A lot at once

It’s been nuts. It’s particularly been nuts at work. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it, but it’s relentless. It was plenty enough challenge to simply have a brand new job in an area I know very little about (air quality). But no, one month into it, they anoint me acting manager (with no actual previous management experience). So that’s it, right, like surely it can’t get any harder than that, right? Right? Wrong.

So guess what? Our senior manager is doing a reorganization of his whole department, and we’re now in the early stages of more than doubling the size of my team, and more than doubling my team’s workload. We currently have one vacancy already, and three new (vacant) positions will soon be moved into my team. So I’ll have 4 new people to hire and train. Our team currently only consists of 3 of us, and 2 of the 3 of us are brand new. So we’re going to have a team of 7, with 6 of the 7 of us still in new-hire probationary status, and only one guy who actually knows what he’s doing. Don’t say it. No, he’s not going to retire. He is not allowed to retire. Because I said so.

And our metrics suck. My team currently isn’t even doing a third of the work we are supposed to be doing. If the facilities we are regulating had any idea how few of their reports we are even filing, much less looking at…omg. We’ve got boxes of unreviewed submissions stacked in unused cubicles. Ideally, we’d be reviewing all the reports. But meanwhile I’m just trying to get some prioritization in place so we can try to catch the most egregious violations.

In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not the official manager yet. The job will be posting in the next week or two, and then I will need to apply and interview, and tell them all about how great I am in this job. I’ve been learning a lot fast, and I probably don’t realize how much I already know. But let me tell you, I spend every minute of every day feeling clueless.

For example, I get an email. I don’t know what the email means or why it came to me. I don’t have any idea what to do with the email. I google phrases and acronyms out of the email. I print the email and walk around to random people in the department and show them the email. I write down the incomprehensible things they are saying about the email. I go back to my desk and google some more. I then tentatively draft something that sounds like it might make sense about the email, and send it to approximately the right set of people (give or take a few) and pray that I don’t sound like a total idiot. Then on to the next email. And repeat.

Meanwhile I’m supposed to be writing project plans and timelines for projects I don’t even understand. I’ve also been put in charge of several online applications, all in various stages of development, none of which I know how to use.

It’s soooo way different from Sandia. At Sandia we were extremely micromanaged and everything was spoon-fed. We had to know everything about everything before they allowed us to do anything. Here it’s the opposite. They’re like, don’t worry about the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing, you just gotta do it anyway because it needs done and we don’t have anyone else to do it. Just go, go, go, you’re doing great, keep going as fast as you can.

And the weird thing – the work here is actually more technically difficult (in my job at least) than it was at Sandia. I have a lot of credibility here from having worked at Sandia, because Sandia has a reputation of doing highly technical incomprehensible stuff. So they think I’m some sort of uber technical wiz. But the reality is, air quality – and the facilities we regulate (oil and gas plants, compression stations, etc.) – are actually really complicated.

Oh by the way, do you know I have the ability to just edit the state’s websites on whim? That I actually know how to do. And they’re letting me do it. Like really? Yes, I can just go up there and write or upload whatever I want (he-he-he). But seriously, can you imagine Sandia allowing something like that?

Ok, update, I found out I can’t actually edit EVERYTHING I want on the state website. I have total access to write whatever I want on any of the pages. BUT, I cannot change the title of a link in a dropdown menu without Bureau Chief approval! (That’s lots of layers up there.) So I have to send a formal email up the chain in order to have one of the options in the side menu say, “Notices and FAQs” rather than “FAQ’s”. But hey, the actual page that it’s linked to is all mine. I can put whatever notices and FAQs up there that I want. Puppy pics, here we come! Ok, not really. It would be fun though.

I haven’t worked this hard at a job in my entire life.