talked in generalizations about it with my coworkers, and loudly they expressed that I should’ve signed it on the spot. “Well, if the pay’s OK, if the position’s OK, if there’s no wiggle room for haggling over pay or benefits, then why the hell haven’t you signed it already!?” So I signed. Beats the hell out of unemployment.
Assuming the rest of my background check passes without a hitch — and I don’t foresee any problems — then my first day as a permanent employee will be July 6th. I’ll have 95% of my benefits covered, which includes health, dental, and vision. Yeah, dental and vision. The company’s not matching 401(k) at this moment, so I probably won’t contribute. But I instantly get ten days of paid sick leave, and I accumulate vacation time, 15 days a year. The vacation time is prorated for the first calendar year of employment, which means I’ll accumulate only 8 days this year, 7 of which I’m required to spend during the holiday closure, so it looks like a proper vacation will have to wait until next summer.
Otherwise, it’s more of the same. Same tasks, same manager, same job. My running joke is, “Hey, congratulations! You’re hired! Now get back to work!” Only difference is that I’m an actual employee now. A fully-recognized human, not a capital expense.
Ladder
My manager told me just before the weekend that the ball was rolling and that I should update my resume on the chance that I’d have to submit it sometime this week. I’m glad I spent some time Sunday cleaning it up, because I was contacted Tuesday to fill out some paperwork and put in my formal application to be converted to a permanent employee. So yeah, I took my first steps to becoming something other than a contractor; it’s been a long 2+ years.
The downside to this conversion is that I’ll be starting at perhaps the lowest rung in the “career ladder” defined by HR. “Client Compatibility Technologist I” (or something of the sort), meaning I’m at the bottom. Entry level.
I don’t have a college degree. Even if I did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be stellar. I don’t have any special training or five-plus years of commensurate experience. I’ve made a few impressions over the years, even got a Spotlight Award from the Director, but that’s not enough to carve out my place in the department. So I can’t expect higher than entry level. I’ll have to actually earn the respect, and that’s the hardest lesson to learn. It’s not enough to have been there for two years, to show up every day, do my job, and go home. When everybody else keeps commitments, puts in extra effort, and makes a point of going above and beyond, the man who does only what’s necessary is at the end of the line.
Among the other hard lessons I’m learning are these tidbits:
- In a corporate environment, it’s reasonable to expect opportunistic behavior among those who work there; if there’s a chance to take more, do more, be more, and therefore move higher, I gotta take that chance. Think of it as a classroom full of fifth-graders standing around a table, and there’s only two pizzas; the slowest ones don’t eat.
- All that stuff about taking turns, letting others speak first, minding your manners, obeying your superiors, that’s all hideously bad advice, because nobody else follows the rules. Decorum and protocol have their place in society, but it’s in all the little interpersonal micro-transactions that the obedient are stepped upon.
- Altruism is largely absent, reserved for only the “good ol’ boy network”. To be in the network, you have to actually be a good ol’ boy, meaning you have to be someone who has worked to garner that respect.
- I won’t get promoted for being an all-around nice guy; I have to actually work for it. If friendliness was the requirement for promotion, the whole enterprise would be doomed to failure.
- The company is built around the concept of “meritocracy”, where each individual person is responsible for their own career path. Don’t look to someone else to look out for you. You rise or fall by your own actions; do well, and you’ll be rewarded well. The guys in the highest levels clawed their way up there and were rewarded on their individual merit.
- So, it follows that expecting a modicum of respect handed to me without expending a respectable amount of effort on my part is just foolish. I start at level 1.
So the ball is rolling. I mentioned my stress at the sudden speed of everything to my manager, and his advice was to not sweat it; it’s all on autopilot from here on out. The position is open to anybody, but I’m pretty much the most experienced person applying for the job (since I’m already doing it), so it should be a shoo-in. Here’s to hope.