It's a good thing I don't drink...

...but the only way to stay sober, at least for me, is to take an active part in my recovery by attending meetings of alcoholics anonymous, keeping in touch with my sponsor, living the 12 steps, and practicing the principles I've been taught there. So last night I attended a speaker meeting. Because I do these things, there are people that are alive today. Specifically my supervisor.

Yes, I'm going to break the cardinal rule of blogging. The commandment that says Thou Shalt Not Blog About Work. Why? Because I don't give a fuck. I know my job, I do my job and I do it well. I am an anal-retentive-detail-freak and that makes my work as close to perfect as you can get. And that's why when you look at the performance statistics for my department, a department of four, fully 40% of the work completed by my department is done by me. Why? Because after dealing with the nimrods, I mean my co-workers, in my department, people have learned that if they want something done right the first time, your best bet is to call me.

Why do I arrogantly make this claim? Because it's come to my attention that I've been denied a promotion and accompanying raise due to the inaction of my supervisor. And since there isn't much I can do about it, I've decided I don't give a fuck who reads this and who gets offended by it.

Let me make it clear that as far as people go, I really like my co-workers. I've reached an age where I can separate "I like you" from "Hey asshole, your failure to follow procedure is making more work for me." The one has nothing to do with the other. If I like you and I work with you, I can ream you a new asshole over the fact that you have the head of customer service crawling up my ass looking for polyps at 2:00 pm and still buy you a beer at 6:00 pm. Working with you and socializing with you are two different things.

Let me make it clear that as a person I like my supervisor. She's a really nice person. But nice doesn't get the job done. She is completely ineffective when it comes to lobbying the board room for the things my department needs to function to the best of it's ability. She's so busy being nice and polite and trying to be liked that she's become a doormat for the vendor that supplies some equipment to us. She is completely ineffective at getting my co-workers to do the job to the best of their ability. Seriously, with all my complaints about the same issues over and over, if this is the best of their ability then they need to quit their day job and find another gig.

The job is not that hard. We have detailed written procedures for almost everything that have been fine tuned over time, complete with troubleshooting tips. We have an easily searchable helpdesk with detailed notes on service calls and there's not too many new issues that crop up that haven't been covered before so when an end-user has a problem that has already been solved somewhere else, it's just not that difficult to check out the trouble tickets and see what worked before.

She's either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid and frankly I'm leaning towards the stupid. She asked me to act in a supervisory capacity and mentor my co-workers, which I did without benefit of title or pay increase, for the last quarter of 2006. But friendly coaching didn't seem to have any effect on their behavior and I got fed up with that and told her so back in January. She then asked me to keep her in the loop when I ran across things that weren't being done in the proscribed manner. I did this by forwarding her the helpdesk tickets where procedures were not followed, issues were not resolved due to a lack of research into the issue /interest in the issue on the part of the technician handling the call, and where I thought user's behavior was creating the problems we were having to fix.

For six months I've been "keeping her in the loop" in this fashion and nothing's changed. I figured she either thought I was being picky or just didn't give a damn. I come to find out, she didn't know what the "forwarded ticket" emails were so she never bothered to click the link and read the ticket to see what was going on.

Finally last month, an overworked and over-burdened me sent my co-workers an email pointing out two instances where I had just spent hours apologizing to department heads about something that was done incorrectly because of a failure to follow procedure. I blind copied my supervisor on the email...and she replied-to-all.

Then during the course of my annual review she had the balls to tell me that because the department went to hell in a handbasket in January I did not get a promotion and raise. Because of her failure to address the problems that I had clearly pointed out to her, I got screwed. And I'm not OK with that. Not OK in the least. I don't give a shit if I get fired over this. I can have any job I want any time I want and if I lose my job because I pointed out that my supervisor didn't do her job, so be it. But when I walk out that door, everyone will know that the problems in the department are not a result of my action or in-action, but hers. I hope HR has a fire suit for my exit interview...