Work on top of work

I have a new Team Leader at work. She's all full of enthusiasm and integrity, as new management can be. She's very good really, generous with her compliments and pep talks. I worked with her on the same team as an equal for several years but she is more capable of putting up with the bull shit from upper management in Ottawa than I am, so I have kept my head low and she moved up the ladder.

Friendly co-workers can be the best supervisors or the worst of enemies as they move up and I have worried about her promotion over me from the start. She can be a stickler for detail likes to make herself busy. Since upper management doesn't give Team Leaders much "meaningful" work to do, zealous TLs will sometimes get into micro-managing. For example, she has listened into more of my phone calls in the past month or so than I have had monitored over the past five years. So far, she has had primarily strong compliments for what she has heard, but it is still a bit unnerving to be so constantly under surveillance.

Every few months, upper management reluctantly allows each team to have an hour off the phones for a team meeting to share news, discuss problems and make plans for special events. Management is saving money by not rehiring so we are short staffed, so training upgrades are seldom given. Occasionally one of the program advisers pays a visit to explain something new, which uses up half of our team meeting. (Sorry, no time for questions. Sorry, only time for announcements and no time for round table discussions.)

But usually there isn't much to fill the hour, if we get that long and there is no training, so my Team Leader has asked some of us to prepare certain reviews of legislation and policy to bring the team up to snuff of what changes have happened. Knowing me well, she has asked me give a presentation on requirements for getting Old Age Security. I've been advising clients about this for over a decade so I believed I knew it all, but incredibly she has pointed out to me several small exceptions I didn't know about and I was stunned by my ignorance. Furthermore, she has listened to everyone on our team and has found that no one else has the complete picture either. I suppose it doesn't help that our training manuals were never correct.....

I have been avoiding the preparation of my presentation, assuming it would be easy, but I am finally getting into it. I want to do a thorough job and I find the new challenge refreshing. Earlier this week she asked me to give it today but was unable to get me more than 30 minutes of prep time, which clearly not enough. I'll chip away at it over the coming month and hopefully we'll have another meeting sometime in May or June.