Career Blues

I've been working on a document since Friday afternoon. It's a very important bit of information for my department - our goals. I was given our 2008 and 2009 goal document to fix. The person who had been updating this has been gone for several months. It hasn't been updated since March. After looking at it, I don't think it's been properly updated since 2006 or 07. Probably 2007. I had to do a lot of reverse engineering. This isn't my document and I wasn't given the liberty to create a new one. First I had to figure out where the formulas came from and how they were being measured. Then I had to go line by line and see where the data was kept for each piece of info. Then I had to make sure it was being look at in a logical/consistent way. I wanted our measures to be meaningful. Some of the lines didn't go anywhere, they were manually put it, which defeats the purpose of having formulas and all that stuff. I had the document up most of the day yesterday. I probably spent a solid 6 or 7 hours on it. I was watching the X-Files at the same time, so what was 10 hours of time on the couch wasn't 10 hours of working. I had some left over to do today, so I've been working on it for the past hour and a half.

I kind of like huge projects like this, I really do. It's neat to have a hand in big things going on. I am a bit down about not getting the bennies for doing all this work. I mean, I get paid over time and everything, but I'm working well out of my job classification. In March they hired me as an Administrative Specialist and since July I've been filling in for a Business Analyst and then for another Business Analyst since August. I was told that I would be made an Analyst, but a month ago I was told that I could only get the gig if the person I'm filling in for gets a job in the department she's working in. That's different than what I was initially told. Meanwhile other people in my group have been promoted to a higher pay grade.

I'm sure it sounds immature or selfish of me, perhaps even egotistic, but I feel like I was left behind. I'm doing a lot of work for the department and going beyond my duties, heck, my boss sends me to meetings in her stead once and a while, but I'm still making Admin pay. Other people (well, one specific person) are getting moved ahead while not working as hard or really working at all.

Part of me tries to remember that it'll all pan out in the end and that at least I'm earning more than a clerk. But it's hard to keep that in mind all the time, especially when it's almost 10 on Sunday night and I'm still working...