Some weeks ago I was involved in a small site update with a colleague named Lynn. She did the administrative stuff, and I made the actual changes. Nobody else was involved. When Lynn sent out the followup email to let the business people know it was done, we were treated to a response: “Thanks Lynn and team!” I was in a silly enough mood to run with it, and set up a signature in my email giving my name as merely “team”. The fact that the person who sent the reply knew I was involved and has worked with me for three years now didn’t really sink in.

A co-worker of mine to whom I happened to mention it was surprisingly upset about it. He thought it was ridiculously disrespectful and, more to the point, indicative of the amount of disrespect our team gets in general. I still pretty much shrugged it off: it’s not like it had been backbreaking labor for which I got no recognition.

But said co-worker stopped by my desk this morning with a gripe. He’d worked for more than a month to get a new system up and running, doing almost all of the work, talking to the vendor, making arrangements for the servers when nobody else would step up, etc. It finally got finished up over the weekend. In a meeting about it today, some of the managers stepped up to say thanks… to the project manager involved who had only done the things my co-worker had told her to do, with nary a word for the actual architect of the whole thing. Needless to say my friend here is rather incensed.

I feel bad for the guy: he’s my dad’s age and gave up on years of consulting on the road to settle down with this company to ride out the rest of his career, but not even a year into it he’s fed up with this crap. I can’t say I blame him. More and more crap is coming every day. And of course since he chose to stop at my desk and chat with me, it’s just another chance for one of my managers to accuse me of spreading around the negative feelings here. Whatthefuckever.

Anyway. This is Team, signing off.