When it happens once or twice or even three times you feel recognized. At first this feeling is good. The feeling I'm talking about is that feeling you get when your boss tells you she's going to a little conference and is doing a little break out session and she'd love to talk about the work you've been doing and do you have a couple slides. Cool.
But as you get asked more and more the feeling turns into something else. The conferences are getting bigger (ones you've actually heard of) and a couple slides has turned into a near complete presentation. Then suddenly you start getting requests from your boss's boss and feeling starts to turn.
Then one day you get the first email from a muckety muck you don't even know, who heads a department you've never heard of. And you think, "How the hell does this person know me." You Google yourself but the results are the same as they've been for months. You ask the guys sitting next to you if he's ever heard of Mr. Muckety SVP of Never Heard of it and guy sitting next to him and the admin for your group and no one has a clear path of understanding of what the guy actually does or who he is. And that cool feeling you had at the beginning dissolves like a pissed on snow ball.
If I'm so popular and the work I'm doing is so conference worthy why don't I ever a) get invited to the presentations and b), B), effing B) get invited to speak? And for the first time you start to contemplate the politics of asking these questions instead of just handing over the slides. And at that point, at that very point, you are fucked. Because now you are no longer working. You are no longer part of the solution. You are enter a new state of being. A state of being that is widely and repeatedly pointed to as the part of the problem. A player, a climber, a tick on the ass of real work. Grrr.
