I didn’t go

For some time now I’ve known that the Service Level Agreement team I’ve been so heavily involved in supporting for the Empire was going to be spun off into its own custom support queue.  The call volume has gone far beyond anything we can readily manage using the informal team we’d first put together two years ago to handle just one of the four accounts we have today (State A).  “Workload management” now means that three people (the team leader, me, and one other tech) have to be out of the queue at all times, not taking any regular calls and adversely affecting the main queue’s head count and service level, and we usually have to pull one or two more techs ad hoc for at least part of each day to get tickets pushed through the process.

The spin-off process finally began this week.  First to go is State C, which will be supported by two workload managers and two or three first-level techs who will actually take the support calls.  Over the next couple of months, Corporation E, State A, and Corporation B’s support will gradually be migrated to the new queue, and by the beginning of the new fiscal year in February, they all should be moved.

I’m not going along.  Half a dozen people had told me my name was on everyone’s short list of “people we’d like to bring over to manage the workload;” I already knew what to do, I was doing it well, and looked like I could keep building on what I’d done.  Also, by becoming a workload manager I wouldn’t have to take run-of-the-mill idiot-user calls any more.  I would deal with a limited number of people at the corporate and agency help desks with whom I could build working relationships.

There was just one fly in this pitcher of milk:  the job they offered me was a lateral move.  No increase in grade, no increase in salary, no extra compensation for the skills I’d spent several months acquiring.  All they offered was a sideways shuffle, and I’m not looking for one of those.  This late in my work life, I need to be moving up and not around.

For the last couple of months, the Tulip and I had been discussing the possibility that I might transfer to the new queue.  He and I were pretty well agreed that if I went, I ought to get some kind of move upward from it, so being offered nothing but a lateral transfer didn’t suit me at all.  If all they wanted was someone to fill a slot on an organization chart, they could just as well grab any tech off the floor at random.  As the Tulip put it, “If they want you and not just some warm body to fill the chair, they should be prepared to offer you something more.”

But they didn’t offer it.  And because they didn’t I told them that I was pleased and complimented to have been offered the position, but I didn’t think it was the right career move for me at this time.  Instead, the team leader is going as one workload manager, and one of the other techs we used for ad hoc help will now be trained as the other.

Apparently the idea that I would say no caught several people, including the Tulip’s manager, flat-footed.  They’d had the idea, I suppose, that I’d be so happy to get away from taking calls that I’d jump right in.  When I turned them down, suddenly they had to go develop a Plan B they hadn’t been counting on.  It’s a pity no one bothered to sound me out directly before the very last minute.  Had they done so, they might not have been so shocked.

But if the Tulip’s to be believed, I haven’t done my career any real mischief by turning down the move to the custom queue.  He thinks that my skills and talents are “very scalable,” in his phrase, that I’ll have other chances to move up into other, better jobs where I can have a positive effect on the company, and he’s willing to help me get there.  We’ve talked about what he and I need to start watching out for—perhaps a move into content development and editing for the technical and troubleshooting tools, which they need desperately—once my nine months in-grade arrives at the end of January.  In the meantime, he still thinks I’m one of his good techs on a team whose metrics are the best of both Auric call centers, and says I needn’t worry about my job (any more than anyone worries about his job these days) so long as he’s my manager.  And I take that to mean that right now, I’m in about as good a place as I could want to be after such a long time down.

Sometimes a cigar is only a marginal planetoid.  Fnord.