Blogcoven

“I like to be play matchmaker” said the senior member of our executive board and I’m fairly sure my ears would have laid back along my skull if I was a cat. As it was I think I blushed crimson and my shirt started to stick to my back. Its probably indicative of some crucial linkage thats stunted in my brain but the very concept makes me twitch.

On the other hand it struck me that the corp’s a lot tighter than it would seem for such a monster organisation… or maybe its just that the powers need pawns to game with. Its also as sign of the varying cultures within the corp – theres a big clique of the Old Locals, then theres the more cosmopolitan permanent staff, then there are the expats and the Management and then there are all the other subtraits – like which of the merged companies people used to work for, where they’ve served before.

The cross-department networks shift all the time as people rotate in and out and the lines of communication change – previously I was the front man for one of the assets with operations, I just handled it all, got orders from the Snr. Res Eng and took care of it all, then he shifted out and his replacement had previously served with one of the ops guys overseas so they shortcircuited that way… but also bypassed entirely the guy who replaced me so he never got a chance to build up the links I once had.

Lessons learned – there is no substitute for going and talking to people. Expect emails to be ignored unless someone can put a face to your name. You have to build a relationship with people (often you find all sorts of treasures when you do as a bonus – lost archives, unwritten reasons for things) and then you can flex them remotely afterwards, but you have to put in spadework up front. Both of my replacements (one more than the other) were ’send an email’ people which doesn’t work. Its just noise if they don’t know you enough to attach a weight to the opinion/instruction expressed in the mail.

So I have kind of been buffalloed into a project which is.. hard to describe but is a kind of inhouse training diversification program – a sort of practical project management thing? The idea being that we get the chance to screw up managing a project on something where the damage is precontained rather than find out you’ve run out of budget while the pipelaying barge is still some three miles short of the platform – not something that happened to us.

This project-running project (ho ho) has led to me talking to all sorts of high-CR denizens of the corp that ordinarily I wouldn’t ever meet. The downside of it is that we’ve been maneuvered into this by one boss and now the Eye is upon us, and apparently the capo de capo’s doesn’t have much faith in the project as a whole… which is worrying. On the plus theres a large element of expendability to the whole thing – its designed so if we f^&* it up completely, the blowback will be minimal (I should be able to dodge most of any blowback by pulling the big red ‘Expatriation’ handle – worst comes to worst I volunteer for Nigeria and hide until the storms pass). Also on the plus is its really interesting.

On the minus, its more work, its a big deadline, and it forfeits all cover and AC bonuses for being tiny. One of the early draftees bailed out due to the risks and took comfort that she could probably fade into the crowd and never be associated with the potential flaming ruin of the project.

S’defnitely a thing about the corp – the toothed gears will catch you and haul you along, if you’re willing to actually follow the path then the future spreads out ahead of you for years and years. I could make a fair-odds guess at how the next ten years will play out, if I stick to the path, which involves the Big Red Expat Handle. Amusingly though, the surest possible way to crowbar *all* of that would be for the senior executive board member to work their voodoo and fix me up with someone – significant others tend to find compounds in conflict-zones even less delightful than the employees who at least have work to occupy them.

My future is a monovariable extrapolation. Insert a second variable and all bets are off.

Listening to: Song For Athens – Tavener