hiding out

When jenn and I used to live together we’d sometimes, when we needed to get away from whatever was going on in the living room or kitchen, hang out in the bathroom hiding out from the rest of the world. Probably making fun of b for too much guitar strumming, or one time we holed up in the loo, waving tampons around in the air to dispell the increase in masculinity in our home. Good times, good times. I wish you were were here now jenn, to hide out with me in my office so we could giggle and make fun of the wonder-schlub-assistant. Except it would be the Mean making fun of him instead of the affectionate, though exasperated making fun that we did of b. Just to blow off a little steam.

Weeks like the last one make me wonder what the heck am I doing working in this stupid corporate world? In some ways I feel like there isn’t really any escape. It’s a business model that has been adopted in other areas, government, small and medium sized businesses, hospitals, schools. There’s no escape…

What’s your experience with HR been like? I keep telling m that I want to invite one of his co-workers (HR Relationship Managers) out for drinks and grill her about HR. Ask her why things are done the way they are, if our’s is the only screwy company with the way they handle HR or if it’s a universal flaw of business practice. How come there are people out there who work their butts off, coming into work every day trying really hard to do a good job, do a good job and then fucks like the wonder-schlub-assistant show up, take up space and get to collect a paycheck for our efforts? It just doesn’t make sense.

It’s annoying to be stuck with co-workers who are incompetent and who just plain suck at their jobs. But probably (hopefully) these incompetents want to keep their jobs and put in some sort of effort. If someone’s incompetent, but they care, you can work with them on improvement. People who just don’t care and are incompetent are like poison to your working system.

It’s appalling that a system allows an employee to screw up as royally as the wonder-schlub-assistant has and still feel that they have no grounds for termination. Like how much does a person have to fuck up in order to get fired? Willfully hiding documents, admitting to the fact, execessively using company issued cellphones for personal calls (the average assistant shouldn’t use them for more than 200 minutes a month, he’s been averaging 1000 minutes a month and been warned about it twice), what else?

And I want to ask that HR manager co-worker of m’s. When you get a call from a person who is obviously unreasonable, how seriously do you take what they say? For example, last week the wonder-schlub-assistant called HR to report that he was made uncomfortable in a discussion where I yelled at him and put my hand in his face. True, I lost my cool and my voice was raised to cut him off from interrupting me further. Yelling is subjective (and in this instance totally not true). I’m not even going to comment on the hand in face part of the complaint. He failed to explain that the tension in our discussion came from his increased resistance to perform a task I assigned him. He obviously did not want to work on the project that I was giving him and kept questioning every step of it, trying to connive ways to get out of at least part if not all of it. And now, reasonable or not, I have a note in my file that says that someone complained about the “hostile work environment” (direct quote) that I created.

It’s so infuriating.

I can’t figure out if the company isn’t doing something about it or if someone isn’t doing something about it. I have a feeling that this has been taken up the HR channels and it’s bottlenecked up there somewhere with no end in sight. Or at least in town. I’m hearing rumours about the head of HR being on some 3 week cruise (again) and once that person gets back, this will be addressed. Once that person gets back, gets caught up from being out of the office, revisits all of this, then, THEN this will be addressed. Then again, our HR has a reputation of being reluctant to terminate employees for fear of retaliatory litigation. Somehow, that doesn’t stop them from denying unemployment payouts. Where is the fear of litigation with that?

I’m just talking myself into circles getting more and more mad. I need to stop.