A Mixed Bag

Today happened to be a mixed bag for me at work. I've been trying to get an issue resolved for the past seven months ( to no avail, but it isn't from a lack of trying). My boss sees things one way, but another boss doesn't see things the same way. We have been at an impasse for about the past five months as I grit my teeth and bare it.

Earlier this week, my boss' boss met with the other boss to try to reach some agreements—not only for my work, but also for four of my colleagues who do various other tasks. Today we got the report.

Things were going great. There were some good in-roads made on one colleague's front. Then great changes came for another co-worker. I became hopeful. Then the time came for my verdict.

I heard the report fall from his lips, "With eComm, we weren't able to reach an agreement." I was a bit floored. Or quite more than a bit. I couldn't believe that they couldn't come to any sort of agreement. So we agreed to give up. We will be letting all writing standards go out the window. I will not be doing anything more than copying and pasting items for them—typos and all.

 I left the meeting quite disheartened. I find it hard to fathom that when a business has help that they would flagrantly deny that help. And it was even worse that after all my offers to help, all my examples provided to management, all my hours that I had invested to make the documents better were completely ignored.

My boss asked me to stay behind and talk to him for a moment. He let me know that since we would be spending less time on this group, we would find more challenging items for me to be doing. And that he was planning to get my position moved to another classification. That meant a raise. While I'm excited to get a raise, and I'm excited for more challenging and new work, I feel a bit bad for all those workers who have to fight their way through the documentation and not get the clarity they deserve. I feel bad that I have to give up on that.

But, for the time being, I'll just have to be glad that I got a mixed bag today. I'm happy to get some good news after a week that seemed to be two and a half weeks all crammed into one.