500 Words — Day Eleven: The Art of Pushing Walls

I feel like a lot of time at work is spent spinning your wheels not really do anything useful. It’s not that you are not doing work. There’s a lot of work being done, but the end product is that nothing productive has been accomplished. Sometimes this happens when somebody else doesn’t do their job particularly well. Their shortcut turns into you analyzing their work until you figure out that they took a shortcut. Then you spend even more time undoing that shortcut and doing it the right yourself. You don’t get paid extra for returning something to the state you thought it was before you started working on it. Any manager would just look at the situation and note that the past two weeks haven’t gotten us anywhere closer to the end goal, but lots of work was done. Work harder!

That situation kinds of sucks, but as a fresh body out of college, this comes across as a novel situation. You never read the assignment and slowly progress backwards as you work until you realize the teacher really had no clue what they were doing. Sure, the work may have been difficult and sometimes you really paid for your shortcuts with all-nighters, but you never ran up to the start line and then were told to run in the opposite direction of the finish line. So, this mystical anomaly was just one bad apple in the system. You were just unlucky that someone was lazy and didn’t really care about their job. So, you continue working hard … and it happens again.

Over time you continue to make progress, albeit, slower than than you ever initially expected. There are even times that things start clicking and progress starts accelerating until something else shakes everything up and sets you back again. You start to get the suspicion that lots of people don’t care. That lots of people take shortcuts. That lots of people do mediocre work. That lots of people are fine with handing off their problems to other folks and are happy to hide this fact from them. Another fake smile here. Another handshake there. Things will get better. Tomorrow will be our day. Another: “Good jobs guys, I appreciate the hard work, we’re making progress” spoken with a tone of reassuring denial.

For me, everyday is just another day of pushing the wall and hoping a door opens in it. The door was in the documentation, but I guess they decided not to install it because the room was good enough. But when you decide to make your own door, you realize the wall is structurally deficient and you can’t make your own door. You just have to hope that pushing the wall will one day you take you to the promised land.

Or you could stop pushing.

I haven’t stopped pushing yet. There’s an art to pushing the walls. You’ll gain a lot of respect and admiration for pushing that wall. Maybe you’ll get others to occasionally push it with you. Sometimes you even get a new wall after you figure out to get around the last one. Management has been hyping up how much better the door is on this one. The door looks pretty good in the promo photograph. You walk up to the door in excitement and realize that the door is painted onto the wall. Disappointed, you lift your hands and start pushing again.