Good thing I still get paid.
This post is to vent about work - can no longer do so on Facebook since I'm connected there to the majority of my colleagues now.
It's been a really busy and fairly rewarding 6 weeks or so since I took over the immigrant visa unit at work. I was really ready for a change - won't complain about non-immigrant visas now that it's behind me, but for over a year I'd been doing a job that I was finding both tedious and exhausting. At the beginning of May, I ceded my non-immigrant visa line manager duties and moved to immigrant visas - a unit with one officer and six local employees, and a very different type of workflow (a small number of longer interviews a day, with much clearer decision criteria.) It has the advantage of being new to me, but I think is also much more suited to my work preferences. My predecessor did a great job of moving some initiatives forward, but let a lot of applications linger in the meanwhile, so I've been really busy trying to clear out that backlog. I've also been able to take some time to get to know each of the six staff members more than I ever did with my 15 or so local colleagues before. They are generally a good team, and I've felt like I've been able to make a few good changes with their input to help make it an even better place to work. So, while it isn't necessarily my dream job, I've felt really good about it.
Cue my boss, today, who only pops up when there is bad news. So this morning I interviewed the wife of a VIP (er, by VIP, I mean one of my American colleagues) and treated her just like everyone else. To me this is part of being a good American - equal treatment under the law, regardless of who you know, etc. Well, my esteemed "colleague" knows the #2 at work well enough to send her a nastygram complaining about how I asked his wife insulting questions like "when did you meet?" and "why do you want to marry someone 25 years older than you?" Never mind that those are part of the normal interview repertoire - they found them disrespectful. So of course rather than point out that this information is needed for the officer to adjudicate the application, my management decides that I must have handled the interview inappropriately and that my behavior needs correction. Fine, great, I'm happy to get "remedial interviewing" or more attention from my absentee boss... probably would have been helpful in the first place. But I'm really sick of my management not backing up its staff (at all levels), not providing proactive feedback, only negative, and especially, of all these jerks who think they're entitled to a benefit and that if they don't get it on their first try, it's because I'm unprofessional. This is not the first time at post something like this has happened, and there is in fact a pattern - of me trying to be consistent, and then getting chewed out because the wrong person complains about not getting what they want, and the squeaky wheel gets everyone's attention. I see my management as lazy and spineless. So does our inspector general, who came last year and gave them terrible reviews - but it doesn't matter, as I'm apparently at a low enough level at the organization that I should just go with the flow regardless of my responsibilities under the law.
Can't wait for new bosses at the end of the summer - they could hardly be worse. And I'm out of here in January. But the question is whether my career is going to be tanked by working for these jokers in Bangkok for two years. Two bad reviews is a lot for an entry-level officer to overcome, and I'm well on my way. My organization allegedly embraces fairness, leadership at all levels, dissent - but even with managers whose bad reputation precedes them, they are the people who write my review, and the people who evaluate them back at headquarters do not get the backstory. The reality of my job for the last 4.5 years has been that I do not love it, and am still waiting to be convinced that my family and I want to make this job the centerpiece of our lives till retirement. Having said that, I believe in the mission, try to do a good job every day, and would like to have that recognized so that at least the decision of whether I quit someday is mine! Thank goodness the excellent onward assignment to Oslo already came through, and that I still get paid every day - but my morale is roughly back to toilet level, at least for today.