This Week's Meltdown

I just want to take the time to clear the air regarding my publicly stated frustrations this week.  It was a hard week and really it isn't getting any easier and I don't expect it to anytime soon.  To break it down, my rants were the products of 90% professional bullshit, followed by 10% personal bullshit.  I'll start with the professional bullshit first.

Most people, even friends don't really know what I do and I am more than okay about that.  If I talk about work I prefer to talk about what I have done recently or have to do or what is happening presently such as a shitty on-call rotation.  All of the other other details and mumbo-jumbo I just try to minimize its role and whatnot in my life.

Now there is a great amount of confusion, change and proposed upheaval in my work environment that is not only impacting me but a lot of my closest coworkers and even my immediate management (my manager an the manager of our sister team, who are awesome to work for) and none of this change is leading towards a good or even functional end.  Everything from voluntary rif's to restructuring the organization.  I am pissed but my dissatisfaction is minor compared to some of my more vocal cohorts.

Be that as it may, there have been a couple of high level briefings and meetings with executive types the past two weeks and it is those meetings and the messages in those meetings that have frustrated me the most.  One exec misrepresented and contradicted himself so bad that seriously... if he were giving testimony in court a lawyer would rip him to shreds as a poor witness lacking any credibility what so ever.  The hard part for me is that I have to reconcile somehow in my mind that this is a leader whom I am supposed to trust and look up to and be inspired by?  I fucking think not.

I watched a movie last night where the owner of a company asked an employee if he was happy there... wow... what a concept.  Something like that would NEVER be asked or even valued in our current corporate culture.

My upbringing provided me with a very strong sense of right and wrong, fair play and a somewhat reliable moral compass... somewhat.  My military training at its root I have always credited with teaching me and instilling in me a strong sense of integrity.  Integrity in my book accounts to personal strength, knowing and choosing to do the right thing. And if you choose wrongly and fuck up?  Have the strength to stand up, claim it, clean up your mess and move on.  Integrity is very important to me.  Melissa has tons of it and that is one of the biggest reasons we are together. 

I was also taught to lead from the front... I don't get that sense anymore in my professional environment... The leaders we have now are incapable of leading and have proven themselves to lack so much character that nobody in their right mind (or capable of thinking on their own) would even follow anymore... Most of my coworkers wonder, actively, why our executives hate us so much... seriously!  Yes it is that bad and it really pisses me off and there was 90% of the cause of my ranting.

The other 10% is personal and mostly is centered around dealing with my father's death and cleaning that up.  It is hard on me handling the estate portion, the administrative part because to do that I try my very best to compartmentalize it, be objective, fair, completely unemotional and level headed. In other words, handle it in a professional nature.  There is some more of that military training..  This is a dirty, dirty job to manage and we are months away from closure on it.  I know as the only and oldest son it is my duty to take care of this and I will, but fuck me it is hard at times.  Because (as far as we know so far) no clear direction was left behind, we are muddling through a lot of grey right now and that can be uncomfortable.  That is the administrative part of it... Then there is the emotional aspect that to be honest I really have NO idea how I am handling it.  Am I grieving more than I realize?  Am I not grieving enough?  I will substitute the word grieving with processing as it sounds more positive, but still,  I wonder how I am doing?  

So there you have it... just a lot of the ugliness in life I was dealing with this week.  Throw in some other personal disappointments as a customer with businesses local and not local and I was pretty much done.   On my run the other night just a lot of this sort of welled up and I just wanted to express my dissatisfaction with everything as a whole.  I also will NOT recant any of the words I used.  I just wanted to clear it up so nobody was thinking anything dire was in the near future...   

I am okay.