Whenever my department head emails me and asks if he can stop over, I get a little worried. Mainly because there is no reason for him to come to me unless privacy is required. And especially because I interviewed for a new job last week. So I went on high alert when he emailed me this afternoon.
Shit! He knows! How could he know? Maybe he doesn't know. Pretend YOU don't know, and everything will be fine. Just play it cool.He doesn't know. He came by to remind me of the company's new annual review policy, and consequently to administer my review. Technically my supervisor is supposed to review me, but whatever. I get along with him better anyway.
So, he starts out very matter-of-factly and tells me he's unable to promote me. I'm not surprised, but I'm disappointed. I've been asking for a promotion for more than a year now and totally deserve it. He agrees, but our company is in a shitty place financially and I'm not getting promoted. Instead I got a small raise. Small as in, right above insulting and far below substantial.
After I thank him for trying to look out for me, he begins to talk about how he can assist in non-monetary ways. He reminds me that he can't really help me up the ladder—I've been in the industry long enough to know the ropes and it's up to me to tack together a career trajectory. But, he says, he can offer guidance and advice about corporate life, office politics, personalities and—
"Is your desk comfortable with that tilt?" he suddenly interrupts himself.
"Huh? What tilt?"
"Oh, I've talked to you about this before," he says. "Look." Now he's down on hands and knees, crawling over to a corner of my desk. "You see," he says, "each leg of the desk has a screw, and this one over here is raising the corner higher than the others. So there's a tilt."
"Huh!" I've sat at my desk for two years. It's true that the drawers fall open and that you have to adjust them in a very particular way to wedge them closed, but because the desk probably predates my existence, I always attributed its quirks to age. I never noticed a tilt.
"C'mon over here," my department head says. "Let's see if we can't get this screw to go up into the leg. C'mon. See if you can squeeze in"—he makes room for me to join him on the floor—"and I'll lift while you turn the screw."
A few minutes later, my desk was sitting level, for perhaps the first time in history. We verified that my drawers don't slide open anymore.
"Great!" he said, brushing desk dust off his hands. "Well! I think I feel better about that than anything else we discussed!" he pronounced, and then walked out the door.
And that was it. Suddenly I don't feel so bad about my stealth job interview...
