Okay, we’re <pauses to look around quickly> getting into pre-retirement mode. I’m keeping my voice low because if she finds out we’re about to retire, my sister will demand Deb & I fly to Illinois to help clean out our parents’ home. (Never mind that we work through the end of 2019, my sister will want us there on her schedule.) I was looking at shifting down to part-time but keeping the same company, but company management has taken the FUN out of dysfunctional, and the past month has involved enough stress at work that I take it as A Sign To Quit Sooner.
Ooooh, you’re in accounting, you’ll appreciate this: so say a company has been using the same two banks for over ten years, and one day one of the banks pisses off the owner enough that he declares that we will stop using it ASAP. Because it’s easy, right? (No, he never talked to anyone beforehand.) So two months later, IT is still finding all the little places that the one bank was hardwired into procedures, reports, workflows, plus the new banks (yes, two new ones, because we want to have options, yes?) have different ways of doing things (from the old bank and each other)… And then, best of all, today the company senior people and the two programmers who have been dealing with the cutover fly to Italy for a week and a half for a “business” trip that was already scheduled. So for the next seven business days I get to spend my time figuring out what went wrong on systems I don’t normally maintain, with problems coming to me from junior people in various departments who may not know the difference between a new problem and an old problem with a new twist.
The company owner is in his 80s, founded the company in the 1970s, and treats it as his personal fiefdom. Which was okay when he had everything together, but now we have the old mad king running things, with his dutiful staff pretending his orders aren’t crazy.
[Hmm. Reminds me of the Trump White House. At least nobody died with the bank switch. Although we haven’t actually finished the bank switch, so there’s still time.]
ANYway, when my boss gets back from Italy on October 30 I plan to hand him my retirement letter. <sigh> Hopefully without a trip to urgent care between now and then.
