Category: Working

Posted on

I’ve never handled no-win situations well

But I’m nonetheless sitting here feeling pretty proud of myself about the current no-win situation I find myself in.

I recently got reassigned to a new boss. I’d heard rumor and innuendo about him. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’m glad I did, but he proved himself to be exactly what the rumors said he was.

No real surprise there.

He doesn’t like me much, again no big deal. I can work for someone dutifully and still wish to see them disembowelled slowly with one of those inquisition torture thingys. I wouldn’t actively cause someone like that harm, unless they messed with me first. But as long as we managed to have mutual respect for each other things would be fine.

However, once that line is crossed… all bets are off.

Well, the new boss has been working very hard at crossing that line.

Thus far I’ve been pretty mellow.

The other day he hauled me into an office and told me that my work wasn’t up to par. I thought, “OK, perhaps that’s true,” I also thought “Of course, had you bothered to tell me what your expectations were then perhaps we’d be further along here.”

Anyway, he blathered on and on, I sort of tuned him out… Until he said something about a personal improvement plan.  In the corporate world such plans are shorthand for You’re SCREWED bucko.

Now, he had my complete attention.

What he was talking about is that I’ve been doing my job. But he’s of the philosophy that I should be answer only one question per phone call then moving on to the next phone call. I was of the impression that we were supposed to actually Help.

Apparently, I was incorrect.

As I listened to the remainder of his blathering, deep inside me there was a stirring. My rage monster shifted and started to wake up. “Uh Oh,” I thought. “Gotta stop that from happening.”  To maintain my calm I thought about the fact that less than 24 hours earlier I’d signed a lease on the apartment. 

“That’s gonna cost a pretty penny to break,” I realized. I also thought about the fact that twenty four hours earlier, and I’d simply have stood up and said, “FUCK YOU With broken glass” then left the building. I’d have given notice at my apartment and allowed my rage to burn itself out loading a U-Haul and returned to the mountains and my home, calmed down and turned the job search into a full time job.

I found out today, that a similar event happened on Monday. Another person was in a similar situation, like me, he thought he was doing a good job, helping people. But the management was displeased that he wasn’t blowing our clients off and making them call back multiple times in a day for the same problem.

In his case, he told the management, ” This meeting is over.” 

He got up over their objections and threats, then gathered his stuff and walked out.

Oh if only I hadn’t signed that lease, it would have made one hell of a statement to have two people walk out at the same time for the same reasons. 

The impending Exodus might be amusing to watch while I’m waiting for my ship to come in.

I’m smart enough to play the game, I’m enough of a chameleon to pull it off, and I’m amoral enough to not feel guilty about being disingenuous. 

I can do this… For a while longer.

Posted on

Oh Yeah… Gotta make sure ya get that pound of flesh!

First, I guess I took a little more than a short technology break. I don’t know how frequently I’m going to be posting but I’ll see what I can do to be a bit more regular about it.

Abusers

I’m posting about this growing trend to make sure that someone is absolutely bashed, kicked, shows appropriate contrition, and then is bashed and kicked some more.

Here’s an example.

Been working at a company 6 months, been transferring calls to the appropriate extension for all that time. Phones and extensions are changing all the time and so it was without much surprise that I get a new phone list.

Dead center of the page, there’s a RED label that says “Warm Transfer” followed by an extension. It’s an unfamiliar extension and so at a glance you’d think that the red lettering was calling your attention to a new extension.

WRONG!!!!

Beaten

Turns out someone thought that coloring only the words “Warm Transfer” was a good idea to highlight a supervisory extension on an otherwise data heavy, very busy page.

So in a chaotic, very busy environment, where you’re graded on how many calls you take in a day, and how often your associated paperwork has mistakes and people on the phones complaining about everything from their lot in life to other products, and the product that you actually are there to answer questions about, you make a mistake. In a normal workplace, making a mistake would be, meh and the employees wouldn’t live in fear. Unfortunately that’s not the case where I work.

Torturers

Someone on a call, needed to talk to a person in the department associated with the “Warm Transfer” number. So you dutifully set about to transfer them, and you dial the most prominent number on the phone list.

OOOPPPPSSSS!

An unhappy supervisor answers and asks how they can help. You explain what’s up and they respond by telling you “This is a supervisor line.” You apologize, then they ask how you got this number you explain it’s on a paper in front of you next to text that says warm transfer and tell the supervisor that you’ll let everyone around you know that the number in question is associated with a supervisor so they shouldn’t use it unless they need a supervisor.

The Sup tells you ok, and transfers you to the right extension. You take care of business, then move on to the next grumpy, annoyed, irate person.

Then your corporate instant messaging lights up asking all kinds of questions and demanding to know why you’re not paying attention to their instant messages, when you’re actually doing your job and talking to a customer.

You finish the call and respond to an interrogation via instant messaging. Then you’d think it was over.

IT’S NOT!

Screamingsupervisors

The last and final indignity is that now YOUR supervisor comes over to make sure that you are appropriately contrite, know what your mistake was, and that it was solely your fault that you interrupted a supervisor.

FOR GOD’S SAKE! REALLY?

It was a simple and easily corrected mistake. On top of that the mistake had been corrected & noted immediately after the first supervisor had said it was the wrong extension.

But in this day & age there is no such thing as an innocent mistake. 

Waiting for your mistake

So for me at least, every day is a grueling eight hour stress test.  Make no mistakes, answer every call, don’t spend too much time documenting, move on to the next call, don’t say what should be said or what needs to be said, and live in fear or terror of being chastised, yelled at, or honestly… bullied all day long.

I come home each day more exhausted than when I was working lifting and toting 50 LB bags of fertilizer, or crawling around in 100° F attics running ductwork.

I’ll tell you this, those honest jobs were a hell of a lot more personally satisfying. 

Workplace Bullying institute

Ahh well, this too shall pass.

And that’s why I’m looking for a new job and why I’ve been offline for the most part for the past few months.

We as a society need to remember that minor mistakes and problems, not only shouldn’t but needn’t be blown out of proportion. 

A simple comment, a word, or small mistake is not cause for the weight of JUSTICE to be brought to bear on the individual who misspoke or did something slightly wrong.

Most of the time, folks will correct their behavior on their own with a simple, “Hey, X, Y, or Z isn’t right.”

Posted on

I’m so German!

There must be order!

So the new job is rocking along.  But after spending 6 weeks learning the rules and how things are supposed to be done.

I’ve been spending weeks learning how things are really done. The latter is basically a series of exceptions to the rules and those exceptions have exceptions depending on who you talk to and the phase of the moon.

There is always a certain amount of fiddle factor in any job, but here its like everything is fiddle factor and nothing is actually a real rule. Except when it is.

The problem for me is that I tend to gravitate toward the baseline rules and then deviate from the baseline when logic says it’s the rational thing to do because “in this particular situation, the rules weren’t built to accommodate the exception.” SO based on common sense… I work around the rules and can defend WHY I deviated.

Here, everything is an exception, the rules are guidelines at best, which are differentially or preferentially enforced, and at worst the rules are right out the window. However, like laws which no longer apply to the reality of life they stay on the books and can be selectively enforced to punish or just really fuck up your day.

That’s where I am now.

I hate not having real policies and procedures!

I’m German…