Off I Go

Some of you have already heard this, but I have resigned my position at IS&T at MIT, as of last Monday. I been associated with MIT for all of my adult life, and I have had this particular job for seventeen years, so it's kind of unsettling. Accounts was the perfect job for me, and I was good at it - for a long time I expected to work there forever, or at least until I died. More recently, I have been thinking that I would work there until it killed me, which is a little different. The recent reorg has done an excellent job of destroying all of Support ("Provider and Consumer Partnerships" but I can never remember that) by punting all the managers, crushing all morale in the entire organization, and inflicting I think well over 50% casualties at this point. There wasn't actually an Accounts in the post-reorg world, I had a different official position with a person's worth of work, plus the three people's worth of work that the Accounts queue was. But I was managing, and I had recruited a padawan and started training him up (which would have worked better if they hadn't kept putting him in the Call Center for six hours a day). Friday I was called to a meeting with grandboss and uberboss and HR "to address my unprofessional communications"; highlights included "you shouldn't ever make guesses about the cause of a problem when you're talking to a professor" and "you shouldn't point people to the Sloan help desk when they're the ones who can fix the problem" and "you shouldn't put it in writing to anyone when you think that this bug is breaking MIT's anti-discrimination policies and should be fixed". So I resigned, which seemed to surprise them; it appears that the plan was to use the evidence that I was not suited for a customer-facing role to pressure me into taking a different developer-y job, but they hadn't gotten to that part yet. (Only after I left did I hear some of the worse horror stories; my citations were reasonable by comparison).

So now the Accounts queue is kind of on fire (I hope nobody needs to hire any temps any time soon), and my unfortunate padawan is trying his best to be me, but I had spun up about three timelines on work and he only has the standard one. Okay, there's some mixed metaphor going on there, but I guess my original metaphor is what tripped me up. If he's the padawan, then I was Qui-Gon Jinn, and I was doomed to be taken out by Darth Maul working for Palpatine (and I know who they are!), and you all know where that story ends.

However, despite everything, I will always be grateful to my grandboss for allowing me to use my chosen exit line.

"Can I talk you into changing your mind and staying?"
"In the words of my people... Offer me money. Power too, promise me that. Offer me anything I want.... I WANT MY MANAGERS BACK, YOU SON OF A BITCH."