It’s 5 PM and for some reason I haven’t eaten.
4 PM in work hours, being that I live in EST and work in CST but my body doesn’t know that. My stomach is quiet, hunger pangs having been successfully staved off by caffeine over and over again, though with each battle coffee loses more ground. My head feels incredibly light and my body is supernaturally heavy. I am not glued to my chair; I simply weigh too much to rise.
My day started at 7 AM, an hour later than it usually tends to. I let myself sleep in, moving my gym rest day from next Sunday to this Monday with the idea that I would be able to log on early and begin to work. I spent the weekend dreading waking up this morning and now that it’s here, I try to put off reality for as long as I can. I walk my dog. I make my coffee. I allow myself thirty minutes of reading. And then it begins.
My job is not ‘hard’ in the way that medical school is hard. It’s not hard like roofing, or creating a hit song, or like customer service. My job is hard in the way that working in a factory assembly line, taping boxes of wet wipes shut and letting them glide down the belt to my coworker, again and again and again, is hard. My job is hard like the post office, like a tollbooth, like the concrete wall you slam your head against.
I settle into my chair at 8 AM my time. I already have several messages from coworkers who, like me, have to pretend our work is urgent. I lower my work desk down from standing height. On slow days, of which there are many, I stand but today there is too much to do to do it healthily. Beside my work computer is a spiral with a list of my to-dos along with their status. Top of the list is taking one report I do in Tableau and moving it over to Power BI. Usually, I will download data from some government website that looks as though its creation may have predated the Internet before dumping it into my previously made excel model. I update the date to this week. I publish the dashboard the data feeds. I email the distribution list. Six months ago, I tacked an extra question onto this email- Hello, does anyone use this dashboard and if so for what purpose? We are trying to rationalize as many reports as possible in the interest of efficiency, thanks! I got three replies, all asking to be taken off the distribution list. This information did not impress my boss.
Then, a week ago, I was charged with transferring the same dashboard from Tableau, a dashboarding service, to Power BI, a dashboarding service. The reasons are not clear, probably because they do not exist. It is not my place to question but to google- “Power BI Query Editor equivalent to Tableau measure”. “Power BI Table Formatting Guide”. “Power BI world's fastest speed run GONE SEXUAL.” It doesn’t actually matter what I google. The answers are never there but hidden somewhere within the hours I will spend clicking around my screen in a way that isn’t quite random until something finally works.
That is what I spend my morning doing. I click, I click, I refill my coffee, I click. The Power BI dashboard is beginning to look like the Tableau dashboard. This is progress. There is a meeting at 10 AM in which we discuss the many ways in which finance is modernizing. I’m 1300 miles away but I still need to tear myself away from the computer and throw on a polo. During the meeting instead of listening I study the faces of my colleagues in their tiny little boxes. The metaverse has already arrived and its barrels of fun.
The meeting ends and it’s back to the real work. I have a few other dashboard updates and reports that need to be sent out as well and I do them on my second monitor in thirty second increments while Power BI is refreshing the query, refreshing the query, refreshing the query. Data populates. The time I have left to live dwindles and dwindles. Eventually, Power BI is ready for me once again.
I have another meeting at 1 PM. It’s now 12:55 and I’m not sure what I have accomplished. My focus has been absolute, my goal clear, the way there relatively simple and yet somehow I have not managed to scratch the first item off my to do list. I throw the polo back on in about twice the time it took me to tear it off and review what I have to present in the meeting. It’s a small meeting, just one other participant. I am going to show her the solution I have come up with to automate the credit for different revenues to different people based upon the timing of these revenues. I do this in Alteryx, a ‘workflow’ tool; Programming for dummies. I have completed the solution and I demonstrate it and wait for questions. None are forthcoming. She tells me to put a hold on implementing it and to have a nice day. The meeting lasts eight minutes. The workflow took me four hours last Friday. The polo comes off again.
I haven’t had a manager for about three months now, maybe longer. I still have a ‘team’, technically, though the only member of it I regularly speak to is a woman older and smarter than me who, as far as I can tell, has been manager in all respects other than title and compensation in the time we’ve spent without one. It’s not clear when we will get a replacement manager but it is clear that we will get one and I await the day impatiently. The last few months there has been a hole in my heart the size of a biweekly one on one that I am eager to fill.
It’s been plain to me for about a year and a half that the concept of working hard to get ahead, at least at the company I work at, has diminishing returns at best. Much more relevant to moving up the corporate ladder is the length of time you have spent at your current position. I’ve just been promoted, so it will be quite a while before my name bubbles to the top of any lists. Despite this and despite the lack of a manager to note any extra work I do, I have privately decided that after completing the Power BI dashboard (which I manage to do just after my 1 PM meeting) I will then automate the weekly process in Alteryx. I’m not sure why this is. It could be for myself, so I don’t have to spend fifteen minutes every Monday monotonously copying and pasting, verifying, publishing. It could be so that when I send the dashboard over to the manager of the adjacent team I have a reason for having taken a week to build it. It could just be that I know that the work is fit only for a robot and so decided to build a robot fit for the work. Regardless, and with multiple other, more pressing items on my to do list, I set to task.
The process is ridiculous. There are four, maybe five steps to updating the data before it is ready for the dashboard and at each and every one of them I run into problems. A data type has transformed for no discernible reason. Tableau crashes. An excel file is corrupted. I google an error message and this time I do find a response- “Sometimes it just does that.” My dog, lying on his bed behind me, stares at the back of my silhouette with accusing eyes.
It’s 4 PM now. My girlfriend has gone to two different classes, the gym, and has just left for some sort of local cultural event but its 3 PM CST and I have a lot of work to do. My phone lights up and I see I have been rejected from yet another job. My to do list stands strong, the workflow sits in front of me unfinished. My head feels tenuously attached to my body at best and my neck lolls to the side dramatically. I notice my hands are shaking. That is when I realize that I haven’t eaten.
My job is not easy like a laugh with friends. It’s not easy like floating a river, or reading a book or taking a walk. It’s not easy like falling into bed, feeling the breeze or singing along. My job is easy like sitting in traffic, like getting older, forgetting to eat. It’s easy like skipping the gym, like holding your tongue, drinking too much. My job is easy like drowning and every day I feel the water close over my head.
Parker Sievert was born in American Fork, Utah to Mormon parents who quickly left the church and moved to Texas, where he grew up. Currently, he lives in Flower Mound, Texas. His writing often uses satirical elements to explore themes of alienation, the corporate world, and Americana.
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