We had an “all hands” meeting today. This is a once-a-quarter occurrence where they take an hour or two, feed us donuts, and then try to re-sell us the jobs we already have by putting up colorful slides and throwing out statistics that must mean something to someone.

Frankly, I think it’s fucking boring. I mean, I work here already. Don’t sell me on our “potential opportunities” and all that - isn’t that what we pay some of the folks here for already? To figure that all out and get us going in that direction?

Plus, I don’t think it should take an hour to explain where we’re going

• cut to the chase already. The only thing I’m getting out of this is a glazed look and a loss of my will to live. Tell me what I need to know, and let’s move on. I got shit to do.

I was actually discussing that a bit with my boss today. How I’m really sick of working on the project I’m on right now (and have been for the last eight months) and now I look for little things - anything - to do instead of working on the project. He says it’s a “grass is always greener” sort of thing - that any other project is going to be a better thing to work on, but then that’s still not as good as the next project… I think it’s more of an “attention deficit” sort of thing - I don’t like working on huge projects for extended periods of time because I lose interest. I like to do a variety of things. The spice of life and all that.

Oh, and I have a problem with the “employee recognition” program they’ve got set up. Maybe not a problem, but an interesting observation. I’ve noticed that the people who primarily get recognized are salespeople. I think it’s great that they’re selling the product (isn’t that their job?), but I don’t think they’re the only people working here, you know? Today we actually had a couple of folks recognized for doing some legitimate above-and-beyond stuff, and that was cool. But I’m starting to think that this place works a lot like a stage production - the actors and folks on-stage get a lot of credit and come out for the curtain call… yet there’s a whole crew of technical folks, makeup artists, propmasters, and so on that keep the production rolling that don’t get all that much credit. I mean, what about the guys in my department who keep the systems up and running daily with less than the requisite staff? When things go right, nobody cares. When things go wrong, we hear about it until the cows come home. Irritating.

Subject change: I brought home a bunch of my class books to review while I study for my next test. It’s a good thing I did - some of the stuff I reviewed last night was stuff I didn’t remember too well, and stuff I had seen on the practice tests I’ve looked at already. I have a lot more work ahead of me. I can’t wait until this one’s over.