The A-Team departed our factory, having established a system–several systems, really, all different–to reduce inventory by hiring more people to handle it. I am not sure they even managed to reduce the total inventory, or just where it was stored. Little matter either way; the next day, P.B. was told to start trimming his manpower. That is, getting rid of people the infallible A-Team said we needed.

In an unrelated, and yet resonant, incident, a new position was recently posted that sounded a lot like my current job. It sounded so similar that I asked my boss if it made my position obsolete, which he assured me it did not. Then I wondered if the job was even worth applying for. When I decided to go ahead and apply, it turned out that the position had been cancelled. A decision was made to simply incorporate the new position into an existing position–mine. When this goes into effect, I will nominally report to someone off-site.

I don’t know when it will go into effect, and I don’t know how or even if my job duties will change. Nobody has made that clear to me. But an automated e-mail from the performance evaluation software notified me that someone else now had responsibility for my review.

I am irked that I lost a chance to negotiate for a higher salary, or perhaps a reduced workload, or even simply more training, but other than that it is hard to see how this makes much of a difference. Perhaps when they finally decide that in this new role I have new (additional) responsibilities, it will seem more egregious. In general, though, even when I feel overworked or stressed, it is seeming like old hat. That’s probably reflected in my posting here; there’s nothing new to say, as nothing new has happened.

When I have difficulty distinguishing good days from bad days, success from failure, and improvement from decay; when my new job is my old job; perhaps, it is time to change the scenery. One way to do this would be enroll for further education. Working and going to school is best done while holding a position that does not exhaust all one’s energy or creativity.

I have not decided to do anything different, but if I do decide to make a change, I hope it will be a change to something different, rather than the tidal change a bathtub affords. The A-Team certainly stirred the water, but one doubts that anything has gotten much cleaner.