An Excerpt from "The Bimp Book," My Anonymous Autobiography

• Work

  • The Last Straw: Competing With Boss For Raise

The last office I occupied at the DoD agency where I worked was by far the least satisfying. I had had good work reorganized out from under me once again, and the options of places to go were slim. I did not get an opportunity to find new analytic work such as I had been cross-trained on my own initiative to do. No, all they could find for me was a boss who wanted me to work as a webpage designer, for her office’s analytic efforts to be represented on the internal web at work.

She was stern, and I was not really all that good at webpage design, nor was there a “fire under me” for that sort of work, and so of course I wasn’t doing my best work in that office. Additionally, our personalities seemed to grate, and there were others in the office that did not like me. When time came for us to compete for the increasingly rare grade level raises - we called them promotions inside the Federal government workplace - I had had many talks with management two levels up about what I should do next time. I had done this, and more.

But now, I had the opportunity to turn in a Promotion Folder to get a raise above Grade 13, where I had been foundering for almost two decades. All my best work had been since that last promotion, with documentation from others readily available to verify this. I was a much better worker, but every Promotion Folder submission found me feeling less and less hopeful. Now, of course, with my retirement eligibility occurring in just a year or two, I wasn’t sure how much it would help my retirement income to get a promotion right before getting out, but hey, if my Mom down in Georgia stayed healthy, I could put off retirement a few more years and earn those few years of the higher salary, and hence higher pension, a Grade 14 would get me, right?

That was my logic, at least. And there were a couple of circumstances that made this promotion cycle unique for me: The first was that my boss was also a Grade 13 submitting her Promotion Folder: Given the specific number of promotions they had to give away, this meant we were competing against each other. Not to worry: The other circumstance was that I had been told by management that my Promotion Folder could go straight up to the management two levels up, bypassing my immediate supervisor entirely. That got me a little bit more excited about this; it eased my pessimism just a little.

That respite from fearing the worst was short-lived. The person to whom I physically submitted my promotion folder per instructions was still my immediate supervisor, and I had expected she would simply take that folder, unseen, and submit it to her own boss, the decision authority, along with hers. That expectation was unfounded. She informed me a day or two after I had submitted my folder that although she did not have to look at my folder, apparently she still could, and not only that, she had sent it on up to her boss with a notation to the effect that she did not recommend me for promotion.

She got the promotion.

I still have trouble coming up with calm, sane words to describe how this made me feel. I would go home in tears explaining my lack of advancement to my wife. The only good I took from this was that I was damn sure not going to stay at that agency one minute past my fifty-fifth birthday. This adds together with the other circumstance I shared here in the chapter “$1032.79/month” to pretty much describe my life’s current financial situation: I am one of those many Federal employees and retirees living paycheck to paycheck, and this after making a huge, successful change in my career that increased my motivation and accomplishments tenfold.

And my mind goes back - seemingly in an effort to punish me - to that friend’s e-mail where she said, “I can’t understand how you could have missed your calling so badly.”

Beats the heck out of me, too.