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.
There are instructions:
Words cannot describe:
Oh, and the flowers…
Best of all, there are three light settings: dim, medium and full. All available at a mere touch of the hand!
Here’s the view from my chair:
And what hangs behind me:
Lemme back it up a bit:
This morning, I was involved in a little car accident. Nothing serious. No one got hurt. Just one of those freak accidents that caused a few scratches to my car and a little dent. Just small enough that the at-fault might scoff the legitimacy of the damage (what I was sweating over). But enough damage to cause me irritation over chasing insurance companies, estimates, paperwork and possibly having to pay for the repairs on damage that was not my fault. Damn freak accidents! Makes me not want to leave my house.
Anyways, so here I was sitting at my desk all gloom and doom. Sighing over all the extra phone calls I would have to make, over my digital camera that sucks so hard and won’t be able to take a decent photograph of the damage, over how horribly unfair my measly little life is. And then my boss tells me that she wants to do my mid-year performance review this morning. Do I have some time for it right now?
I bought myself a little bit of time by going to the restroom and quietly freaking out and trying to convince myself to build up a calm stonewall demeanor. Who cares, right? Who wants this shitty job anyways, right?
I leave the restroom an oasis of calm and head to my boss’s office. We sit for the review behind closed doors.
And you know what? Turns out that she thinks I rock. Well, not in so many words. But she said that overall I “perform effectively” (Don’t you just love the corporate mumbo-jumbo? What a load of crock body of lexicon!) and that there were a few areas where I surprised her and “exceeded expectations.”
Shazam.
And here I was quaking in my Steve Madden sandals worried about how I was going to hold it together if she nailed me for something wrong. All for naught.
I admit that I am not The Model Employee ™. I have really high standards and strong work ethic. Normally. And in a normal work situation, I find ways to fill my down time with productive tasks for my office. Lately? Not so much. I still get my work done. But I am efficient and complete my tasks quickly left with the task of a whole day to fill with busy work so that I appear productive.
I think that the thing that gets to me is how much bullshit these reviews are. It’s a terribly flawed system. On a certain level, I appreciate the touchy-feely desire that a huge corporation adopts to give employees the feeling like the company has a human side. We do care. We want to help you improve. On a different level, I feel like these things are just another heap of paperwork that goes in “your file” in the event that they want to build a case to boot you out. I’m being a touch cynical here. I haven’t really thought about how else these reviews benefit employees so I don’t have any suggestions for solutions or change. But the thing that really chaps my hide is how relative performance reviews can be. In my year and a half with this company I’ve had three performance reviews that look like a cosine curve:
I’ve been putting decreasing amounts of effort and high standards into my work and this is how they perceive me. My first review was with my former manager’s manager who had to give the review since my manager had quit after I was only there for a month. It was a fair review in my opinion. My second review was with a wacko boss who seemed to find every little thing wrong with me. It ended up turning into something bigger and I found out through the course of it that her initial review had been far worse and they had to talk her down into something a little more constructive and a lot less damning. My last review (the one that just took place) is with a manager who is fair. I like her and I respect her. But I can’t help but wonder if some of what she thinks is so amazing about me is in comparison to the last girl who held this post who (from what I hear) fell quite short in performance. Or in corporate-speak: Does not perform effectively and needs improvement.
Not that any of this really matters in the long haul. It’s still a shitty job and I don’t see a future for myself here, right? Right. But it’s good for me to keep in mind how much of a mind-fuck these things can get to be. It’s all about perspective. I can’t let them get to me.
Today’s post written while listening to Dengue Fever. Today’s guests on Morning Becomes Eclectic.
This came up in conversation because we were both agreeing on how tasty Italian sausage is. “But it’s so unhealthy,” he lamented. I comment that it’s funny to hear this coming from a guy who eats a tuna-melt with fries nearly every day at lunch.
But it’s fish. He says.
Mercury. I remind him.
The mercury levels are minimal. He counters.
How about those fries? I ask.
Aren’t they healthy? I thought they were baked. He makes a call to the restaurant and confirms that the fries are indeed fried. He looks a bit morose.
My boss enters the fray by reminding him of the mayonaise that goes in the tuna. And the cheese, I jump in again.
Mayo’s bad for you? He is genuinely surprised. He is thinking this over and remembers something.
Have you guys heard about how those styrofoam containers that your take-out food comes in, it’s bad to put that in the microwave?
I wonder without saying it out loud if perhaps the minimal amounts of mercury in his tuna-melt have something to do with this apparent lack of awareness of the contemporary world. I silently take bets on when he’s going to ask me about that crazy game of six degrees of separation with Kevin Bacon movies. Instead, I just nod.
As for lunch, he has decided to continue ordering the tuna-melt (I always figured I was getting a healthy lunch. I mean, it’s not fast food, right?). He’s going to order something else instead of the fries.
EDITED TO ADD:
I can hear him placing his lunch order now and he’s requested a different side (fresh fruit), and he did ask them to include some tomatos, lettuce…and bacon.
My boss rocks.
She is the bomb.
She’s got it goin’ on, giiiiiiirl!
Okay, so first of all, she is way laid back. She doesn’t freak out. She doesn’t lose her temper, she is totally reasonable. Wait a minute. Is it totally strange that I am singing the praises of a boss because she is sane? I have been on a long losing streak of bad managers. Let it be known, the dues have been paid and I can now revel in the rewards.
When I first started working for her, she told me that sometimes (cough, cough, all the time) on Fridays, we close the office at 5 instead of 5:30. LOVE IT.
And then every once in a while, like every other week, say…she’ll tell us: let’s leave at 4:45. It’s such a quiet day.
And just now as she left (she works half an hour earlier and leaves half an hour earlier than we do), she told me that since her boss is out of town today, and it’s been so quiet I could leave early too.
Bless you mxxx for your sanity and coolness. May I have many more bosses like you in my professional future.
(takes so little to make me happy, right?)
