02.11.10
angry villagers – a bedtime story
This scenario has, to date, played out three times in my short professional career:
Management accuses me of being opaque and arbitrary.
I produce a logbook detailing activities and notes on my recent work, and offer to walk them through my decision chain.
Management’s eyes light up. “Aha!” they say to themselves, “Here is his secret recipe book! We must possess this power! With the processes documented in here, we won’t have to rely on him anymore! Hahaha!”
Management demands a photocopy of my logbook. I happily oblige – it’s their project, after all. It’s completely worthless to me outside the context of their job. They have every right to this information.
Management skims my notes and finds them incomprehensible. Because my job can rarely be expressed as a simple “Do A, then B, then C.” Defeated (for now!), Management quietly files the copy away in a drawer (We will decipher this someday!), and I return to my work. And it’s always on paper, in a physical drawer. That seems important for some reason.
The bitch of it is this- if they handed my notes to another specialist, that specialist probably could follow them. Reinforcing the idea that we’re all in on the conspiracy together.