The Work Around

Have you ever read something you weren’t supposed to see, but had stumbled upon accidentally?

I once worked for an outfit I’ll simply call the company. It had numerous departments, and one of my jobs was to work on texts for different departments, some of them long and complex, with lots of codes.

As such, I was asked to work with someone who’d been there a while, I’ll call her Hera, and who had suffered through the various software programs they used with what we might diplomatically call “limited personal compatibility.”

She hated Microsoft. To the point where she had developed elaborate workarounds and procedures to continue doing things her own idiosyncratic way, wherever Microsoft was forced upon her.

And now my boss asked me to go to her group and take over a project for Hera in her absence; I went and talked to her about it, asking if she had documented her procedures and workarounds.

My work there had been well received; I’d helped other departments before, and knew people were happy what I’d done. So of course I got a tad overconfident. I was puzzled by some of her procedures; she told me there was a file in one of her online folders that would help, and that’s how her long, complex texts with many identified terms (needing consistent reference) and internal and external references, with her extensive procedural voodoo, landed in my lap.

I did not pay great attention to her workarounds, as the text had to be compatible with the company’s systems, anyway, which I was well-versed in. Which meant, as I massaged the text for her department, I used some of our companywide systems, not her workarounds, but soon had a hard time and went looking for the file she said was on one of her drives. I did not find it, but in looking for it found something with a title about coding problems and opened that up.

It seemed to be an email saved to a Word file. It spoke about procedures and workarounds and oh, man, a lot more, too. It touched on some of the issues I had, and far more than touched on some very touchy and private topics at the company. I could tell who it was from by the situations it discussed, I’ll call that person Athena, although all names had been expunged with care. I found out about numerous skeletons in the closets of various offices, the bones of contentions long gone. Deep-felt sentiments about my group, about past decisions and deficiencies.

I found out a lot that neither Hera nor Athena wanted me to know, I’m sure of that.

Got to go finish something now; tomorrow morning I’ll write up and post what happened after that, I promise.

Update: You can read the rest, here.