Negativism Sucks

Work is starting to get me down. It's not the work I'm doing—I love what I do—it's the people I'm working with right now and the attitude of the company.

I work for a fairly small, family-owned, regional distribution company. The president of the company is well-meaning, but somewhat whimsical in his approach to strategic vision for the company. And what I mean by whimsical is not funny and amusing, but rather the prevailing rumor around the company is that his "latest idea" for what we should be doing as a company tends to come from a conversation he had with someone in an elevator somewhere or the in-flight magazine he was reading on his last trip.

The CFO of the company is about as close with the purse-strings as they come. He doesn't want to spend a dime on anything without proper justification and an almost 100% guarantee of satisfaction and/or success. I do respect him; if I were to win the lottery tomorrow, before I quit my job I would ask his advice for how to invest it and pay attention to every word spoken. And indeed, the company has been reasonably successful. But it seems very difficult at times to make things happen without the backing of the guy holding the money bag.

However, one of the main issues I have with the upper management of the company is that they tend not to listen to the employees they have hired, even when there are several of us saying the same thing. Or rather, the will hear what is being said, but not trust its validity until it has been verified by an outside consultant who has studied the situation for a week at roughly $200-$300 per hour.

But that has been going on for many years—much longer than I have been there—and most likely will continue long after I am gone (barring some major shake-up). What has really been bothering me the most over the last few weeks has been the other people in my department.

For such a small company, we have a pretty advanced IT infrastructure—all run by 6 of us and a manager. As with any department, there are minor quibbles and differences between co-workers, but recently it has started to get out of hand.

One of the group is a former consultant who seems to have hung on to the consultant mentality of making the work stretch out as long as possible while looking busy. Unfortunately, when you aren't paid by the hour, all that manages to do is piss people off. However, despite the fact that many of us have a hard time pinpointing exactly what he does and how he contributes, he somehow manages to get a lot of credit for things that he may or may not really deserve the credit for and to get people to think that he's really doing something. Go figure.

Another falls into a similar spot: a former consultant who now works as little as he can while spending quite a bit of time managing his recently purchased side-business (in a completely unrelated industry), shopping for more establishments to purchase and trying to squeeze as much out of people as possible (in terms of goods, services and work) for the absolute least amount of money and effort on his part. In addition to sometimes being impatient and somewhat abrupt in manor, his accent can make it difficult to understand him at times.

While these two might be considered the ultimate source of the intradepartmental issues, it is how two of my other co-workers respond that is causing my problems. One is the senior network admin, former deparment manager and overall IT guru; the other is the other network admin and general IT geek.

Both are nice guys and I do like them. But their attitudes as of late are rude, obnoxious and plainly unprofessional. Don't get me wrong: I am all in favor of a casual and laid-back work environment. If I could, I would change the dress code for IT to "whatever you want as long as it's more than underwear and flip-flops." I have no problem with flex-time and comp-time and whatever else in the time-off department as long as the work gets done and there is support coverage during business hours and emergency critical systems support coverage. Of course, with my employer, that level of slack will never happen. What I do have problems with is plainly spoken and barely concealed contempt for co-workers.

Recently I have felt like I was back in high school where people still whined and complained on a nearly constant basis and called each other rude, inconsiderate and down-right crass names. The prevailing attitude is a near-complete lack of care, overwhelming pessimism and, of course, the barely concealed contempt.

Of course, here I am whining and complaining about it myself. But it makes for a pretty rotten environment in which to try and get anything done and at times makes me want to not even go into work at all. I have been trying to shield myself from it; I have been trying to ignore it; I have been trying to escape into my work and my headphones. I realize that all of this negative energy isn't my stuff—it isn't even directed my way. But it just seems to keep seeping in and it is very hard to not make it my stuff.

I think I will be saying something to my manager tomorrow. And possibly to one or both of my co-workers. I'm not sure what, if anything, my manager will do. He is certainly aware of it, but has done nothing but seemingly laugh it off and hope silently that they will tire of the childishness and drop it. One co-worker might actually listen to me. The other would probably just tell me to go pound sand.

But I have to say something to someone. I'm not sure I can continue to be in that environment and maintain a healthy mindset. And I don't really want to face the uncertainty of a job search right now. We'll have to see what tomorrow brings.