Later the Same Week

My wife and I both woke up early this morning. Not so early as to catch our daughter before she sprinted down to watch television (she gets up easily on days when she doesn't have school; with varying degrees of difficulty when she does), and not so early that we felt cheated by lack of sleep, but still: early. We hung out together for a bit, in a way reminding ourselves of why we like to be with each other. I don't think we're ever in danger of forgetting that, but its nice to remember.

My wife says that once again at her company there are rumours of layoffs to occur, and she said that the thing that worries her the most is not that she will be -- she doesn't think she's impervious to that, she's just grimly aware that its a possibility - - but that if she is, it might and probably will affect my intentions of retiring. I admit that thinking about that gave me pause, because I've gotten into the mode of thinking this year, possibly six months past that, and no further. That external events might make me hang around past that, and substantially past, at that, is a little unsettling. That feeling is frosted over with my dismay at my findings of which I spoke yesterday, and its reinforced whenever I hear a manager say that something ought to be done 'in case' an auditor doesn't like how we do it now. I won't go into that now except to observe that wariness of auditors seems to have replaced intelligence and foresight at my organizational level. But if that should happen, and she does get laid off, and I do have to stay around -- I won't be happy, but I'll know that she is happier to be out of that environment. (Its not a sweatshop; its just occasionally mismanaged. There's no word that means 'not managed according to the precepts celebrated in Fast Company', is there? Perhaps 'managed according to the precepts of The Harvard Business Review'. Which isn't entirely fair to HBR. ) Anyway -- though staying past that mid-next-year date would be a high price to pay, I'd pay it. Her happiness is more important to me than mine is.

Whats better than that is for both of us to be happy at what we do, of course. I wonder sometimes how happy people are, as a rule. And I wonder why we lost (if we ever had) happiness at work. Certainly, there must have been a time when people routinely got satisfaction from working. They may and almost certainly did not enjoy it, and even in times where everything was done manually there had to be tasks that were unbearably difficult, soul-draining, and dangerous. But (and perhaps this is my sense of whimsy, or belief in the Easter Bunny) I like to think that when those tasks were done, they felt a sense of satisfaction along with the bone-deep sense of weariness. By god, that tree is finally cut down to size.... that mountain is finally tamed... But the people I work with don't seem to have that sense of satisfaction, and as for the ones last night, they seem to operate on a much lower plane even than that. I want to do something about that. Yes, I know thats ludicrous, to assume that I can do anything about it, when I frequently cannot even manage the evironment of my own job, let alone, my reactions to it. Yet I want to. More accurately, I want an adult to take care of it, and since they seem to be in short supply, I am looking around for alternatives. Easter Bunny, you there?

I learned on Friday that starting on Tuesday I'll be on call for the operating systems. I don't doubt that I can do it, though I know that there will unquestionably be events where I do what I think right and reasonable, and its not the way the current operating system people do it. I am a little apprehensive that I'll make errors, because this is an unforgiving environment. But overall I'm pleased. Its something that I've wanted to be able to do.