Jananas

I’ve been working for just under three months and am rapidly approaching the end of my probation period. I wish I could tell you that its all its cracked up to be, but frankly I’ve been tempted to just walk out at least twice a week. That isn’t a very good track record.

It sucks because I like the people I work with. They are a good group and I get along with them.

Its the work that’s killing me. I’m a financial analyst doing business case support. But, but, but (there’s always a few of those out there) we’re really just a check in a process. We do business cases but don’t have the authority to say no to a program if the numbers are bad. The numbers we do pull together don’t feed back anywhere (forecasts, planning, budgets, etc.). No one’s held accountable. In fact, our numbers generally aren’t great because we don’t have good data. We don’t understand our customers or their behavior. We don’t really know how previously campaigns turned out. And we don’t know how things are changing (i.e. in a fast moving industry, assumptions from two years ago just don’t cut it).

We got our objectives earlier this month. I’ve been there for just under three months and I’m already 80% to completing them. By the end of next month I will have completed everything on the list. There are no stretch goals. There’s no where to go and nothing to do to get me to the next level. There’s nothing to reach for, to motivate me to try harder. It sucks.

It is really, really demoralizing to have a job that doesn’t do anything. That doesn’t contribute. It makes it hard to stay connected and to care about the quality of your work. It isn’t motivating.

I hate when senior management is so far out there that they bullshit their employees. Please don’t tell me one thing and do another. I’m not stupid and treating me like I can’t put two and two together is belittling. I read through program documents regularly. I get bombarded with marketing jargon telling me how we’re “technology leaders” in our industry. We still use Office ’03 and IE6 (which is so old it doesn’t support tabbed browsing and doesn’t work with some of our own customer facing sites!). I find it hard to believe that we’re leaders in technology when I’m the mayor of our office on Foursquare. Me, a finance analyst for business cases. Not a marketing person. Not a tech person. Not a product person.

I’ve been really struggling with work. I generally have a fair amount of down time (in part because I work fast), which leaves me with a lot of time where I have to look busy. That’s time that I could be spending learning or creating (painting, spinning, knitting, batiking, etc.). Instead, I get home at the end of the day and I’m exhausted. I don’t have the energy to create. It makes me resentful of that time that I spend at my desk. I know that as a salaried employee I’m paid to park my butt at a desk for 7.5 hours but I hate that those 7.5 hours impact the rest of my life.

When I don’t have the energy to create, I’m miserable. And that spills over into everything else as well. It impacts my relationship with Jason and my desire to exercise and to spend time with my friends.

I’m torn. We’re told as employees and good little job searchers that we can’t leave a job after three months. It’ll look bad on our resumes. The next place won’t look twice at us. I’m in an even tougher position because this is my first job after my MBA and I took time off to travel. I have an even bigger gap to explain. This makes me feel like I’m stuck working in this environment where I’m disconnected and bored and resentful.

I know that something has to change because I can’t keep doing this.

I’m not a corporate person. I can’t put in my 7.5 hours every day. I want freedom to be creative. I want a job that wants me to voice my opinion and that will challenge me. I want a job where I care about what I do because its exciting and cutting edge. I want a job that asks me to think and values the fact that I’m not a stereotypical MBA.

It may be time to make the decision that I can’t stay in a job just because I need it to look good on my resume. That my mental health and happiness is more important than making it easy to find my next position. That I’m going to have to bust my ass to convince the next company that I have more to offer than a business degree and analytical skills.

What do you suggest?

By day I’m a financial analyst. I’m the cog in the machine that puts together your business cases  so that you can get the go ahead to launch. Last week I worked on a program that involved DRM (or even more importantly, a move towards the lack thereof!!). I got to explain to my manager what DRM is and why many people aren’t big fans of it. I had to add a footnote explaining it, just in case senior management didn’t understand either. I took it directly out of wikipedia.

“Digital rights management (DRM) is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. The term is used to describe any technology that inhibits uses of digital content not desired or intended by the content provider.”

I understand that definition. It made me think if other people would understand it. If people don’t really think about ownership rights when they buy a song or download an e-book, then they may not understand the implications that DRM has for them. If people aren’t deep into the tech world or the music world or cutting edge authors, then they may not have a frame of reference for what this means.

How else can I explain DRM? How else can I frame the problem? Can I use another metaphor, something with more relevance to everyday situations? Something that someone who isn’t technically minded (and might even be dismissive of those who are) would still get? It hit me last night.

Imagine that you’ve bought furniture for your house – couches, a dining room table and chairs, a bedroom set. Imagine that you’ve moved homes twice in the last 10 years. Tomorrow you’ve moving into your third house. Except that when you go to move in you get told that you can’t take you’re furniture with you because you were only allowed to use it in “two houses”. That’s what DRM is – it is restrictions on how you’re able to use something that you’ve bought.

Imagine a world where someone told you how many times you could move your furniture or how many times you could sit on your couch. That’s DRM.

How else could I explain this? What other metaphors might work to communicate this idea?

This evening I ordered myself a Nexus One (engraved to boot) and setup my p8tch to direct, well, here. Yup, I feel like my nerd character just lvld up.

We spent today playing with fibre (me) and computers (Jason) and decided that our hard work should be rewarded with some more root beer. Sprecher Root Beer is a micro-brewery founded in 1985 and located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’m not sure when they ventured into the realm of sodas, but they do have a full line of gourmet sodas. Our friend had grabbed two bottles of Sprechers for us – one Root Beer Soda and one Lo-Cal Root Beer (sorry for the not great shot, my camera didn’t feel like cooperating).

Before we had even opened this bottles, they’d already stolen a little piece of my heart. They are big and sturdy and feel good in your hand. In fact, they are so big that they contain an entire pint! Even better, the labels say that they are “non-alcoholic”. That just made me laugh in the ‘really, who made that mistake?’ sort of way.

We opened our bottles up and they both had that amazing minty root beer aroma. The normal version is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (gross!), but also has raw Wisconsin honey. Not entirely sure about how those two fit together, but… this root beer was good. It was full bodied (more on the minty side) without being overwhelmingly sweet. It had a subtle mint aftertaste without being overbearing.

The lo-cal version was good. It was tasty without being sweet. It had high fructose corn syrup, raw honey, and sodium saccharin as sweeteners. Thankfully there wasn’t that gross artificial sweetener taste or aftertaste. In fact, this diet root beer soda was so good that even Jason gave it two thumbs up – a first so far in our challenge!

We both liked this root beer. And although it isn’t our top choice overall, if you’re going to pick one sweetened with high fructose corn syrup I’d make it a Sprecher’s.

In fact, we enjoyed this root beer so much that we finished our taste testing off with root beer floats. Glad to say that this root beer passes that test as well!

In our quest for good root beer, I started googling home made root beer in Toronto. Turns out that two of our local breweries make their own! First up was the Granite Brewery at Mount Pleasant and Eglinton. Reason it was contender #1? Its on the way home from my parent’s place. Yup, I’m all about efficiency.

We stopped by mid-afternoon to try some out. Ordered two root beers and some food so that we didn’t look like total weirdos.

Here’s Jason drinking his fancy glass mug of root beer. We asked if they sell it so that we could take some home and the answer‘s no. Apparently this is so home brew that it doesn’t last well when bottled (which is actually fairly common). Home brewed root beer is a class all on its own and doesn’t necessarily compare well to mass produced (even if its fancy bottled) root beer. Thankfully we had tried some before at Iron Hill Brewery in Delaware so we were better prepared to enjoy this one.

The root beer itself was well rounded and scrumptious. Ever eaten something that tasted so good that you didn’t want to eat/drink anything else afterward because it would ruin the taste? Yup, this root beer was that good. It was well rounded, managing to be creamy and smooth and slightly minty all at the same time (i.e. not flavours kicked in as an after taste). It wasn’t super carbonated (when compared to bottled root beer), but it had a nice creamy head to it. Overall, this was a big win. It was so good that I purposefully drank it slowly so that I could savor it, which is impressive because usually I’m a gulper.

And yes, this was so good that we might stop by again. Just for a root beer.