People have visions of the solitary writer who enjoys nothing more than being left alone in solitude for months to work on their great next novel. That is not the case at all for me, as I am a screaming extrovert. Each one of the Myers-Briggs assessments has confirmed that the only thing that will make more of an extrovert is if I ran for political office. Short of that, I am about as social spongy as one can get.I had in fact thought that when my job moved to telecommuting it will give me some extra time to push faster on Blood War: Alliance, as it’s prequel Blood War: Betray has gone off to the formatting stage for pre-release. But unfortunately, when your day job includes being a Program Manager for technology development, my workload has increased exponentially. Keeping large groups of engineers, logisticians, budget analysts and security personnel all moving in the same direction is difficult enough when they are in the same building. Now that they have all been unchained to work secure in their own individual dream introvert paradises it has become a cat herding chore of biblical proportions.
My job as the extrovert manager is to normally grab straying cats by their tails and toss them into a whiteboard wall covered conference room forcing them to group collaborate as a physical group. Usually after an hour or so the heard of stray cats is all moving in a common direction and I can go back to drinking coffee and thinking up glorious new strategies to amaze the world with. So what about the telecommuting? Well… long story short. The damn cat herd all scattered. They can now hide! You would think in this digital day and age I would be able to force collaboration and discussions with ease. Oh no no no. Yeah, my screen may show their status as ‘active’ but for some odd reason it now takes hours to get the simplest tasks done after I coordinate the coordinations you need to coordinate for the collaboration of the coordinated collaborators.
So you know what this tells me as an extroverted cat herder? That ALL of my introverted stray cats will get to enjoy hours and hours of collaborative remote work process training, sitting side by side, locked in in a conference room together. Just as soon as we can leave our houses. Oh yeah… I’m thinking trust falls and sh*t. Maybe a mandatory group forced fun social right after that. Go all in on an extrovert’s paradise. That’ll teach the world to torture me like this.
Signed, an ENTJ.