Chicken Ess...

Two posts, no waiting....

I wanted to touch on something i witnessed first hand yesterday that really took me for a loop.

The company I work for is not bad. They like to pay well, thier full time people from other locations seem to be happy. Locally, its like watching a car wreck in slow motion, only to realize you are watching from outside your own body. I have a manager that lacks tact, management skills, and is usually pretty clueless. I am my normal sarcastic self to him, and he has no clue. He will call me and say things like "Hey, where are you?" only to have me reply with "well hey, where are you?" I answer his questions with questions a lot, and truthfully, it would look horrible on any employee evaluation. I probably shouldn't, but when you put up with crap, and attempts to piss you off, well, you push back.

Yesterday during a staff meeting of the IT brain trust, we were going over a list of projects for the next week. Apparently we have a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it, so we can expect to work a lot of OT. (does that sound like the theme to Smokey and the Bandit to anyone else, or just me?) He looks at my evening counterpart, and says "Bill*, your name is not on the project plan, because we are going to dedicate your evening shifts to cleaning up, and catching the overflow work from the projects". To me, being left off a project plan is a good way to be left off the payroll, but we carried on. Bill* made suggestions for training classes coming up, and was involved with the meeting.

Shortly after the meeting broke up, I went outside to get a tool from my truck, and as I walked out, Bill* was called back into the building by my boss. They went into HR and closed the door.


30 minutes later I got a call from my boss telling me that he had fired Bill* and wanted to tell me before the rumors got around. 40 minutes after telling him that he was going to be working overflow.

To me, the best way to have handled that situation is for him to release Bill* prior to the staff meeting, and then tell the remainder of the staff at the meeting, not paint a silly picture of work to be done. Another thing would to have done the firing prior to the meeting, and then telling us about how hard we are going to have to work, instead of making us think that now, the work will be that much harder because we are short another associate. I guess what I am trying to say, I would have done it differently, and I can almost be sure that 85% of the managers that read this entry, both of you, would have done the same thing.


Man, I need to go mail off some more resumes.


(*notes that Bill is not his real name, in fact it is not even close. It might be considered a psued...psuedo....fake)