it's official

I had recently written one of my "frank" posts about this, but the boss made a general announcement to the R&D staff today, so I think I can write openly about the sea change that is very suddenly coming over our department. Long story short: this is our boss's final week as head of R&D. Without getting into details, it's enough to say that there have been forces conspiring against the boss from the beginning—people who don't share his vision for what R&D is and how it should operate within the company. As a result, the boss is being "put out to pasture," so to speak: he's not leaving the company; instead, he'll be sent back to the Mido building, where he, my coworker A, and I all used to work until July of last year.

R&D was something of a great experiment, so it's a shame to see it flaming out like this. Our department will still exist, of course, but instead of developing our own textbooks and pushing a company brand, we'll be reduced to creating supplemental material to shore up textbooks that we buy from large textbook publishers. I have mixed feelings about this: the lazy part of my brain tells me that it's good that life will essentially become simpler and more straightforward. The more industrious and creative part of my brain, however, isn't looking forward to an already-boring job becoming even more boring. We'll see what happens.

There's a chance I might be moving over to Mido myself, following in the boss's footsteps, but that's not written in stone, and even if I do make the jump, it won't happen immediately. The boss says he doesn't even know what, exactly, his new role in the company will be, which means he doesn't even know whether he'll need underlings. As for R&D, one of my coworkers will become the interim manager; there's a chance he might become the permanent manager, but the boss thinks the CEO has already chosen someone.

Upshot: things are up in the air right now, but we're all in the middle of projects that will continue for the next month or so, so the changeover in leadership won't be as radical or as immediate as all that. Either way, I'm still going to the US and to France this year, and that's what matters most to me.