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So I have ADHD or something like it. I'm not officially diagnosed with it-- closest I came to an actual diagnosis was when I was still in elementary school, when I was pronounced a borderline case, and dosing me up with Ritalin had no appreciable effect that my parents or teachers noticed-- but the way my brain can bounce from topic to topic and off on wild tangents, with the struggles I have to focus on things at times, tells me that if I were to go back and get diagnosed now, it'd probably be clearer. (No intention of that atm, since despite this, I'm still functional.)
At any rate, this is less about that, and more just how my brain subconsciously sabotages me at work.
At The Client, they are in the process of decommissioning [Major App X] (MAX), as it uses an old application platform which The Client has largely moved away from. I think at this point, MAX is the only reason the platform is still being used. But they're in the process of transitioning the data and functionality from the old platform to what amounts to a cloud-based application [Cloud App X] (CAX). Once CAX is fully up and running and MAX fully decom'd, [Office] where I work will no longer have to support any tickets for MAX and all CAX tickets that we would have handled will be handled by close support teams.
For various reasons, I was never really properly trained on MAX tickets. There weren't enough coming in for my trainers to teach me on, and when those tickets did come in, others in the office took care of them instead. Every time this deficiency in my knowledge base was brought up, talk would be made of having me handle some of those tickets to train me. And this never happened.
However, in the past six months, [Office] has shrunk in size. My "supervisor" Sly, moved to a different position (same office space, new desk, different [Office]), one of my fellow contractors decided to leave the contract, one of the staff floaters rotated out, and then one of my coworkers, Shorty, moved to a different position as well (different building), and my Boss has said that she's not being allowed to backfill those seats. Now we've gone from having about 10 people to 4.
When Sly and my fellow contractor left, Boss had started insisting that everyone needed to know how to do everything, so if someone was absent, the workload could still be addressed by everyone. An understandable thing, one I didn't have a problem with. And so my big knowledge gap with MAX became something to be addressed properly.
Sadly, the SOP documents we have about MAX are garbage. I don't know who originally wrote them all (there's three different versions, to further complicate things), but they're poorly worded and organized, which only compounds my ability to grasp what I'm supposed to be doing. So coworker Mezza offered to show me how to do it, assigned me three MAX tickets. Unfortunately, none of the tickets were bog standard, all three had different things that made them "not covered in the SOP." On top of that, Mezza's teaching method was lacking, sort of boiling down to telling me what each step was, without really giving me context or explaining it, which all amounted to not being enough, and so my brain didn't really learn any of it.
I've told Boss and Mezza both that I'm just not retaining this knowledge, which gets me a serious "you have to be kidding me" look from Boss. She knows how bright I am, has complimented my ability to bang out tasks quickly, how I've re-written some document templates that get used around [Office], and managed to give several presentations to clients about how re-orgs work, so she evidently feels like my inability to learn how to do MAX tickets is down to laziness. She's gotten on my case before about how I've complained about how many tasks I get assigned at times, insisting I'm capable of handling them all, and I've had to snap, "Don't tell me what my brain can handle!"
Boss does seem to get that I learn with solid, clear instruction and retain via repetition. New tasks may take me a bit to grasp, but once I've done them multiple times, I work out the routine, find ways to get more efficient at it, and can then crank them out without too much issue. But this depends on repetition. And since fewer MAX tickets are coming in than there used to be, as CAX takes over more and more of its functionality, that gives me fewer chances for repetition to learn it, since the tickets have to be distributed among the rest of the team.
And since CAX is taking over, and will soon replace MAX completely, my brain is subconsciously pushing back against retaining the knowledge. Sort of "Why do I need to know this? MAX is going away soon." I've explained this to Boss and Mezza as well, and they've both rightfully pointed out that we still get MAX tickets so there is still a need to learn this all, but that doesn't exactly make my subconscious accept it. As Mezza put it, "I need to have a talk with your brain." I told her, "Good luck, I've been trying to talk to it for the past 42 years."
Sorry, I just needed to vent my frustrations with all this. I hate having to deal with MAX stuff, because of the aforementioned poor training and my inability to retain the knowledge, compounded by none of the MAX tickets I seem to get assigned are the needed bog standard ones that will help train me on the basics.
At any rate, this is less about that, and more just how my brain subconsciously sabotages me at work.
At The Client, they are in the process of decommissioning [Major App X] (MAX), as it uses an old application platform which The Client has largely moved away from. I think at this point, MAX is the only reason the platform is still being used. But they're in the process of transitioning the data and functionality from the old platform to what amounts to a cloud-based application [Cloud App X] (CAX). Once CAX is fully up and running and MAX fully decom'd, [Office] where I work will no longer have to support any tickets for MAX and all CAX tickets that we would have handled will be handled by close support teams.
For various reasons, I was never really properly trained on MAX tickets. There weren't enough coming in for my trainers to teach me on, and when those tickets did come in, others in the office took care of them instead. Every time this deficiency in my knowledge base was brought up, talk would be made of having me handle some of those tickets to train me. And this never happened.
However, in the past six months, [Office] has shrunk in size. My "supervisor" Sly, moved to a different position (same office space, new desk, different [Office]), one of my fellow contractors decided to leave the contract, one of the staff floaters rotated out, and then one of my coworkers, Shorty, moved to a different position as well (different building), and my Boss has said that she's not being allowed to backfill those seats. Now we've gone from having about 10 people to 4.
When Sly and my fellow contractor left, Boss had started insisting that everyone needed to know how to do everything, so if someone was absent, the workload could still be addressed by everyone. An understandable thing, one I didn't have a problem with. And so my big knowledge gap with MAX became something to be addressed properly.
Sadly, the SOP documents we have about MAX are garbage. I don't know who originally wrote them all (there's three different versions, to further complicate things), but they're poorly worded and organized, which only compounds my ability to grasp what I'm supposed to be doing. So coworker Mezza offered to show me how to do it, assigned me three MAX tickets. Unfortunately, none of the tickets were bog standard, all three had different things that made them "not covered in the SOP." On top of that, Mezza's teaching method was lacking, sort of boiling down to telling me what each step was, without really giving me context or explaining it, which all amounted to not being enough, and so my brain didn't really learn any of it.
I've told Boss and Mezza both that I'm just not retaining this knowledge, which gets me a serious "you have to be kidding me" look from Boss. She knows how bright I am, has complimented my ability to bang out tasks quickly, how I've re-written some document templates that get used around [Office], and managed to give several presentations to clients about how re-orgs work, so she evidently feels like my inability to learn how to do MAX tickets is down to laziness. She's gotten on my case before about how I've complained about how many tasks I get assigned at times, insisting I'm capable of handling them all, and I've had to snap, "Don't tell me what my brain can handle!"
Boss does seem to get that I learn with solid, clear instruction and retain via repetition. New tasks may take me a bit to grasp, but once I've done them multiple times, I work out the routine, find ways to get more efficient at it, and can then crank them out without too much issue. But this depends on repetition. And since fewer MAX tickets are coming in than there used to be, as CAX takes over more and more of its functionality, that gives me fewer chances for repetition to learn it, since the tickets have to be distributed among the rest of the team.
And since CAX is taking over, and will soon replace MAX completely, my brain is subconsciously pushing back against retaining the knowledge. Sort of "Why do I need to know this? MAX is going away soon." I've explained this to Boss and Mezza as well, and they've both rightfully pointed out that we still get MAX tickets so there is still a need to learn this all, but that doesn't exactly make my subconscious accept it. As Mezza put it, "I need to have a talk with your brain." I told her, "Good luck, I've been trying to talk to it for the past 42 years."
Sorry, I just needed to vent my frustrations with all this. I hate having to deal with MAX stuff, because of the aforementioned poor training and my inability to retain the knowledge, compounded by none of the MAX tickets I seem to get assigned are the needed bog standard ones that will help train me on the basics.
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