The Problem with being a Global organisation...

is that you have to work across so many different time lines and, in the end, don't have much of a personal life.

Right now, I'm working with Saudi Arabia (1hr ahead), Dubai (2hrs ahead), Italy (1hr behind) and the USA (depends on where you are, but from 7hrs behind). The result is that you end up working more than the average 7.5 or 8 hours per day on a number of days. And what recognition do you get for it? Fuckall, except "it's your job" or, as is the case with SA these days "you have a job, be thankful".

FUCKOFF!!! is what I say to those arguments.

Yes, I have a job which, mostly, I enjoy and which pays my bills at the end of the month (speaking of which, I must do my banking tomorrow) and I am thankful not to be in the lines at the end of the month trying to collect unemployment benefits. Mostly, however, I get strange looks and comments when I say "I have a life. Work can wait until tomorrow if it's not important". But that's the truth of it. I do have a life, a home, a family, animals, bills, and all the other trappings of the working Joe's life. So if I do skim an hour or so here and there from my working day, I don't feel guilty and expect my management to not hold a whip to my back when I tell them I just came from having my car washed. What's the old Biblical quotation? "Let he who hath not sinned, cast the first stone"...not too many takers there, would be my bet.

The other big problem with working globally is that you end up waiting for people on the other side of the world to get back to you on things, things that are important to you both getting things done but, because of time differences, can end up taking place over a couple of days instead of a couple of hours if you're both in the same vicinity.

And then there's the other things that take up your normal working day too...the menial, mundane, tasks and processes that corporations enforce upon their "valued staff members" (read: "serial numbers", which is what we have, not an "employee number"). I reckon that, if you had to take all the internal processes we have and add the time together it takes to complete them all over the course of the year, you would probably spend around two months completing them if you did them from start to finish at one sitting. It's bollox, I tell you.

This actually gets me back to a theory I developed many years ago, round about the first time I did a file transfer from one computer system to another (probably goes back about 20yrs)...Communications will be the downfall of mankind.

I know communications are necessary in the digital world to move information around, but we abuse it way beyond acceptable levels. Imagine if we'd said 50yrs ago that we had to send an email to people on the other side of the world and would get worried if we didn't get a response within a day? Ridiculous...Fifty years ago, people still sent surface mail from one continent to the other and it would take six weeks one way!! Never mind waiting for the person to reply to, and post, his reply. Add another six or seven weeks to that!!

Now we get ants-in-our-pants (like me, right now) if we don't hear from someone who is supposed to be organising a flight for us to satisfy a deadline (20yrs ago, what the hell was a "deadline"? - never heard of it) brought on by some other non-delivery fuckup in the digital world which I now have to go and fix. I'm supposed to be in Turin (ok, Wreckless, "Torino"), Italy, on Monday next week to start a new project for a large motor manufacturer, but I'm also waiting to hear if I'm required in Saudi Dryland to do a presentation of a report I drafted recently. They might want me there around the 8th or 9th December, but because they organise all travel arrangements from their side, I have to wait for them to send me travel confirmations and e-tickets before I can even start making my Italy travel arrangements. That, in itself, is a fuckup due to the three management levels I have to go through seeing as the travel is international. Try getting that done in a day, and still getting the flight reservation confirmed and ticket issued...ha!!

It gets back to those internal processes I mentioned earlier. Management, too, have their own set of processes and tasks that they have to get through in a day. Do I want to be a manager in this corporation? Do I fuck...and I told them as much a while ago just after a Leadership Development Course I went on. I'd love to have a Chief Financial Officer waiting to do nothing more than approve my flight plans, but that would be ridiculously expensive to the corporation and I don't think they'd go for it somehow.

Anyway, where was I going with this ranting?

Oh yes.....I long for a small, easy to manage organisation to work for. Somewhere that I can have a little stress (unavoidable these days), not too much, somewhere I will enjoy going to work every day (not necessarily from home), people I will enjoy working with (yes, I have some today, but would like more), where I don't have hundreds of repeatable processes to perform annually, where I don't have an email system sending me mail that I've missed capturing my hours worked for the week, where I don't have a cellphone/PDA to store hundreds of contact names and numbers that manages my diary for me, where I can afford to take five weeks to go from SA to Europe by boat and not spend eight cramped hours on a jet plane...etc, etc, etc...

{sigh}...