Bone In The Throat

I don’t know what to do with myself. 

I’m sitting here, after sleeping for 10 hours, having a cup of coffee and thinking, “What now?”

There are things I could be doing and perhaps even things I should be doing. The house is open, there’s light rain failing and aside from the incessant traffic noise all is quiet.

I should be planning to move my stuff out of the apartment. I should be looking for a new job. I should be working on my resume. I should be deciding what’s next. But all those things are somehow just not that important. 

There’s something about being off work on a “real” weekend day. I know it’s just cultural… the seventh day and all that, but somehow the day off seems different.

One thing I’m appreciative of, is that there’s no screaming leaf blowers as a wake up call. 

It’s a lazy kind of Sunday, even the birds are muted in their squabbling.

Later, I’ll mosey over to the hair cut place in a while and maybe take myself out to breakfast…

Or Not

The first wave layoff is complete.

Not much rumbling to report. Yet!

I think more and more people are figuring out that management will find a way to make sure that we don’t get the promised bonus. I suspected this would be the way it went.

They’re changing the rules as we’re playing the game. The latest changes are retroactive to the beginning of the year and have effectively made everyone left, technically not in “good standing”. They’ve also reduced our call time and time to finish our documentation, again. The games management plays… sigh

Many people have asked about it, all we’ve been told is that adjustments well be made…

Uhh, that’s already happened, and now management has showed their cards. There’s no reason to stay. Typical of this company, set un-achievable goals and then punish us for failing. A lot more people are looking for the door and several have said that they’re looking for ways to exit early.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to exit early and still get unemployment. But that’s been a thought. Once someone figures that out, I suspect there will be an exodus that would stun the Ancient Egyptians.

Naked by a pool is looking better and better. Maybe with a nice stiff drink that never runs out.

Well I’ll see, now that my head is clear for the follies of the week, I’m in the right mind set to do the research to find out what the options are.

Gotta have all the logic on-line to analyze legal doublespeak.

Wish me luck.

About 2 weeks after my last blog post, the company notified my department that we’re being laid off.

Well… SHIT!

I mean I’m ready to find something else to do, the current job is just too draining and leaves no time for creating social connections. I get out of work at 1:30 pm and am in bed by 7:30 to be at work by 5, what am I going to do? Where do I go to engage with other adults? 

They get pissy when we ask each other work related questions. They get downright snotty if we actually try to connect with each other in friendship or teamwork.

So while inconvenient, it’s a relief.

Then there comes the date of the layoff. A small group is in the first week of May. Mostly supervisors and leads. The second big wave is in August. (Happy Freakin Birthday!)

I plan on spending some time in Palm Springs naked by a pool afterward. 

The May date would have been better for me personally, since I wouldn’t have had to renew my lease on the apartment. Sigh, but it’s OK if I go month to month for 1 or 2 months. 

Now, here’s the real kicker. They’re asking some of the May and August groups to stay on longer. Shit! Please God don’t let them ask me that question.

Apparently, the geniuses behind this cluster fuck have realized that their offshore group isn’t going to be able to handle the job for quite some time. 

Yep, you read that right, they’re offshoring medical device support and sales. So let’s walk through this. The device isn’t terribly complicated, but not one person calling in describes any part of the device the same way. Often, they’ll describe an individual part differently in the same conversation. It’s tough for a native speaker of English to follow what most of the callers are complaining about. You can only imagine what it would be like for a non-native speaker. 

We’re (my group) is already seeing increased errors in reporting and flat out failures in sending replacements, or correctly diagnosing the problem. That is translating to longer calls and documentation times for us. 

A lot of the call is spent with the customer telling us how bad their previous call was, before they even get to telling us their problem. This translates to a direct threat to (my group) getting the promised retention bonus on our final day.

Why is this a threat? Because management is only looking at time on call, time in documentation, and getting to the next call. They’ve completely negated the aspects of providing customer support that educates, so that the customer is better able to address their own issue and come to the correct conclusion about fixing it.

The company hasn’t actually provided us with a contract or even an agreement that specifically says what they consider “acceptable” to get the bonus.  They’ve only said that we must be in “Good Standing” at the end. But that terminology is ambiguous and clearly subjective. Without an actual agreement signed by both parties, the employees are still serving at the whim of capricious management.

Given that there is considerable mistrust toward management already, you can see how the environment is becoming more stressful.

We’re facing the question; Do we do the job, the way it should be done and risk losing the retention bonus, after putting up with the bullshit until August, OR do we just slap-dash fix the immediate issues and not worry about actually correcting the mistakes? 

A lot of people are choosing another option. They’re just bailing out. This is creating a problem for management because they’re losing people at a faster rate than they anticipated and are beginning to see losses in critical areas.

It’s funny to see the architect of this cluster fuck shitting himself daily.

The sales side of this is even worse. Wrong addresses, wrong equipment, older customers not understanding what the offshore group is saying, etc. The single biggest complaint I hear is “I don’t like my medical information being handled by offshore resources.“

What are we supposed to say to that? “Suck it up buttercup, this is the way things are going?“

I suspect that the company is going to see a lot of customer loss, that should make the stockholders extremely happy. I’m glad I don’t own stock.

Medical device support shouldn’t be outsourced. The device should be supported by native speakers actually in the country that the caller resides in. 

This device isn’t a modem, where the corrective action is, “turn off the modem and turn it back on again.” This isn’t a panic alert button, it’s not a security service. It’s a device that is injected into the person and it’s a device that people base treatment decisions on. (At least that’s what the literature says.) Treatment mistakes, at best land a person in the hospital, worst case… The person dies.

That’s the thing that I think most of worry about. We want to make sure that the person on the other end of the phone knows where they stand and how the machine works. So they can make informed and safe decisions. That philosophy can’t easily be quantified by numerical call metrics.

However, MANAGEMENT KNOWS ALL…

Of course they haven’t been talking to customers for years so take that with a grain of salt!