A Complete Explanation Of Everything

...not.

Anyway, I had best inform you all of my recent travails in terms of getting promoted / career advancement at work.

It all started out innocently enough, simply put, a good friend of mine who has risen through the ranks was in the position to pretty much offer a change of scene on a plate for myself. A lateral move but a ticket to the easy life in some ways, we've worked together before and it would have been quite a laugh.

So in tandem with my current direct report going on maternity leave until perhaps February of next year (this was all back in July), the ball and the advantage was firmly in my court. Outside of material recompense, this company has been pretty good to me (if you leave aside the soul destruction of coming in here everyday and operating one single cog in the wheel of capitalism 40 hours a week) and I did manage to get them to pay for the masters and also sneaked three months unpaid leave following a threat to simply quit.

So perhaps, I'm expecting too much, to have my hard earned contempt rewarded with anything more than the current dead end I find myself in. But then again, am I? Things go relatively well in work and certainly when I'm here, I feel like contributing and enjoy the job to a certain extent because welfare economics and price cap regulation is essentially a big game. A really boring big game but a game nonetheless and you can get lost in the plot of it and to some degree believe that you are actually delivering a benefit to society. In the sense that all going well, if we applied policy correctly, we'd end up with a nice shiny airport that was comfortable and didn't cost the earth.

However, anybody who has travelled through Dublin in the last 15 years might guess that we have been the victims of alot of very bad policy and became a sort of political football for the neo-conservative elements of the national administration during the last election.

But bringing this all back to me, because this is about me.

My manager basically agreed to plumb for a regrading of my current job which would allow me to suckle at the teat of junior management and pretty much represent fair value (in my honest opinion) for the six years of my young glorious life that I have wasted in this coalmine. All well and good, says I.

Then we write the shiny job evaluation document.

Then it turns out human resources (or as I like to refer to them, the devil incarnate) request a job profile to go on the side with that.

Well, that's really just re-hashing the job evaluation document so I do that.

It all gets submitted then with suitably glowing support from my manager and my big boss.

Timeframe? 6-8 weeks.

Ok, not ideal but sure let's see what happens.

This week, eight weeks expires with 'nary a word, I contact human resources to be informed the application will be reviewed shortly and even at that point, the CX gets the final "yay" or "nay" on it.

Then on top of that, HR decide they want to meet yesterday (with the head of Internal Audit in attendance) to: "get a better understanding of your role and key responsibilities"???

Hello??? Have you read the shagging document I fucking sent you???

Anyway, we have our little shindig and then in a moment of clarity it hits me, I'm the one here doing all the bloody work! Gone are the days when you worked and were rewarded on the basis of performance, when it was within the manager's gift to grant cash and seniority (the usually associated symbology of advancement and progress), now, it's left to the poor pleb, him or herself to justify your supposed hauteur.

So yeah, I pushed human resources on the timeframe one more time yesterday, at the end of our amicable little chat, and I'm looking at a further 2-3 weeks before a recommendation is even issued on the application.

Then, if (and that might be a bigger "if" then I had first envisaged) a recommendation is given, it is then passed up to the high altar of the Chief Executive for an arbitrary decision.

And lo, with the wisdom of Solomon, the man from Del Monte says: "No".

I have forseen it.

Work sucks.