another day at work, another day with nothing to do.

the manager who interviewed me for my systems position finally returned to the office after almost 2 months out on disability for back surgery; we had a team meeting to go over stuff that went on while she was out (which was basically us hanging out with her in a conference room for an hour and a half, eating donuts and talking about her rude neighbors and the office politics she missed while she was out).

after our meeting, she and one of my coworkers and i went out to the shopping center next to my office to get our lunch and i told her about how on friday our associate director (her boss) called me into his office and said that he was going to be taking me off of her team and placing me on someone else's team instead. i don't know how i feel about that quite yet since my new manager is coming from our acquisition with alltel and is based in arkansas — i'm not going anywhere, but it's going to be weird reporting to someone in a whole different state. when my associate director told me about this he said that he figured this other guy's team would be a better fit for me since it's going to be customer service systems instead of sales systems and thinks that i could put my skills to better use there, but when my new manager and i had a conference call on monday to get to know each other it sounded like neither of us really knows what's going on or what we're supposed to be doing at the moment. he's actually going to be coming up from little rock in october so we can meet face-to-face, but i still think it's a bit weird to be reporting to someone out of state.

plus, from what i've seen and heard about my (previous) manager, she's rather laid-back and relaxed and a good buffer between upper management and her team, and i don't know what things would be like if i'm reporting to someone from out of state — if management has an issue with something, are they going to take me to task about it directly? or are they going to go through him and have him coach me even though he may not know exactly what the deal is since he's removed from the situation? i'd kind of like to have my manager where i'm located.

so anyway, i told my (previous) manager about this plot twist while the three of us were out at lunch and she's pretty upset because she's the one who interviewed me for her team. apparently she and the associate director and one of the managers who has been taking her place while she's been out, they're going to have a meeting on wednesday i believe to go over some stuff that happened while she was out. she and the associate director also had a meeting today with just the two of them, and when she got out of that meeting the third coworker who was with us at lunch saw her leaving and asked her how she was doing and she gave a kind of noncommittal response. we aren't sure if that was just her being melodramatic (since she tends to do that a lot) or if some serious stuff went down during that meeting.

it occurred to me today how my (previous) team is a lot like the tv show “the it crowd” in terms of misfitness, not to mention we're all guys with a female manager. plus, my (previous) manager who just returned from disability is also named jen, hahaha… and in the “wow” category, i learned today that one of the guys on my team was out twice and in the hospital at least once because of failed suicide attempts, yikes.

i don't really know what i think about all this quite yet, but she seems to think that our associate director has it out for her and is going to try to take her team out from underneath her and have her demoted or something since the two of them don't see eye to eye. at any rate, i need to update my résumé anyway.