Office Magic

How the hell did I end up in a posi­tion like this? There is noth­ing in the cor­po­rate job descrip­tion about sit­ting in my office and lis­ten­ing to a never-ending stream of peo­ple spilling their guts out about the issues that are stop­ping them from accom­plish­ing their assigned jobs. There is espe­cially noth­ing in the job descrip­tion about lis­ten­ing to one per­son come in in the morn­ing with mul­ti­ple rea­sons why another per­son is caus­ing them mul­ti­ple prob­lems and then hav­ing that other per­son come in in the after­noon and tell me that the per­son who was in in the morn­ing is the one stop­ping them from get­ting their job done.

Per­haps it is because I am in this orga­ni­za­tion­ally strange posi­tion that does not seem to fit into any box, that does not have lines con­nect­ing lots of peo­ple to me, that does not imply peo­ple work for me; but these peo­ple seem to believe that there is no impunity to being totally open dur­ing these ses­sions in my office. Per­haps it is a form of com­pli­ment that they believe they can be so open. But, there is no code of con­fi­den­tial­ity for the con­fes­sional of my office. This is the part that amazes me.

You need to under­stand, I have one of those posi­tions that is shown in a box that sort of floats of to the side all by itself. These jobs can either be prime picks or are dead ends that are one step from the door. At least for now, I am fairly sure my lit­tle box is one of the prime picks. I believe this because when peo­ple ask my boss what the heck I do he answers with “what­ever I need him to do”, or “what­ever needs to be done”, or my per­sonal favorite, “what­ever he thinks should be done”.

But there is one aspect of this strange posi­tion that I have taken a very long time to adapt to. Actu­ally, I have to admit that I am only some­what along the path to adapt­ing to this aspect. This posi­tion has no iden­ti­fied power. Yet this posi­tion has tremen­dous power. In reviews, I am the busi­ness’ des­ig­nated Lord-High Inquisi­tor, I ask many ques­tions; many more than any­one else. After­wards I also qui­etly per­form analy­sis and obser­va­tion out­side of the pub­lic inqui­si­tions. I form very strong opin­ions of actions that should be taken that I expresses to those who actu­ally posses author­ity to act.

Some might refer to me as Grima, Worm­tongue, whis­per­ing behind the throne. But I think I am actu­ally much more like Mer­lin, pass­ing through and caus­ing action with­out really touch­ing. After all, for every issue I have influ­enced that peo­ple know I have influ­enced there have been five or ten oth­ers that they do not even real­ize I have influ­enced. This is true Office Magic.

Is Still Here