Unprofessional Professionals
Like a lot of people, I have a hard time understanding people wit whom I have very little in common. For example, I can't understand many people born and raised in a foreign country simply because my background is so compeletly different that there are precious few points of common ground that we might share. I've never seen my country ravaged by war, and don't know what it's like to be afraid of land mines. So there's an understandable disconnect that I can try to bridge by creating common reference points, but without that effort, there's a lot that will simply be a total surprise.
I find myself in a curious place. Management wants to believe that by keeping me out of certain meetings that I won't learn of them, and understand the context of those same meetings. They want to believe that for these meetings I'm not as smart as they expect me to be all the rest of the time. They believe that if I'm not in a meeting I won't know of it's existence, it's attendance list, and from that infer the context of the meeting and why they want to exclude me.
So I'm in the position of being close ot being re-assigned onto another project. That's life, and in and of itself isn't so bad. I've built a system that looks easier to maintain than it is, but they'll learn that as they transfer it to someone less competant, but that person will either get up to speed or they won't.
No, my biggest gripe about this is the way in which they believe that I'm simply a tool that doesn't care what it's working on, so long as it's just working. This dehumanization of me bothers me a lot.
Sure, back at the turn of the century I'd be lucky to get fresh bread, but that's not the point. The point is that they expect me to behave
professionally towards them and their projects, but at the same time, they don't believe that they need to behave professionally towards me. The source of my greatest frustration on this is that it is my honor that keeps me from dealing with them in-kind. It is precisely because of this honor that they believe I'm so valuable, and professional. So I'm having my own good nature used against me by less honorable individuals.
I can't control any else's actions... only my own.