A one-trick pony

He’s a one trick pony
One trick is all that horse can do
He does one trick only
It’s the principal source of his revenue . . . .

                  —Paul Simon

It isn’t that I can’t do more than one trick, but it’s horribly difficult to make myself do whatever work is needed to move forward and begin either doing other tricks or learning how to do them.  There’s just about no possibility that I’ll advance within my own sub-organization, because the possible places I could go up are to jobs I don’t want to do, but trying to move up and out both requires filling out online questionnaires and talent forms and other guff, and I don’t have time for that—not and still do a decent job of what I was hired to do. 

And that’s not to mention that I’ve always had a very bad time trying to fill out online forms and put down everything I can do, some because it isn’t formal work experience on a resume, and much because I wasn’t brought up to that.  I was brought up to expect that you do your job and you do it well, and eventually somebody above you notices and gives you the opportunity for more responsibility in a new position where he thinks you’d be a good fit.  And even though that’s only happened to me twice in my life, I still expect it in every job.  I expect somebody to notice that I’m doing good work and advance me accordingly.  It’s not supposed to be my responsibility to take care of that—not unless I’m unhappy and looking to bail out to something, anything else.

Everyone at the Empire seems to expect that every employee has a grand strategic career plan mapped out within a month or two of becoming a permanent employee.  Well, here’s news, folks:  I don’t.  Frankly, I don’t care that much about which job I do, as long as it’s one I can find moderately rewarding of itself to do and that compensates me adequately for it.  (My current job falls down on the second point.)  I don’t have any huge ambition to manage an organization, so trying to make a manager of me isn’t likely to help much, although I’ve been a manager before.  And the only thing I truly want to do—to find a job where I can write—isn’t perceived by the organization as one that requires many specialists in it, so writers’ positions are scarce.  (And this despite the ubiquitous, sempiternal evidence that an organization of writers and editors is exactly what the Empire needs, and exactly what it lacks.)

So because trying to get organized enough to move elsewhere takes time and energy I don’t have, and because what I want to do most isn’t valued, I stay in an inbound support queue, a one-trick pony doing the only trick he knows that keeps a paycheck coming in, never mind how hollow and wasted he may feel about what he does.