Office Space

The way my life has been going lately I’d probably be better off not gloating but sometimes ya just have to live on the edge.

At the beginning of July I got an IM from a friend who was also a web vendor for The Non-Profit while I was Web Manager. Mark told me that my replacement had faxed them 30 days’ notice that The Non-Profit intended to withdraw from their hosting and support contract with his company. Now, Mark and I had done a similar thing to The Non-Profit’s previous web hosting vendor, to the tune of a 98% per month savings for The Non-Profit, but we’d done all our work up front: getting scripts reading, beta testing them, coding HTML pages, testing those, resizing images, and like tasks so that by the time we gave notice we’d be ready to immediately switch on the hosting and DNS for the site’s URL to the new server.

My replacement had been, rather obviously, moving content off the servers at Mark’s company but did not immediately switch the DNS. In fact, it took him 25 days, approximately, to make that critical switch. How do I know this? Honestly, I’ve been looking because I was curious to see what he was going to do. Was he going to transfer hosting to another web-based content management system written by his coding buddies? Was he going to work with The Non-Profit’s International Office to use their content management system? It was, for me, a bit like watching a chess match and waiting to see what the next move would be. He finally made his next move.

Not only did he switch servers, something fairly easy to look up using Network Solutions WHOIS lookup, but he also changed the look and feel of the site. Why am I gloating? Because his changes aren’t for the better.

One of the issues any charitable organization faces is a paucity of funds. This is why you’re forever getting solicitations from one charity when you’ve given money to a completely different charity: they trade lists and, with most of them anyway, if you don’t specifically tell them not to they will trade your name and address to other “like minded groups.” Which means if you give money to, say, the World Wildlife Fund (disclaimer: I did not work at the WWF; they are not The Non-Profit to which I am constantly referring), it’s very likely that you’ll be getting a solicitation from Amnesty International or OxFam or the ACLU in the four to six months following your donation.

When I was at The Non-Profit I was constantly working with the membership and fund raising folks to best position the join/donate/give button on each page, to make the donation form easy to use and pretty, to provide the information the IRS requires each non-profit organization in the U.S. to have publicly available so we were in compliance with the law. In my replacement’s new design this link to join/donate/give is buried in a secondary menu. Yeah, it’s right there on the front page when you get to the site, and it’s available from all five of the pages in that section, but from no where else. For an organization that has been struggling financially for the past three years I’d say that probably wasn’t the best move.

As well, because I am curious and because I’m a geek I took at the code behind the site as well as the cascading style sheet. Save to say, I am not impressed.

The CSS is not disability friendly (font sizes in px for god’s sake!) and the code is, well, a bit of a mess. Tags are used incorrectly, they’ve combined CSS with tags that aren’t in the current standard, oh, and biggest sin of all: there’s no doctype definition.

Why does all this matter? It really shouldn’t but it’s a bit frustrating to see something that I poured two years of blood, sweat, and, quite literally, tears into torn down after only a year, and torn down for something that isn’t any better for the site visitor. Perhaps he’s saving the organization money. It’s quite possible he is but when I made the decision to stay with the outside hosting firm instead of work with the International Office it was a choice between spending about $45,000 for 2003 or spending $110,000 for 2003 for web site hosting as the International Office was demanding we contribute 90,000 Euro to their budget (at the time the conversion rate was around $1 USD for 1 Euro).

Were all my decisions perfect? No, not at all, but they were the best decisions to that could have been made given the circumstances and constraints. And I’m gloating because, by all accounts from friends I left behind at The Non-Profit, from my friends at the web vendor, and from the web editor I supervised, my replacement is, well, an asshole. I don’t think he has any idea what he’s gotten himself into and I can already smell the roasting goose. I’m just hoping that some of the magnificent Senior Management Team gets a little cooked on this one as well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of work lately (you do that when you don’t have a job) and how work has come to define who we are in American society.

Typical cocktail party chatter between two people who have just met usually involves the question “So, what do you do?” and by this they don’t mean “how to you amuse yourself in your free time?” or “what gets you hot and bothered?” When someone asks this they are asking “how do you earn money?”

Now, I understand that about a third, often times more, of a given person’s day is spent doing tasks in exchange for money. Despite this I still want to know: when did the work I do, when did the tasks I receive money to complete at someone else’s behest, come to define me as a person? Why not ask someone you’ve just met “what was the last book you read?” or “what was the last movie you saw?” or “what is your favorite place to go in the city?”

One school of thought says that simply because we spend so much time at our jobs, the job someone chooses tells you a lot about that person. In discussing this with one of my friends, whose age and life experience are vastly different from mine, she points out that to some, the job someone holds gives others an idea of what sort of power that person has in society.

I have to think that my own views on this are inherently influenced by my upbringing (poor enough to understand the intrinsic value of an honest day’s work done with your own two hands, well-off enough that most of my family wasn’t coming home with dirty fingernails at the end of the day) but to me a job has always been more about how you get money to do the other things you love to do than about accruing power in society. So aptly expressed by my mother’s succinct: your job is not your life; your job exists to finance the rest of your life.

I ran this concept by another friend, younger than I with similar, but not the same, life experiences, and his perspective on the matter was that society places too much emphasis on work. Why not ask about someone’s hobbies when you first meet them?

A lot of this thought about work and that nature of it has flowed from not having a job at the moment myself; some of it was sparked by my own 15 minutes of fame (I got to be one of the quoted for the “Question of the Week” in our local gay and lesbian newspaper and they insisted on having a job title to go with my name). Being unemployed doesn’t make me unique here in our third year of recession but I think the fact that I left a job that was making me miserable gives me a relatively unorthodox perspective.

We forget as we get into our daily routines that there is a whole different world out there during the day. Ever walk by a coffee place at say 10:37am on a random Thursday morning and wonder “who the hell are these people and why aren’t they at work?” (I know I have) Some of them are people like me, no job or killing time before an interview. Some of them are students, some are artists, some are just people who don’t work a 9 to 5. In some ways, I think those people are the happiest among us. They’ve the security of a steady income but they see life from 35 degrees to the side. The world they live in is just enough off center from the steady grind of modern America that they seem somehow at peace.

Either way, my musings will have to take a bit of a backseat very soon. Last night I accepted an offer for a good job at a decent salary working for someone I think will be a good boss in a great part of town. It’s back to being a wage slave for me.

I’ve been applying for jobs since I decided to leave mine back in October, and because I’m probably one of the five cheaper people on the planet I’ve been sending the majority of my resumes and cover letters via e-mail, always careful to blind carbon-copy myself to make sure that the e-mail does, in fact, go out.

Now, anyone who has dealt with e-mail that comes into an e-mail server, as most corporate (ie: non-personal) e-mail does, knows that it is quite easy to set up an auto-reply on any given e-mail address. The whole process takes about 10 minutes even if you include the time it takes to write a generic reply such as:

Thank you very much for your interest in working at [insert company name here]. We have received your documents. If, after reviewing your qualifications, we determine that you might meet our needs you will be contacted for an interview.

Simple, right? Doesn’t promise anything. Let’s you know that yes, they got your documents. You’ve been acknowledged; you are validated as existing and having been heard rather than just shouting into the void.

Care to venture a guess how many of the 28 e-mails I’ve sent in the past two months have received auto replies? Two. Two companies have taken the small, and totally free, step to acknowledge resume submissions.

I’m not saying that I want to go back to the days of Emily Post, white gloves and suits and ties and getting “dressed” for dinner at home but what does it say about our society that we’ve become so callous that something that costs a company no money and at most ten minutes of personnel resources isn’t put into place? What does it say that even if it isn’t callousness that is motivating the lack of response but a simple lack of thought at all?

There is very little in the world that is more depressing than the job ads in the Sunday paper.

Since it’s Bitch About Your Job Week at Dykewrite [link removed as site has been abandoned to drug spammers] (poor dkitty…and I thought my office sucked) I thought I’d share the final indignity from upper management.

So…the end has come. I took the plunge and have quit THE JOB that has made my life miserable. Why such a big plunge? Quite simply put, I now have no income.

Yes, you read that right boys and girls. Ten years of supporting myself and I’ve been driven so far down that I’m willing to be without income to escape the pressure that has been grinding me into powder, the mind numbing stupidity of management, the humiliation of being responsible for that which I do not control, and the anger that being called a whiner when I ask for the tools to achieve that for which I am held responsible generates.

What finally drove me to over the edge was a simple realization: the people in my life that I love are more important than any source of income will ever be.

You see, I manage the web department in the U.S. office of a well known non-profit advocacy group (which for modesty’s sake shall remain nameless (hey, without cash flow I can’t afford the libel suit)). Like most non-profits, Group X is funded by donations, and like most non-profits Group X has struggled since September 11th, has struggled against Bush’s stubborn refusal to recognize that a “job-less” recovery isn’t a recovery at all. (Last time I checked no job meant no money…see above), but most of all has struggled against its utter inability to get its act together and focus on the business of its mission in an orderly way.

This situation, less money coming in, led to layoffs to the tune of 20% of the staff (which in my section meant deferring one open position, and losing two positions altogether as our section was combined with another, related section in the organization). The deferred position, in my department, is one that I’ve been having to fill in for since I was forced to fire someone for non-performance of her duties in March. Those duties got added on top of the Technical Project Manager job I was already doing as we moved from a flat, HTML site to a database driven content management system, and to the actual Web Manager job that I should be doing but have not had time to pay attention to in nearly 18 months.

The final indignity, though, inspires the title of this entry.

You see, I “maxed out” on vacation days (ie: I’ve earned my four weeks and will earn no more until I actually take vacation) for four months running. However, with just the two of us in the department and this “incredibly important project” about to come to a stage 1 launch, I was “too essential” to take another vacation (this after taking a week off in February and still earning all that leave over again.)

When I resigned, I asked if it were possible to be paid for all or part of the 111 hours of sick leave I accrued since I was, in fact, denied vacation benefits. Now, under the law, Group X, is required to pay me for my annual leave (all 160 hours (4 weeks) of it). They are under no such obligation with sick leave. Today I received this note from our HR person:

First of all, [Group X] will not under any circumstances pay you for yur[SIC] sick leave, even given that you had topped out on your annual leave.

It’s the “will not under any circumstances” bit that really gets me. Why it gets me? The day before I left on sabbatical I found out that despite all the belt tightening, despite the ban on travel, despite the fact that on only $4,200 a month I was trying to run a web site that was supposed to

• give donors access to their membership accounts and the facility to change their personal details
• provide up to the minute fresh content about what was going on in each of the issue areas the organization is concerned with
• somehow fill the needs of the programs and still recruit donors
• be visually appealing and coherently organized for the average visitor while still allowing our most luddite issue expert the luxury of using the web server as his own personal electronic filing cabinet

despite these things, we’d spent $3,000 on a last minute, non-refundable plane ticket to Alaska for one of our issue experts. Three thousand dollars for one person to fly somewhere because on Tuesday some bright light on our Senior Management Team decided this guy needed to be in Ketchikan Alaska on Thursday.

The good faith gesture of paying me for my sick leave would have cost Group X $2,326.17 and would have paid my rent for five months. Five months’ rent for less than the cost of a plane ticket.

Funny, I thought an organization’s soul would cost more than that.