Having worked in the Education Records department at the University of Nottingham for a few weeks now, one of the things that's struck me is the amount of office politics that goes on around here. That is to say: there's office politics. And there's never been office politics (by which I mean people complaining about other people within their own organisation, and not speaking to each other or not working together efficiently in perfect harmony because they don't like each other) anywhere else I've worked. There's not a LOT of this stuff, I dare say anybody reading this who came and sat in my office for a while wouldn't consider it much more than background radiation, but it is there, which has given me pause for thought.
Up until now I've been working in temp jobs in primarily technical disciplines, IT departments and the like. I've been entering data into computers among other people who also do computers for a living. Now, for the first time, I'm working in an admin kind of office with databases AND paperwork AND lots of real, you know, PEOPLE. And that, I think, is the difference.
When you work in some organisation's IT department, unless it's an IT company, you're not actually doing the work of the organisation. You're pulling strings, you are behind the curtain making sure everybody else in the organisation, who actually does do the work, can do their work every day without incident. In effect, working in an IT department is meta-work. And I think the major difference between being behind the curtain and being in front of it is that behind the curtain, we have no time or patience for petty, trivial hu-man angst, because we are all of us united against a common foe. As professional geeks, the real problem in our working life is not other people, but our eternal struggle to tame and harness The Computer.
Certainly that's the way I interpret it. As for me personally, I drift through social turmoil like a neutrino through lead. I have, to date, encountered nothing I would describe as office politics actually concerning me, something I put down to 1) my utter professionalism, and 2) being completely relaxed and groovy in the way that only a rational, thinking geek can be when potential Issues-with-a-capital-I do surface menacingly nearby.
