Well today was fun (or not). I had a meeting with HR and my immediate manager to discuss some "issues" raised by some co-workers. They had a written warning for me to sign, and wanted my side of the story.

I explained the constantly changing requirements, the micromanagement by people who understood nothing about the work I do, the hostile and abusive behavior by some of them, the confusion and inefficiency of their processes, their complete obliviousness to industry best practices for things like project management and supervision, and then pointed out that the manager's lack of interest in supervising his staff was creating an "anything goes" scenario where people did a lot of paper shuffling but got very little real work done -- missed deadlines, poor quality no matter how many iterations of proofing and review they added to their "process", and the general feeling of "anything I don't know ain't worth knowing".

I explained some of the past history of that group's interactions with me before the latest manager came on board -- the lack of cooperation with requests for information on projects I was working on, even though they were the go-to people for that information, the way they turned my information requests into accusations of plagiarism (because I had copied some information out of a specification, cited it, and asked for product specific information related to that specification), their refusal to review material that was directly relevant to what they were working on because they didn't want to disclose any of the "secret" stuff they were working on with the same projects, the personal attacks and harassment by one of the key members of that department (who gossiped and complained about me behind my back, and made up ridiculous excuses and attacked my character when I asked for a meeting with him and with my old manager to try and resolve the problems), and on and on it goes.

I said I took full responsibility for my statements and actions and signed the letter. They were probably hoping for a personal meltdown and craziness and scary threats so they'd have an excuse to fire me on the spot. I kept my cool all the way through, so they're probably more pissed off with me now than before. I gotta stay cool because SO works in the same company, so if/when I do leave, it will have to be on my own terms without burning any bridges, or he's screwed too.

I am thinking that around tax refund time SO and I will have a financial buffer that will make the two of us less dependent on my salary as well as his to make ends meet. The real estate market's doing a little better lately too, so it may be a good opportunity to sell one of the rentals and get the other rental and our own home paid off.