Playing Politics

Even these days, having had a variety of office jobs over a period of a little over 20 years (when did my job become a career?!), I harbour a small disquiet that, sooner or later, office politics will be my downfall. It happened in my early 20s - where a misunderstanding of the dynamic between me (essentially a newbie in the office) and a (senior) colleague led to some poor decisions that made my position untenable (and led to me seeing a shrink for a while). Nothing like it has ever happened since - I've made mistakes, certainly, but never the same ones - yet there is still a nagging sensation that I'm bound to fuck up again sooner or later, which has me almost constantly on my guard and not very trusting in an office environment. So when one of my colleagues recently fell foul of office politics (or, in a way, someone else's misunderstanding thereof), I started feeling quite uneasy.

The situation is this: the structure of the company changed recently, with our bon vivant boss departing (ousted, I suspect, due to other, unrelated office politics), with the void filled by the head bean-counter. Having an accountant officially in charge of a company is, in my humble opinion, never a good idea because their only concern is keeping the company solvent, at the expense of keeping the employees happy, and the client/provider relationships healthy. Running an entire company requires that a balance be found - generally in favour of the finances, but a balance nonetheless - and I really don't think he's going to manage that. The problems experienced by my colleague are both evidence and symptoms of this.

Part of the problem is that the guy who now runs the company has a certain manner about him - abrasive, but generally humourously so - and, with my colleague being still quite a recent addition to the company, this has led him to believe that a certain amount of backchat/banter is permissable. Of course, if that were true, that was before the restructuring. Now the guy is running the company, he clearly feels he's entitled to everyone's respect and deference. That's all well and good but, as the head of the company, he has to be equally cautious about how he treats everyone else. Or he would, if it weren't for the fact that he's also the closest we have to Human Resources.

But I digress...

A few months back, my colleague (and I, as I can hardly claim to be blameless in this particular matter) failed to check a certain element of a job, which made it rather more costly than it needed to be. He decided - off his own back - to personally apologise for his slip-up, and was met with rather childish scorn. It's possible - due to his perception of the level of banter between them - that he said something unwise in response. Based on the conversation I had with my head of department last week, I strongly suspect that all the complaints that have arisen about my colleague stem partly from there. Nothing in that meeting was new, and the fact that his somewhat costly cock-up came up at all, along with another, only slightly more recent cock-up where he didn't think to double-check the quantities provided for an order, tends to suggest that the company's newly promoted head holds grudges.

Another side to the issue is that our head of department isn't in anyone's good books. While my own promotion is ostensibly intended to take certain pressures off our boss, there are other factors at play. Just one of those factors is a sustained, harsh, and only partially deserved campaign of criticism. But when our boss is criticised, that invariably gets passed on to the rest of us.

There was also some discussion on the subject of 'common sense' - which some feel my colleague is lacking - but, these days (evidence of a certain mellowing of my attitudes in my old age), I tend to say that 'common sense' is common only to a specific individual, and that it comes from their background and experience, so expecting someone else to display the same 'common sense' is ridiculous.

Needless to say, I have advised my colleague to be on his guard, and not engage in any further office banter, while also assuring him that I am hearing good things about his work as well (strange that it doesn't seem to get communicated to him directly, but hey...). I've also restated to our boss that he feels he has been assigned some tasks which are outside his current skill set, and that they are passed to him with insufficient instruction. Our boss acknowledged this, at least.

There's probably more I could write about, but this has been a bit of a struggle - I don't much like writing about office politics, and it all gave me a couple of sleepless nights last week.

Instead, I shall start writing about telly.

The new series of Gotham, for example, which started to lose me from the outset. Gordon becoming just as corrupt as the city he had originally vowed to clean up (it comes to something when Bullock is less tainted by misdeeds than Gordon!), Bruce being pretty stupid (blowing up a secret door rather than figuring out the password, which was his own name!), and a new villain, intent on taking over the city by means of some ridiculously theatrical, staged criminal activities, starting with the breaking out of a bunch of Arkham Asylum residents, then setting them loose on the city. They were so clearly setting up one of the escapees to be The Joker, but then killed him off in a manner than suggests that the eventual true Joker will effectively be the result of a gypsy curse. Another of the escapees is Gordon's former girlfriend, who now wants nothing more than to get back together with him... I was all set to switch off permanently recently, when a new Police Captain was introduced to the Gordon's GCPD precinct, played by none other than Michael Chiklis... So now I'm slightly more keen to keep watching. Albeit reluctantly. That one event did highlight a huge cock-up on the part of the writers, though: Gordon was sacked at the end of the last series, and only got his job back by doing a favour for the Penguin, who then 'encouraged' the incumbent Police Commissioner to retire, resulting in the promotion of Gordon's erstwhile Captain to that coveted role. She was Commissioner long enough to reinstate Gordon, then got killed by the escaped lunatics on something like her second day in the new job. But why, given that the former Police Commissioner worked elsewhere, was she even still at Gordon's precinct, evidently functioning as Captain and Commissioner? And now there's no living Police Commissioner, why is the new arrival only a Captain?

Agents of SHIELD returned without much fanfare but, in its opening episode, introduced a character that looked so much like Blackheart, I'm sorely disappointed to find that it's (probably) not. It's always watchable as a show, thanks to a very charismatic cast, but I frequently wonder about the direction of the show.

Other than that, most of what I'm watching is First Dates (which may feature someone I used to work with) and Bridezillas (which constantly has me wondering why the couples it features even stay together, let alone attempt to get married and, sadly, we've had only one acrimonious on-camera split on the big day... So far), and wasting the rest of my time on the interwebs, doing very little of any import.

But this week sees the return of The X-Files, and what I hear so far isn't good. Like many people, I do wonder why they felt the need to bring it back (not least because I have the boxed set of the original series on DVD, so I'm not exactly missing the show or feeling unduly nostalgic), but it's only a short series, so hopefully it can't stray too far from the old, successful formula.