Yesterday, while sitting through a meeting that I can only describe as a boredom marathon, I had an epiphany.

I don't think I recognized it as such from the start, but now I do. I was sitting there thinking about how much work it was for me to maintain this team, how it just piled higher and higher with each of these monthly two-hour-long slugfests, and most importantly how it wasn't doing anything for me. I was enduring this horsehit for no benefit of my own. I joined the team originally because it would give me exposure to a program I wanted to be involved in. I found out too late that the exposure was limited to ancillary technical support of the project, and not in the procedural realm. In short, I was spending time pushing the fucking desk when I wanted to be in the idea room. Bah!

So there I am, sitting in this meeting stewing and stirring my anger cauldron. This sucks. This is pointless. Why am I here? These people don't appreciate me. It's a waste of my time. Then I started thinking about all the things I do at work that don't add to my career. Shit that I do that is not helping me position myself to be where I want to be. The big picture lit this panic in me. Oh shit! I'm not just wasting my time anymore, I'm practically backpedaling.

Career plans have been a reoccuring thread for me lately. I've had my eyes on the next-highest rung, laid out a tentative personal goal to get this far or complete this new project. But the other day was like a lightning blot: I needed to change the way I did my job, and change what my job was. After the meeting I came back to my office and some fuckface had taken my chair from behind my fucking desk to sit in on a meeting. WHAT the FUCK? Is it my day in the barrel too? It only added to the spinning sensation of the frustration and the urgency. I went into a colleague's office (who's a bit of a mentor, and has really helped me put together the good things about my position now) and shut the door.

I pretty much unloaded on him that I appreciated him putting me on this particular team, but that the meetings were a fucking grind and it wasn't the area I wanted to be inolved in. I didn't want to quit cold-turkey and cause workload problems for the other team members, but I wanted to be put on a more process-oriented team. He nodded, and we began to discuss a host of topics about my job, where I want to be, what I need to divest myself of and invest myself in to get there.

Basically, the scuttlebutt is still murmuring about a new management position being created, and I'm in an okay position to be the logical internal candidate. One of those tentative personal goals was to get this job, but the epiphany slammed home the point that I've got a lot of work to take on if I plan on being in an irrefuteable position as the logical internal candidate. Acknowledging this deficit was what created the panic. I was cruising along thinking I was a shoe-in, when in reality I was spinning my wheels with a bigass bullshit project that I thought was helping me out. I'm not going to be able to dump it anytime soon, but I've also got to start taking on things that matter. My colleague is going to help me with that, but it's going to be something that is going to involve a lot of leg workon my end. The trade-off here is that if I can manage the workload I'm carrying now along with the projects I need to whip ass in to make a play for this job, I'll be good.

Of course, there will always be a boring meeting, and future goals to meet, and urgency over climbing the ladder - but at least at that point I'll be making multiples of the mere peanuts I make now and the boring meetings will be more relevant than the horseshit I spent two hours on the other day. The next few weeks/months are going to be gangbusters.