Happy Path

I'm not Awkward, I work in IT.

When I first joined my bank unit, I assumed I'd be taking over all of my predecessor's duties. There were two glaring flaws in that logic: Julie was with The Bank for years and I had no handover notes. People would come to me with questions or work that needed to be done and I'd turn them away. I had no qualms about this method because it was an honest reaction. Just the same as if someone came to me with a broken arm and asked me to set it, I would have turned them away. Without any knowledge of the process, it was foolish to even try.

There's a certain freedom in working outside your area of expertise and openly admitting your shortcomings. When I worked in broadcasting, if someone had asked me about a television production issue, I would have felt responsible. If I didn't know the solution, I'd have made an effort to find out and learn the process as part of continued job training. As a PCO, when someone approached me and said something that sounded like this to my ears: Are you able to sasquatch the team's uber ladder into triplex mode? The only thing I could do is say I haven't been taught sasquatch and I'm not cleared to touch the uber ladder or use triplex mode. Or more often I would say I know all the words you just used, but not in that order or context. Sorry, I can't help you.

Sometimes I'd reflect on my early days in FinTech and feel good about all the things I'd learned over the months. I'd gleaned what a sasquatch was and how to use the uber ladder in triplex mode. But there were other things Julie did that I never learned. I wanted to do my job well, but I had no designs on advancing in the field. At a certain point, I felt I had pretty much learned all the skills that served me in my role, as well as anything that could transfer to a position in what I considered a more desirable industry.

Charles pushed me to learn more. I think he continued to harbour a fantasy that he'd mold me into a Project Manager who made six figures. At the very least, he wanted me to be my most marketable self when I left The Bank. With that goal in mind, he made me navigator of an agile project. He wanted to make me scrum master, but I balked at heading up even a small and fairly straight-forward project in IT.

I'll take a step back now in case project management is as foreign to you as it was to me. There are two main methods of project management: waterfall and agile. The former inspired a TLC earworm every time I heard the word. The latter was the sweetheart buzzword of The Bank when I was there. As opposed to the waterfall method, where things flowed in a straight line in a series of pre-determined steps, agile was the scramble crossing* of project management. Everyone jumps in at once and gets to work. The idea is that a project is completed more quickly because workers have the freedom to do what they need to do without waiting for someone else to complete their work and pass it on.

One day I overheard a man in the office say, "I have the room all set-up and squared away. All we need are masking tape and paper towels." That was a man speaking the language of agile. While the method reeked of cutting-edge usage, the implementation actually involved a lot of sticky notes that are migrated from one place to another on a white board partitioned into cells by masking tape. Hooray for the future of business!

One of my favorite misheard words came from this method. I had a five-minute discussion with a Romanian team member who was complaining about the proliferation of meetings at The Bank. He started by saying something about "a jail". I assumed he was drawing some kind of parallel between having to attend these meetings and being held captive. The word came up several more times as he talked about how the meetings interfered with time to do actual work and how he needed to recover after each session. Before walking away, he said, "In my opinion, a jail is not the best method." That was when I finally figured out he'd been saying "agile" and not "a jail".