Untapped Potential

(Written 31 MAR 2026)

Sometimes, working below your potential means having the space to think, write, take a break.

I was thinking about this while waiting for company vehicle service while on the clock. I don't have a difficult job or a high-paying one, though for where I am, I'm eating good. Most days, I feel competent. People around me continue to be impressed that I can do office work at the level of your typical cube farmer. I turn to Excel to solve my problems:

1. "Hey [Dolfin], I need you to put together a history of every time [event] happened."

2. Two minutes pass.

3. I send an email with a report pulled from a web service that has all of the information needed. The next most likely person to do that would've either manually pulled information from emails or, if they felt lazy, attached all of those emails to one big email in an unhelpful blob. 3000% efficiency achieved.

Anything that doesn't require me to move physical objects around and document those movements can be resolved with Excel. It's way beyond what's expected of my position. Ergo, I have "untapped potential." My manager means only the best by it; anyone higher than them would say it like they were building low-rent housing and struck oil. Doing something beyond expectations means the expectations advance, and not always in a visible, broadly supported way. If I hadn't grown a couple vertebrae from past experience, I'd blithely yes-man my way to another full plate of responsibilities without a title change--I love an unsung hero, and I want to be something I love.

Titles aren't just ornamental or just sets of permissions IT hands out, they tell the stratospheric administration that won't ever know you what it is ya do here and under what circumstances you can be drop-in replaced. Taking on more work and stretching beyond your role sets up the interpersonal understanding that you'll do that stetch again for free forever; the higher-ups don't know that and don't know how to tell the other departments which numbers connect your enhanced value to money. A department could lose a vital piece of their process and be unable to ask for another superhuman because, according to company records, they never needed one. This is coming from someone who's twisted in the head enough to *want* to do good work semi-intrinsically. Yeah, throw those problems at me, but make sure everyone trusts and believes you need me to do that--give me a title.

The administration is taking a predictably long time to draw up plans that involve giving me more money, but I'm not rushing them. This is the first job I've had where I have actual, honest-to-goodness downtime. The work ends, and I'm not expected to look busy. I can think, breathe, write. It gets wonderfully quiet in my office.