My new job is pure chaos. I don't know how else to put it. Except for maybe calling it utter mayhem. And me, master of the regimented flow, is agog in disbelief (I used to create charts mapping out the flow for all readings, projects, papers due for each semester so that I always knew where I was, what needed to be done, in what order, and by what time).
For example, on my new job: training consisted of sitting and watching someone type forms into a computer. They typed really fast. Picture you sitting there, with no context for what you're watching other than you know they are inputting data into a form. They type "B, 14-g, 64-B0-692, Y, Y, Y, 0, 0, 1, 1, 4, L-1, L-6, BW6, B.W7, 07, 4.692" on and on and on. For five hours. No lie. Five hours of streaming numbers and letters and dashes and dots. No context. No explanation, just a stream of data. Streaming and streaming as your brain finally goes on standby and all you see, hear is: ahhhhhhhhohhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
And the mainframe is essentially one step above DOS so there isn't even an intuitive or user friendly flow. In fact, it is most often counter-intuitive, although you can't count on which direction of counter-intuitive it will land.
A specific example: On one part of the form, you're supposed to enter "Y" (yes) for the question "citizen of US?". On a line on another page, you're supposed to enter "C" to the same question (C for citizen). And there is no prompt to tell you which one goes where. And if you do it wrong, you may just get an error message, an error message that says 'please modify highlighted area' although no area is actually highlighted, or you may get booted out of the form and lose all of the data you've already put in, or maybe, just maybe, you'll lock down your system (as I have a half dozen times already) and you'll have to reboot the program, which since the computer is muthafrakkin ancient, takes 10-15 minutes. And in the meantime, the line of people waiting to see you is stretched outside the door. 50, 60, 70 people. All waiting. All irate. All freaking out. And if you screw up, they won't be able to pay their rent, buy their children food, make the mortgage payment that will keep their home off the foreclosure block.
But back to training: The person you are watching keeps up a muttering commentary, and you scribble notes, but without a context, and not knowing what the other five choices they could have made on the form, or even why they made the choice they did, the notes are essentially useless. Pages and pages of scribbled "BR549 input Y for Yes if they are transitional".
"Hey," I say to the person 'training' me. "What does transitional mean and how do I know if they are transitional?".
"You just put 'Y' if they are transitional."
"Okay, I get that. But how do I know if they are transitional?"
"You just put 'Y' if they are transitional!" he says, with force, aggression, and the not so subtle subtext of: just frakkin DO IT.
"Yes, I understand that if they are transitional, I put a 'Y', in the form. Maybe I'm not being clear with my question. What I'm not sure about is how to determine if they are transitional. Where do I look in their files to see if they are transitional?"
He gives me a look and I understand that he's been busted. He leans in and whispers, "I don't really understand it either, so I just put 'Y'."
When he goes to update the form into the mainframe, he gets an error message, and it won't let him. He goes off to ask someone higher up on the foodchain what the issue might be, and she tells him that the response should have input 'No' for transitional. He's worked here for over 20 years. I am afraid.
I 'train' with another person. A chick with fiercely helmeted hair, an ex-Marine, and when I force her to let me do some inputing of data so that I can get a feel for what goes where, she gets impatient every few lines and grabs the keyboard, pushes my hands out of the way, and puts the data in herself.
She tells me things that directly contradict what the last guy told me. I ask her which one is right. She tells me that the way the other guy told me to do it is wrong. Later on I ask the bureau manager, who tells me to do it like the guy told me. When I go to 'train' with the woman again, and I do it like the guy told me, she gets very, very pissed.
"Well, if you need to be nitpicky about it, go ahead, do it that way," she says.
When I explain that I spoke to the manager, she says, "Fine, be rigid, if that's the way you want it." She rolls her eyes. As she's an ex-Marine, and she may nunchuck me or at least scream Semper Fi in my face, I do it her way while I sit with her, but the way the manager say to do it when 'training' with other people.
But by my third week there, I had a pretty good idea of what the form flow was, and I created an action flow sheet for it, which details step by step what the procedures are, what the choices are, why to choose the possiblities available. And I printed it out and went around and asked the folks who'd been there awhile if they had any input for it, incorporated their feedback, and huzzah: a very simple flow for how to do this stuff!
But of course, six years ago, which is the last time the state budget allowed them to hire new staff, I'm sure they had some sort of training manual, or even procedures, but now, as it's a freakin free-for-all where employees simply get as much done as they possibly can, and creating a 'training procedure' is quite frankly, a for-profit luxury, and we three new employees are most likely the last new employees for a really, really, really long time, who cares?
(You guys realize how f*cked things are, right? Seriously, things are really, really f*cked on the economic front. It's what I deal with every day now: how incredibly f*cked people are as the economy slides into freefall . . . )
What came to mind today was the movie Brazil because it is just loops and loops of forms and bizarre shades of grey on one side, and desperate, alternately pleading and raging people on the other, with the office employees as these overworked, underpaid robots who ask questions and input data, even as their humanness surfaces here, and there, and they try, really try, to help the person in front of them keep their head above water.
But here's the thing. I actually like it there. Yeah, it's hell on so many levels. People scream at me for a good portion of the day. The stress level is insane. The job itself is horrific in this "Procedure Bears No Resemblance To Real Life" kind of way. But human beings depend on us for money, for survival. And the people I work with are actually pretty nice. And I appreciate how thankless their job is, and how little they get paid, and how meager the benefits are. And because of the chaos, I'm mostly left alone. I muddle my way through as best I can. I pester the people in the cubicles around me with a hundred questions a day. I take a morning break. I take a lunch break. I take an afternoon break. I do my best to both help the people who come and sit in my cubicle, and not piss off the people I work with. And then I go home.
No one cares that I have a master's degree in public health. Or that I am an accomplished psychic, holistic teacher, shamanic healer. They are just happy that I work, that I make their work load lighter. And that I bring in snacks and share them, usually with a joke.
I'm very grateful for the income. Although I still haven't seen any. Because the state payroll system is just as frakked as the rest of it. But I'm hopeful that the end of the month, when I'll have been employed for over six weeks, I'll receive a check. And I'm confident that eventually I will get paid. And in the meantime, I'm actually just grateful to be busy, so busy that I don't have time to think about death or failure or misery. At least not my own.
Never in a million years would I have thought I'd be okay with a job like this. But to go into chaos, plug in, find a little flow for the day, go home, exhausted, snuggle kitties, read a bit, watch a dvd, then sleep until the next day, is actually okay.
I think about that morning I woke up a month ago with that psychic directive to go to this particular office, a place I'd never been before, I even saw a picture of it in my mind, where it was on the road, what the building looked like, and heard: take the first job they offer you. And how this job was so not what I would have ever have pursued, much less accepted. And how it is the perfect plugging in each day. Go in, plug in, plug out, leave. No one all up in my grill. No one watching me to count the minutes I take for a break. Just do my best, and leave. It's perfect for my broken heart, my fractured mind. And oh lordy, thank you for the income.
