Me, as a manager. Nerd Alert: I have a blue lightsaber because I’m still one of the good guys.
There I was several months ago sitting in my cube, not doing much of anything and getting paid rather well for it, when one of the regular “Job Posting” email messages came out from our Human Humor Resources department. Sensing something different, I quickly scanned the email and only found two mispellings and three grammatical errors, which made this one of the most legible messages they’d sent out in a long time.
Reading a little deeper I quickly realized that this was a managerial position which almost seemed to be written for me. The job asked for skills I had, listed people I had worked well with and it didn’t report to my long-time boss and part-time nemesis, Dick Lundberg.
I quickly spent the rest of the day polishing up my resume, being careful not to go too overboard on my accomplishments knowing that someone might, on a whim, actually check. I changed “Found a cure for cancer,” to “Found a probable cure for cancer,” and when I listed how much money I had saved the company with my brilliant ideas I only used eight or nine zeroes.
Remarkably, I was interviewed. Even more remarkably, I got the job.
And, within a span of about three weeks, I went from Tom Coffee: Office Schlub to Tom Coffee: Office Dark Lord of Middle Management.
I’m still working for the same company largely doing the same things I did before, but I no longer have to work on the self-serving plans and directionless projects created by Dick Lundberg. Even more importantly I’m no longer in the Seventh Ring of Hell known as “Information Technology.”
I have an amazing group of minions staff members that work for me, I have a a slightly larger paycheck, slightly more responsibilities and a slightly larger cube. I don’t yet rate an office due to space constraints in our current building, but I’m actively mailing anonymous retirement community brochures to some of the older managers in my area.
I’ve also found that becoming a manager has given me special powers that I never had before. I can put a stop to stupid projects, I can actually influence plans so that they are carried out and I am allowed to talk to Vice Presidents without averting my eyes.
I’m still getting used to my new position but so far my favorite activity has been making obnoxious requests with Emergency Helpdesk Tickets to upgrade my PC to something with more gigahertz, change the color of my databases or run reports that have hundreds of required fields and parameters.
And you can probably guess who gets stuck with most of these requests… I now see Dick Lundberg, my former boss, more than I ever did before.
And I like it.
2 Responses to “On Becoming A Manager”
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Twit Biddler says:
Do you allow Dick to call you by your first name or do you now require Mr.?
Is Dick Lundberg a pseudonym for “Bill Lumbergh” of Office Space fame?
Sorry for all the questions – its the coffee talking..
Oh yeah, and I prefer my database in Mauve (Dilbert – 9/24/1994)
-Twit
February 10th, 2008 at 2:49 am -
Advice from a Hiring Manager: What NOT To Do In Your Cover Letter and Resumé - Spilling Coffee with Humorist Tom Coffee says:
[...] receiving a promotion at work a little while ago I’ve found that one of my main duties is serving as a hiring manager for my office. Between retirements and position changes and job additions I have been hiring and [...]