There’s a lot of internal conflict in this organisation, from all I can gather, which might account for why their recruitment process is so cloak-and-dagger. If I had freedom to ask a lot of questions, I might not take the job.
I remember in my gap year, on my first day at work, being introduced to people, and one saying ‘Why on earth did you want to come and work here?’ I thought they were joking, but no – actually some people had been there for decades in an increasing depth of despair. Ah, the Kafkaesque nightmare that lurks behind the cheery plastic facades of the suburban shopping street…
And then during my undergrad days, the department I was in had such bad inter-personal relationships going on between the staff that even the students noticed. I once drew up a diagram of the office politics going on there. Between who was sleeping with whom, which people were working together, which pairs didn’t speak, which people were pretending to be chummy while briefing against their colleagues, it was a vastly elaborate web – a dense, multiplex network, as sociolinguists might call it – despite only involving about 8 people. The opposing factions there were so relentlessly entrenched that eventually they had to merge with another department just in order to call up some reserves for the battle.
Here it’s different. People are a good deal more subtle. But I keep getting odd and conflicting demands from various different levels of the management hierarchy. So far I think I’ve kept them all reasonably contented, but I don’t think that’s going to last. Plan is just to bank the salary and erase these few months from my CV, if necessary.
thewhalebytes 