ControlFreakPete

[ZombiePete]

Man, I had an irritating day at work today.

I can't even really pinpoint what it was that got to me so badly. Part of it was our Monday morning engineering board that I run...or don't run...I'm not sure because another guy is the actual chair of this board but I run the meeting. Anyway, he is completely disengaged from the process, so he often makes decisions that don't really make sense or don't follow the spirit of the process.

It doesn't really matter anymore though because the entire process is being given to someone else to manage now that I've gotten it up-and-running. Neat!

Frankly, that doesn't bother me so much except that the guy they're giving it to is brand new here and I already get the "at my last job we did it this way" vibe from him so I can just feel the radical, pointless changes that confuse everyone coming. On the other hand, I am also seeing that he's a smart, reasonable guy, so hopefully he can overcome his urge to reinvent the wheel (that just got invented from scratch in March by yours truly) and ease into the whole thing.

Yeah, I think this is what's really bothering me. I've worked really hard to make this whole thing a success, and now I am seeing that I am going to have to let it go and it kind of frustrates me. Such is the nature of the beast, of course, and I am sure that over the years I'll develop lots of processes and systems that will end up someone else's. Hell, even the network that at one time had my signatures all over it has become something more than me. It's now the sum of the hard work that my entire team has put into it, and where once I knew all the IP addresses for all the different devices and had logged into every network device at least three or four times, now I find myself asking how things are setup because I'm not in it everyday. And while at one point I thought this would bother me, I find myself feeling a sense of pride because while I didn't necessarily run every command on each switch and router, I put together and trained the team that's doing it now.

So I guess I am going to have to start separating myself from the process now. I will always play a part in it, and I'm sure the new guy will still ask for my input from time-to-time, but it's not going to be mine anymore.

In less than a year it will have been ten years since I joined the military. The kid who enlisted in the Air Force in June of 2000 never imagined that when he was 28 he'd be getting melancholy over a change management process, that's for sure. What a horrible geek I've become. lol