Lounge of Tomorrow - Sooooo.....

30 clerkship applications finalized and four more in draft form - waiting for the light of day for me to re-check and make sure I didn't make some horrifying verbal blunder. It will all likely amount to nothing, but it feels good to be working on a way out. I have a back-up plan for this if it doesn't succeed - that's also a little remote on the possibility front - and after that I have several exceedingly likely-to-succeed ideas that aren't my first choice but aren't bad choices.

It's all better than where I am. So much wrong with the place I could write a book. It just boggles. What do you do when you're assigned tasks that make no sense? We're writing up our processes and procedures. Here's the process for filling out this report. Here's the process for completing that spreadsheet. All well and good. Then: write the process for the database. What? You mean the one that we use to fill out several reports? That we reference all the specifics on in those process sheets? I'm not describing it well, but it's like telling someone to write up the procedure sheet for Excel, rather than for the specific spreadsheet.

Then - instructions to write up how we prepare for a certain type of meeting to which folks at our level are not invited. We don't prepare; we're not invited. Oh, but what if we WERE invited! Then what's the process? How should we know? We've never been to that meeting and we haven't the foggiest notion what they discuss or what we might need to prepare.

Or: write the procedures for this task that someone in a completely different area with completely different responsibilities does. But we don't do it. Write up what you do do with it. But that's nothing. Look, I need you to write up how you complete these tasks so that we all know what each other does. It's like asking the receptionist to write up how to update desktop security settings. It's someone else's job.

And we can't seem to convey the "this isn't my job" in a way that doesn't make management think we're just being belligerent. It's not my job. I don't know how to do it. You might as well ask me to write up the procedure for disassembling a rifle for cleaning. It isn't part of the scope of my work and I don't know how to do it.