I was speaking to my manager about work and one of the things that came up was how far she was in the process of recruiting a replacement for one of the people in the department.
She said she had interviews this week, with only 2 candidates.

At the end of the recruitment period, she had 25 people. Of those 25 people, 7 remained. Three pulled out (she didn’t say why) and of the 4 remaining, she chose 2 to have the interviews with.
Out of interest I asked her what would happen, if these 2 aren’t going to make the cut, she replied she could use the other 2 as backup, but she thought they were overqualified and were just looking “for any job” because they recently moved from another country.
And she thought with them being overqualified, they’d be bored easily and therefore wouldn’t stay long at this company.

I was silent for a bit, because that remark hit home. It felt like she was talking about me. This remark stunned me.

One of my day to day dealings is fixing other people’s mistakes. They make mistakes, because they are too dumb to understand the processes and systems we work with.

I constantly have to explain and re-explain to another manager how “the system” (which he set up) works. He then pretends to know that he totally understood what I just said and creates his own quirky system on top of the official company system, so he can make sense of what’s going on.
He’ll repeat this process if he gets discombobulated and puzzled by his own work and will create another system.
The result of this is, that I have to repeat the same process in three different systems. For example, he wants me to scan, copy and email the same invoice. Very odious when you have 340 invoices at the end of the month.
And then the cycle starts again, he’ll call me into his office to have me explain why we have three or more different systems and why it takes me so long to process invoices.

In reality, my tasks are so simple, a first generation smartphone can do it.

oldest smartphone

I am overqualified for this job.

I am the person my manager just told me about. I applied 5 years ago, because I needed “a job”, not “A Career”.

And here I am, doing a Blackberry’s job for almost 5 years.

And I haven’t left, because I got bored.
I haven’t left because I got complacent.