Thought Picnic: Political regain from office pain

Wants and needs

It was like entering a bazaar of the bizarre. My engagement extended just a few weeks ago had someone asking if I still required the privileges I had to do what I was brought in to do.

Immediately, I replied ensuring my manager was copied in that the privileges are essential to fulfilling my role – that should have been the end of the story.

Apparently, that was not the case, as the week began, I noticed that certain ordinary things I was once able to do, I could do no more.

Lose to lost

Sometimes you ignore the little issues because at the time, the situation is not as significant as to warrant further investigation, some other things I needed to do, I could do all because I was still registered with the environment.

However, yesterday, I decided to check why exactly a restriction came into place only to find out that literally all my privileges had been revoked without notification.

This is the sort of unnecessary frustration of activity and productivity that one sometimes encounters in the workplace that it borders on an atrocity.

Find the wind

Usually, on occasions like this, you settle into forensic mode, obtain earlier requests, approved implementations and compare those with the current state of play before the matter gets escalated up the chain for a speedy resolution.

Speedy it had to be, but not before the email church of scores of meaningless power plays that fail to grasp what needs to get done until someone up there bellows and suddenly there is someone to assume responsibility to resolve the issue with alacrity.

Just two hours later, things seemed to return to normal but it would tempting fate to want to determine the how and why of the loss of my privileges apart from the apparent lack of processes to ensure that such events do not happen willy-nilly.

Room to bloom

Where you find you are about to fume and fulminate, you take 10 sharp breaths, type with consideration without letting go of the piece of your mind you desperately want to express and allow the system to adjust itself as the responsibility chain that depends on your services sorts out the politics to get the technical issues resolved.

As you drum the desk with your fingers, don’t forget that you are still charging for the time you have been made idle by forces within the organisation that should have been facilitating your greater productivity.