Temporary Promotion

Well this is a lot more of a bloggers style piece than you’d usually find me doing. I’ll cut straight to the point to save you the dilemma of whether to keep ploughing through this subjective self-indulgent claptrap or not.
After 20 years in the service I’ve been given a temporary fill in managerial position. Scouts honour!
Naturally you’re shocked. “What took you so long?” you’re pondering, or snickering.
But I contend that it’s not at all that obvious. Subjectively speaking, not in the slightest.
For a great number of years, too many, I’ve seen myself as merely surviving, an immigrant in the system. At first that was my primary aim.
I got admitted to the Israeli Bar some 20 plus years ago, an ordeal in its own writes, getting through a written and oral test in the process, in Hebrew. For starters I still didn’t even realise quite how linguistically disadvantaged I was. But I came to appreciate all that over the next few years, once I entered the service. I’d enjoyed learning Hebrew in the couple of years previous to my recruitment and considered myself an earnest student, but once I had to write out a simple memo in Hebrew I promptly realised that I was stuck, not in quicksand like a minor character in a Tarzan matinee, but in a foreign language.
Besides the language issue there’s always been some sort of cultural issue that I don’t know quite how to define or break down. Oh I survived, stiff necked and determined to integrate. But there are no free lunches, as the yanks are wont to say. I, and my family in turn paid the price. Or to put it another way, Newton’s third law of motion applies to people just as well as it does to physics.Just try accounting for the various forces and vectors affecting our lives.
By Israeli standards I was apathetic and not playing the corporate game. I liked to think of it as nonchalance. That was much more cool, where I was coming from. But after about a decade in the service I found myself working in a prosecution department and the cultural dissonance was coming to a head. I still suffered from the delusion that work was this thing you did to get money in order to live out your life in the remaining 8 waking hours of the day, doing banal things like being a loving husband and father. Well in hindsight, that’s rich. If you’re employed too, and stuck somewhere between study and retirement, you probably know what the new age of slavery is all about. Not that I was overtly punished but there were some people who candidly confronted me, curious as to my apparent lack of ambition. Maybe what I was tackling in these Israeli legal eagles is what anti Semites would call a characteristic of the pushy Jew but I understood, at least rationally, that this was the antithesis of the Australian tall poppy syndrome. They were primarily after self-fulfilment.
Oh I understood the principle but I was stuck. I’d survived and rolled with the punches, which was not an insignificant achievement for an immigrant. And I was earning a truly respectable wage by Israeli standards. But my father thought I lacked ambition. I guess the criticism did hurt but I was in denial. I was convinced that I was fulfilling my own agenda. I wanted to be more present as a father than he’d been. Meanwhile I was earnestly treading water in the service coping with a variety of challenges. Maybe I was still in some sort of post adolescent rebellious stage. In retrospect it would have made a lot of sense to find some sort of modus vivendi towards some bilateral joint ventures with my father. But it’s too late now and the awful truth is that we all too often visit the faults of our fathers on our own children. But I’m straying as usual. Even to this day I don’t know whether I should have come or should have stayed. (I used to listen to punk music too.)
Anyway things are changing. Firstly I went and paid some sort of retirement consultant for advice and the long and short of it was that if I intend to keep working after enforced retirement I’d be better off quitting as soon as possible and building up a new career while I still have some youthful energy left in me. The problem is my lack of preparedness, like not knowing how to check out the required stats and costs and pricing considerations, nor about marketing or networking either.
And then again, back at the old homestead, at the office, the service’s hard-nosed managerial approach had succeeded in little but creating a vacuum. As Lord Acton held, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." And while the management were free to make their decisions with monopolistic unqualified authority, obsessed with supplying statistics for their superiors and politicians, rather than providing leadership to their workforce, and protected from the inconvenience of dealing with a union or otherwise organised work force, they succeeded in causing of a full on brain drain, bringing a successful legal department to a state of collapse, by bullying successive department heads and seconds into running for their lives. The initial use of force and bullying only leads to a cycle of more bullying. Offering no recompense for added responsibility and blocking transfers to potential advancement or just a more normal work environment, the management had no takers for department head when the last one managed to get himself deposed. So they brought in an outsider.
So, with a fait accomplis and a new boss of a legal department totally inexperienced in that unit’s branch of law, there was an obvious vacuum in fomentation and in light of my aforementioned lack of managerial and decision making experience I figured that it was about time I threw my hat into the ring and steel myself for coping in the decision making world. I’ve never even been considered for the posi before, but there was a certain constellation brewing, with the other potential candidates being alienated and disillusioned. So doing my best not to breach solidarity with my begrudged colleagues I signalled my willingness to cooperate with the new boss, for the sake of the department.
Well you could say I was kind of the candidate by default. Not too complementary, but whether it's clear or not to the others, I have a motive and it's not promotion within the system.
Anyway next week I start as the boss's temporary fill in.
I guess the weirdest thing is that I’ll probably have to find someone to proof read my correspondence, not really appropriate for a head of a legal department. I guess my dad would be able to identify with that.