Untitled Ventings

The last week's been funny.

I do time trials against a setting sun in the evenings and write and read this and that most of the other time.

But at nights, the same dream that had left me sleepless for most of June last year comes back. Again and again, as nightmares do.

Its a stark setting, there is this conference room with a bunch of people around a table -- some half-asleep, some barely there, some pecking away at their laptops -- a management review meeting is happening.

And I have just being pronounced guilty.

"What do you do anyway?" has always been the question here. Sometimes voiced, sometimes not, usually very subtly stated of course.

"You don't deserve what we pay you" has also been always the accusation here {when the recession happened, my ROI was naturally the first to be questioned (purely a case of fingering because I had NEVER not delivered something asked of me)} sometimes veiled, sometimes not, never stated of course.

Let me cut back to the dream.

So I have just presented what my team has been doing for the last two months. All this has already been reviewed by my reporting head (and management by default), we have been sending weekly status reports.

My own reporting head has also never brought this up. Its been understood that my team will facilitate and support all techno-marketing-whatever-you-call-it activities and "marcomify" (as phrased by him) whatever content is sent over. Even if the content is a mish-mash that has been "captured" from this and that source and rewritten to be muck and "rewriting" which again meant getting a headache in just 10 minutes!

Psst...my team consists of only one writer. Yes, yours truly and him alone.

Now that I have presented the presentation, a gent says "Not happy with you boss!" Then he even kindly raises his voice and repeats the same thing yet again. As I have already said, the conference room is full of people, this is not a one-on-one review and I report to someone else.

So this was no off the cuff, casually uttered and unintentional jibe. This was evidently something far more than a rap on the knuckles. Something akin to "public mein pant utaarna" by somebody for whom I had bent backwards, never refusing anything, doing everything asked of me in the spirit of passion, leadership, blah, blah....

So a bit of me died that day and this dream started coming every night. I had decided to quit that very day and two other incidents that happened thereafter vindicated my decision.

ONE -- I am told that my reporting head feels that all I do is "put a comma here, a semi-colon there, and so on", by someone in management who had said the same thing to me a number of times earlier (of course jocularly, with marked bonhomie, a nice smile, et al). So a bit more of me died.

TWO -- And then {post a lengthy internal debate post which I am told my team of three will be an independent department again and will be AGAIN solely responsible for putting up a full-blown website (supervised by the techno-marketing excel sheet types of course) when I look at the work in hand and ask for resources, I am reminded of my hearing disability twice (but the same damn phrase) by two gents from management. Again, a bit more of me died.

Continuing there after these two things happening would have been like living on a dole or feeding off someone's far from veiled kindness.

So I quit, wrote Moving On and I had thought I had moved on.

But then this dream comes again and again.....