Rebels are Overrated

I searched for an appropriate "rebel quote" for this story but the samples I found were lame.  Like, wow.  People who consider themselves rebels seem to have a stick up their ass.

I read part of a book about seduction once.  It mostly told me things I already knew, which I found ironic, pleasing, and depressing all at the same time.  Like really, if this is what...successful guys do, the fact that it comes naturally and totally doesn't work for me is just...a topic for another post, I'm sure.   What's important is that it talked about one style of...seduction (including the political version)  that involves being the rebel.  Oh baby.  The author actually had a different name for it, but if you spent enough time in a thesaurus, you could get from the word he used to the word "rebel."  Anyway.  If I were to pick a successful personality type, I would definitely choose not the rebel one, because I don't want to get fired (foreshadowing!).  Apparently it comes naturally, though.  A little too naturally.

I switched teams at work a month or two ago.  My previous habit of reaching out of bed for my cellphone at 11am to dial in to the morning meeting from under my warm covers is no longer acceptable.  In fact, there are a whole host of things I do that are unacceptable now.  Not even that, but I had it so easy that I didn't even...well, here's an example.

I rolled into a meeting...basically on time this morning.  Unfortunately, "basically on time" to me is about 15 to 20 minutes past the start time.  I sensed--my acute spider senses went off when I walked in the room and saw that they had not started yet.  I'm accustomed to doing meetings by ... well just scheduling it and having most of the people show up by 15 minutes into the meeting.  Well, I was in for a shocker.  My boss, who was on the phone, was...quite unhappy.  Not only is 15 minutes considered late, but he considers it both unacceptably late and a personal insult to everyone in the meeting.  This is unfortunate because when it comes to meetings, it is often easier to count the number of instances that I'm ever on time.  We started the meeting by spending half an hour talking about a chronic problem with people missing meetings or arriving late to them.  The discussion included a threat to abandon our development process and switch to...basically no process.  There is no doubt in my mind that I directly inspired this conversation.  This was a bit of a shock, though, since I had been under the impression that we had been handling meeting attendance fine all month.  We've been tracking "unexcused absences" from the morning meetings all month, of which there have been a total of 8, across like 6 people.  But my boss doesn't care about just the unexcused ones.  He cares about the legitimate ones, like when you're in another meeting.  There have been too many.  I couldn't understand what his problem was, and so...long story short, I basically volunteered to track everyone's reason for missing this daily meeting for an entire month.

My boss bitched at us two or three more times during that meeting about me being late.  He then also explained that when it comes to our monthly planning sessions he expects us to accomplish in three hours what my old team did in an entire day.  So, that will be a fun challenge.

Then, well, it gets better.  In another meeting, after which my boss said he was going to "drop off," (we called him from the conference phone) the whole meeting lateness issue was brought up.  Some people who haven't been inexcusably late at all joked that those of us that were should pay them for each of our absences, and so on, and then we realized that the conference phone, from which we had called our bosses cell phone, still had the green light indicating the call was active.

At this point, we had two options.  Call out and ask our boss if he heard us making light of this dire attendence situation, or immediately end the call.  I don't know what wolverine would have done, so I reached up and slammed the end call button.  That was episode number two, and I was closest to the conference phone.

The next incident involves a problem we were troubleshooting.  The root cause of the issue lay somewhere between my old team and my team.  I was mid-conversation with a small cluster of people around my bank of monitors when I entered a snarky comment into the computer system we use to track the resolution of these problems.  Seconds later, and I'm really not kidding about the seconds part, my boss called me on my cell phone.  Fortunately his exact words are no longer ringing in my ears, but the gist of it was that he wants to discuss my comments in our "1 on 1" meeting tomorrow.

There was a time when I didn't even know what a "1 on 1" meeting was, when I was just a fresh graduate who saw his boss...basically once a month or two.  Now, well, idk.

People around me have been deriving some amusement from all this, and I've been laughing, but there's been a growing pit in my stomach.  Fear.  Of what, I didn't know, but I stayed late and channeled that fear into finally getting some coding done.  The fact that everyone else had gone home and there were no meetings to waste my time also helped.

On my way home, I stopped at whole foods, and then at McDonalds, which I think is a great combination because the fruit you get at whole foods can mitigate the damage done to your digestive tract by McDonalds, and then I watched a movie about death row starring Morpheus and James Bond.  Afterwards, though, I still felt some kind of fear or stress that wouldn't melt away, and the fact that I had totally gotten a ton of work done didn't even help.

I sat back and asked myself, what am I afraid of?  I shouldn't care.  I should have thicker skin.  There's no specific threat.  The worst case scenario is basically me getting fired, and that is something I can handle fairly easy.  In fact, wow.  I could just sell my crappy furniture and head on home.  It would be awkward and unpleasant;  picture one of those movie scenes with a person carrying out their box of personal equipment, except its me with three monitors, a monitor stand, and like two boxes of random crap.  But I digress.

Ever desiring thicker skin, I asked myself, why do I even care.  Then it hit me:  guilt.  I'm not blameless in this scenario.  I was the one who was late, and I've missed our morning meeting a couple of times (not as much as our boss though) and, well, snarky comments need no explanation.  So that's it.  I shouldn't feel unsettled just because my boss is totally annoyed at me, but since I am not blameless, I can't help it.  My only hope is that this experience will innoculate me towards this kind of insecurity in the future.

Picture me in a small office tomorrow, for my "1 on 1" meeting, with a spreadsheet of about 8 different categories of absences that I've identified (not even kidding), along with their acceptability rating, explaining how I am going to track this shit for a month.  I'm not...I'm not making this up.

Whatever the case, we're doing happy hour right afterwards.  O captain, my captain.