Our CEO/President/whatever has invited us all to drop what we’re doing at 2pm to gather to ‘Thank the Troops’, and in this instance that means we all get to sign a big corporate banner to send to troops in Afghanistan. This strikes me as pointless. In the past we’ve done things like gathering for big care packages, which makes sense. Today’s thing seems like some kind of odd passive-aggressive charity work.

Everything this company does is getting stranger and stranger, and at all levels. They decided our employee directory lookup thing wasn’t sufficient: people now have to be able to upload photos of themselves. When there’s a tech emergency the response is that management makes up new, ill-conceived regulations that inevitably don’t stop it from happening again. And in cases where we warn them that bad thing X will happen, we’re ignored until bad thing X happens… at which point they come up with ill-conceived regulation Y. Then we’re asked to put out-of-office gatherings with other co-workers on our status reports.

It’s a nonstop roller coaster of ‘wtf are you thinking’. Weird things will always be a part of office life, I’m sure, but it’s just oddity after oddity and nobody with a supervisor-or-above title seems to notice. Everyone below does and gets nowhere when they bring it up. It’s exhausting to try to stick with it.

A friend and co-worker here linked me to a long article talking about a psychological condition called Anosognosia. An Anosognosiac has some sort of issue, such as a paralyzed hand, but there’s a weird trigger in the brain that prevents them from being capable of recognizing that this is happening (I may have linked it before but here it is again: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/ ). They give the example of a woman with a dead hand. When asked to pick something up with that hand, rather than admitting they can’t she’ll just say they don’t want to. When the hand is pointed to and picked up off her lap or whatever, she’ll claim it’s someone else’s hand.

That’s what we’ve got going on here. There’s a huge problem with all this weird crap going on, and for all the screaming of the people affected by it, nobody in management seems able to recognize it, even when it’s specifically pointed out. Anosognosian Management employing me, the Sysiphean Administrator.

The resume is getting updated today.