Happy thanksgiving. We stayed home this weekend to focus on relaxation.

These days I'm under a lot of pressure from home to succeed at work. I was offered a promotion should I stay in AZ. My transfer to CT came with the understanding that my new boss would have to re-evaluate me for the promotion. My wife really wants me to get that promotion, and my predecessor is said to have desired it for many years without any gains. I'll be honest: if I don't get promoted, then it will be a major blow to the impression I have that I can make a long-term career here and grow in it. Therefore, I have to make the most of these times of relaxation, using them to plan my approach. I have to find the energy to do my best here, so that if I don't get promoted, I will have no negative feelings about the decision my wife and I will have to make, whatever the result.

The work environment in CT, as I mentioned in another post, is very different from phoenix. At first, the differences struck me as an excess of practical inefficiency. Whereas I used to get a few emails per day, most directly relevant to me, thus giving me plenty of time to indulge in HR updates and internal newsletters. I now get about 30-40 emails per day, most of which are sequential messages in threads about my projects, projects which might become mine, or miscellaneous service issues, in most of which only the first and last email are relevant to me (if any) -- crosstalk. About 0.5% of the HR emails and newsletters are actually very important: "time to renew your benefits", "we're implementing a vaccine mandate", etc.. I'm so overwhelmed with emails now that the only way I notice important company bulletins anymore is when they appear as reminders in the daily morning meeting, and that one time they mentioned the vaccine mandate was literally the only time that meeting was useful for me in an immediate sense. For the rest of those meetings, the only value was in the exposure -- I'm hearing recipe names there, and slowly becoming comfortable with them; I'm learning the names of people, and becoming known as a solver of problems. But I don't have time to solve their problems, because they call me too often for things which aren't actual problems; for example, one day (true story) I spent 4 hours walking back and forth between the line and my office for service calls, and each time, the problem was solved  by maintenance or operations either while I was in transit or soon after I arrived. So, their actual problems are deprioritized in favor of expensive projects. I'm also being asked to produce documents quantifying progress on my projects, which takes up time I could be using on the project itself, and honestly strikes me as odd, seeing as my progress is readily quantifiable in terms of the POs which have been cut (which I expect we should have in a database somewhere... right?) and the actual project materials (drawings/code) I've produced. Moreover, the union is a constant source of problems -- not actually because of their rules (I haven't had any problems with union rules, necessarily, as far as I can tell, and everyone told me that would be the source of my problems), but with their attitudes. The unioneers literally ignore me and cuss at me when I approach them for information about an issue; they call me and demand that I come to the line with my laptop to examine their issues, and then hang up on me when I ask them for details like, "what does the alarm on the display say?". Their attitude is totally inexplicable! And, we're in the midst of, what seems like, a plan to perform an endless series of major upgrades to our SCADA/MES system; these updates are performed in a way that prioritizes speed over correctness, because it's impossible with Wonderware to understand the consequences of a given change you make to the server, since they're so deeply in bed with Microsoft and their software is, like Microsoft's, a rat's nest. So every change brings with it an immediate loss of functionality which occasionally takes weeks to figure out. Our goal is to get our software completely up to date, but by the time we get there (give it a couple of years), the next major upgrade will be rolled-out and we'll be pushed to implement that instead; this isn't hyperbole on my part -- we already know what the next major upgrade will be; it was released already, and it's hanging in our periphery; we just say, "we'll install that after we're done with the current changes". I'm put into the middle of this and expected to learn our current Wonderware system -- maybe I could do that if it was my only responsibility. There are people in the company talking about bringing in Ignition instead; they're going about it all wrong, shouting buzzwords and trying to push redundant solutions out to corporate audiences who haven't asked for it. Sometimes my boss asks me, "what can Ignition do that Wonderware can't do", and the answer is, technically, nothing, except that it can do all the same things easier. Well, "easier", if you are willing to learn Python and eliminate the system that you've already dumped 30 years of frantic upgrades and boatloads of currency into, and the America team is willing to do neither.

At first, I thought this was all reckless inefficiency. But now that I've had a day to rest, (even though I have had the opportunity to sleep-in a few times in the past year, this feels like the first in several years; but I'll try to spare you much more of my self-pity), I realize that I'm being treated as a Project Manager, and I haven't been keeping a good attitude about it.

I did the same thing with emails to my project manager. He asked me to keep him apprised of all my projects and to CC him in emails.  Project managers are expected to be content while inundated with large quantities of meaningless information about their projects, picking out the meaningful parts, which makeup a large enough quantity of information as it is -- to sort through technical data and discern meaningful progress. This is the task I have to set my mind to.

The morning meeting serves exactly the purposes I mentioned above; it makes me mutually familiar with the people in the factory. It exposes me to product information, and makes me aware of (mostly inconsequential) problems with production. Most importantly, they talk about things I occasionally miss in emails. Attending the morning meeting is an obligation because my boss says it is, and it's my job to squeeze every last drop of value out of that meeting.

The nuisance calls I get from production are like a reflection in water, refracting and showing me the very same errors, oversights, and incompleteness in our documentation, interface design, and operator work instructions. It is a primary function of mine to analyze these issues and conquer them; to get our documentation up-to-speed.

As far as I can tell, the unioneer's terrible attitude is a function of their feelings about their position (it doesn't matter whether they think it's a superior or inferior position, and the way inferiority complexes work it would be impossible to tell anyway). I have to become one of them -- not by joining the union, but by making myself a member of their class of individuals (I'm not a marxist; give me a break when I use the word "class"). I should involve myself in their work and lighten their burdens, while making my own effort imminently apparent to them. If I can earn their respect and rise above their struggle (I won't bother trying to convince them that it is the struggle common to all mankind), then I can make them useful to me, and drive this factory toward perfection.

Wonderware is the software I'm stuck with. I'm going to take my time on this one. Hopefully there will be some reprieve when the immediately planned server updates local to my factory are complete. While I wait, I'll become competent in what's needed to get by, maintaining a steady increase in competency while I accomplish other goals. And when the moment is right, I'll master it.

God has always been good to me.

"My lot has fallen in pleasant places."