Oh what a beautiful morning

For those of you who enjoy the show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, I was watching him on a pig farm. This in itself was very entertaining, but the farmer was brilliant in his harvesting of resources that would otherwise be landfilled. Not the point I wanted to make, but never the less brilliant. I was faced with the stark contrast between the thought and effective efforts of the farmer and the absolute lack of intelligence here.
Our technical reviewer, who himself boarders on brilliant, was reviewing an assessment. He had lots of comments. Nothing unusual here, but the comments became so numerous that he felt it better to have a small meeting to discuss the issues, rather than trying to write all of his thoughts down.
He gathered the relevant parties in the cube next to me and began to discuss the assessment. The assessment was wrong at the most basic levels because the SMiLES was wrong. [SMiLES is a method of writing molecular structures in normal test (e.g. ethanol is CCO and phenol is c1(O)ccccc1). When this structure is wrong then all the computer modeled information is based on the wrong structure.] The error in this assessment was significant and yielded an assessment that was pretty much off-base from top to bottom.
If the assessment had been sent to me for review and I discovered the error, I would have simply sent it back to the author with the correct SMiLES and told them to redo the work. This would let the author start the assessment over, but on the correct path. Then I would have simply forgotten about the issue until the new assessment was ready for peer review.
Our beloved technical reviewer did not take these simple steps, but rather he called a meeting to discuss the error. It started simple enough, with him pointing out the error in the SMiLES. From there it crashed through the barriers of decency and common sense and swerved into the realm of insanity. He actually walked through the whole assessment and pointed out how the wrong molecule and the correct one were different. Talk about a complete waste of time. If that wasn’t bad enough, in bloody gory detail he also covered the natural sulfur cycle and nitrogen cycle, and how the fate of each molecule was different. He took a five minute review and turned it into a 90 minute waste of four people’s time.
It was like a train wreck. I could not just put on some music and tune it out. I kept listening and listening. In actuality he changed a five minute review into a waste of 90 minutes of my time too, and that is where I have the issue. I could have spent that time day-dreaming about my wife! – Oh, the humanity.

Further work reflections.
I have been as upfront and open with my decisions and intentions as it pertains to school and my career change. Many of these “disclosures” have been very costly to me personally. I have been straddled with projects that would not have otherwise been assigned to a senior member of the group. All told I have been excluded from a plethora of meetings and cut out of a great deal of projects, in favor of more routine work and drudgery. I have accepted this as a price for being well prepared for the upcoming transitions and being able to have the best possible solutions to the problems.
Here is where I have an issue. The best possible solutions were not implemented. Preparations were not made, and thus I get f@cked. I just found out that no arrangements have been made for my change in hours (from 40 to 32). No arrangements have been made for working at P3 (an alternate site with flexible hours). No forms have been filed. No approvals have been documented, and nobody seems to know anything about it.
This leaves me feeling screwed! I paid for the good intentions and am now going to be paying as if I gave no notice. Thanks PACE!
I have been shorted salary increases.
I have been shorted advancements.
I have been deigned travel opportunities.
I have been buried in sh!t work.
All of these dues paid for nothing. I am still going to get the crap of short notice.
I am going to be stuck without a laptop.
I am going to be unable to work at the alternate facility.
I am going to have to go through the approval process of changing hours.
The lesson here is to lookout for your own. On Pace’s letterhead, website and literature are the six core values. The second core value is “value employees”. This is listed right after “Integrity.”
LIARS!!!!!

Employees are values only in how much profit they can produce.
This makes me very bitter. You can bet that when it comes time to consider interests, I will not choose to serve theirs.