The job

Since 2016, I have been a technical writer as a contractor in an IT office of a government agency. I would work on regular reports to the customer, manage the wiki, and turn ad hoc notes by engineers into SOPs or similar documents. Around the end of 2019, my job's contract was awarded to a different company, and they made me a job offer. My transition date was scheduled for mid-April. Here's how things were supposed to go. I would get paychecks from a new company and there would be a transition period as things were reorganized, but the actual job would change very little. An orientation at corporate HQ, maybe a few days working there or at home as access was sorted out, a new manager, new links to bookmark and acronyms to memorize, then back to normal.

Here's how things actually went. My new company sent me a laptop, which was an unexpected concession to the new reality. Yay. However, I cannot use it to access the government agency's network. So far it's only good for HR stuff, the corporate email which is separate from the .gov email, and certain apps like Teams. I still have to use my personal computer for everything else. If I want to do everything else while using these things, I have to set up these computers side by side. This is

FUCKING INSANE

Also, while setting up my corporate laptop, I needed my employee ID to log in. After 20-30 minutes on the phone with Corporate IT Person 1, I found that my supervisor sent me someone else's employee ID by mistake. The following day, on the phone with Corporate IT Person 2, I found that Corporate IT Person 1 had given me the wrong kind of RSA key to log on. Then I found that I needed a one-time password, which could only be emailed to my manager. But that's not my supervisor, that's someone else who was tangentially involved with hiring me. They couldn't tell me who. I managed to guess the right name after scrolling through two months of emails. It was a VP of something or other. (Hey, I report to someone up high. Cool.) I eventually got into my corporate laptop. It was only after then that I figured out I couldn't get into the government agency's network.

I'm rapidly losing my patience for the transition process.