Office Space

Pine or Sea

I understand why people write green crayon letters about things that for the rest of us are of little or no import. Some of them write them because they are possessed of insanity of one flavor or another. The voices tell them to write these letters. They become convinced that the fate of the world hinges on some small thing they think no one else has noticed.

Some people write those green crayon letters because they see something Not Quite Right and it offends their moral sensibilities. Clearly the world would be a better place if people actually knew how to use the apostrophe or if engineers gave a single moment’s thought to how actual people really used the things they were designing and designed those things around that behavior rather than blindly thinking that behavior follows form.

But most people, I think, write those green crayon letters not because they are clinically insane or because their inner pedant has gotten out to play. Most people write green crayon letters because they’ve finally woken up to the fact that they are caught in a gigantic, unfair system with almost no power and what little power they do have would take so much time to exercise that any victory would by Pyrrhic at best.

For the new job I had to buy grown-up clothes. Admittedly, khakis and shirts with a collar aren’t all that grown-up but when you’ve spent about a decade going to work in jeans and a t-shirt the change can be a bit jarring. Because they offer it, and because I like that nice Armani break in my pants, I chose an online retailer that allowed me to order my pants in a custom hemmed length and they have dutifully performed until recently. During their first wash and dry cycle one of these pairs of pants lost an inch worth of inseam length which is fine as long as I either stay standing all the time or I don’t mind that nice band of pasty white skin between the hem of my trousers’ leg and the top of my socks when I sit down.

Now I find myself at one of those decision points: do I spent my precious time hassling with retailer-who-shall-remain-nameless over these pants that are now half an inch shorter than I’d normally buy them if custom hemming weren’t available or do I simple go on their web site and write a green crayon review of their clearly inferior product?

I’m not really sure but what I do know is the next time I order pants I’m ordering them an inch longer than I need them to be.

Be careful what you wish for

One of the problems I had with Floundering Non-Profit was the fact that it was floundering. It suffered from a bad case of Founder’s Syndrome which meant that new ideas were often rejected without any consideration on their own merits. It also meant that structure, what there was of it, was haphazard at best and often hidden from view; a typical example is the simultaneous lack of any sort of coherent inclement weather policy existing right beside the unwritten policy that all leave needed to be taken in either half-day or full-day increments. It’s not surprising, then, that when I went looking for another job I looked for organizations with more structure. And I thought I had that. Turns out, I have it and I don’t.

I have so much structure at my new job that the IT guy for our group only takes care of hardware problems. For software problems, network issues, or password issues, I have to call the help desk. Allot a minimum of 20 minutes per call.

I have to get my software requests, like having Firefox installed on my machine, approved by our operations group but they don’t actually do anything with the request. It’s then up to me to wheedle, cajole, and plead with the IT help desk to actually install the software. Because yes, it’s important to have a web group that is restricted to using only IE 8.

There is, in turn, so little structure at my new job that we’re a web group serving internal clients yet we have no standard document we can offer them to guide them through the items we’ll need to see in order to approve their design or redesign plans. So…we’re expecting them to meet a standard but giving them virtually no guidance on what that standard is. Is that right?

I have so little structure that an original “request” I ended up getting from one of my internal clients when the e-mail chain was already about 6 message, and 5 carbon-copy addresses, deep consisted of “Here’s the Word doc and the PDF. They’ve been checked for accessibility on our side. They need to be posted.” Not only did this “request” not contain any actual information, it crossed internal groups that shouldn’t have seen it at all in order to get to me.

Because I am having to adjust to so much – new issues, a new role, new colleagues, a new way of doing things – I have been working hard to suppress my incredulity the during the past couple of weeks. I could probably bench press a VW Beetle using only my WTF reflex at this point.

If it sounds like I’m complaining a little bit that’s possibly because I am. The only saving grace at this job is that my co-workers realize things are messed up. But, since the organization we work for is so large, mostly they’ve taken a “what can you do?” attitude toward this problems. For the most part, I’m fine with that. I already know that I’m not going to fix the major problem with most of my clients’ web sites. I’m fully prepared to let that one go.

What I can’t let go, what I absolutely refuse to let go, is a work process that makes sense for me. So in between feeling like I wanted to cry and I wanted to punch something today as I waited until nearly noon to get access to my computer, I started to figure out how to systemize the work requests I’ll be getting from my clients.

After all, they should be used to having to fill out forms by now.

Net $5.50

Yesterday was my last day on the job Floundering Non-Profit. Strangely, I feel very little relief mostly due to the fact that even at the very end Management was still trying to pull a fast one.

Pay-cut rate salaries are still in effect at Floundering Non-Profit. While I was out on vacation, using up what I thought was to be my last furlough day, some personal days, and a single vacation day, ManagingDirector announced “some good news for a change!” The pay cuts would be ending on March 12 instead of April 1 as planned. She also added,

We appreciate the incredible sacrifices made by our staff to help get the organization on a stronger financial footing…We are optimistic about our financial prospects in 2011 and hope to be able to restore other cuts later this year. In the meantime, we are pleased to be able to make this small gesture to show our appreciation for your efforts.

Really? Fifteen percent of my pay, something acknowledged as an “incredible sacrifice,” only merits a “small gesture” in return? Admittedly, I didn’t actually give up that 15%. I took furlough days which for me were adequate compensation; after all: time is really the only thing you ever run out of. But still, the patronage in this message astounded me.

Logistically the pay cuts ending early meant that my 17 furlough days was reduced to 16 and I’d have to use two vacation days plus the personal days, for which they aren’t obligated to and would not compensate me for when I left, to cover the vacation in the middle of the three weeks’ notice I gave them I was leaving. And I was fine with that, until I got the answer back about the rate at which they intended to pay out my vacation.

Floundering Non-Profit, like most U.S. employers, awards vacation and sick time on an incremental basis per pay period. You work, you earn the benefit to use later. Prior to the pay cuts, I had accrued 11.18 days of vacation. Since the pay cuts went into effect, I’d accrued 2.82 days of vacation. Fairness, and possibly legality, it seems to me dictates that since I earned the bulk of that time at the pre-pay cut rate it should be paid out at the pre-pay cut rate. Sadly, Management did not agree.

Management chose the course of paying me out for all 14 days at the lower rate. So rather than treating me fairly and paying me out as the time was earned, they chose to be cheap. They chose bad karma and ill will, which was unsurprising given their previous performance, to save $354.18.

Management can not do the math.

Instead of two vacation days, I got NewBigBoss to approve my final time sheet with two sick days and the three personal days. That means they will be paying me for 14 days of vacation at the pay cut rate and two sick days at the pay cut rate.

Now, if Management had chosen to be fair, I wouldn’t have had any problems with taking two vacation days for the time I was out. It would have been the right thing to do. But they chose to try to be clever, to try to cut a corner and get one over. They didn’t though.

Two sick days at the pay cut rate is $359.68.

There’s something ineffably wonderful about winning a game of chicken shit against the house. And it always pays to do that math.

Heisenberg in action

It’s not often you get to be the physicist and the atom. What I mean by this is that I find myself in a unique situation that is simultaneously wonderful and terrifying: I get to both feel and observe my reactions in a situation that was almost entirely predictable.

I knew it was a mistake going in to give CheapButDemandingClient – hereinafter referred to as CBDC because typing CheapButDemanding Client is a pain and though my impulse is to refer to them as TheClientFromHell I am trying to reduce hyperbole in my life and the frightening fact is they could be a lot worse than they are – a proposal with a reduced rate. It doesn’t matter how noble your cause is, nor does it matter that you’re a non-profit which is suffering under the 11% reduction in individual giving from 2008. If you want work done by someone with specialized skills, and particularly if you want it on a short timeline after having screwed around for nearly a month making a decision, it’s going to cost you. I know this, everyone with half a brain knows this, yet I gave them a proposal with a reduced rate anyway. The reason I did that is simple.

I wanted to see if it would turn out the way I thought it would, and, like Cassandra, my prediction has turned out to be true yet, like the rest of the world, I didn’t listen to that prediction. [Read more…] about Heisenberg in action

85% of something is more than 100% of nothing

It’s the rare event that has no upside. Right now, I’m trying really hard to see the upside of a 15% pay cut.

I sort of knew we were facing pay cuts. It’s not a surprise given the way things have been going lately. The company has moved two offices, in Minneapolis and in DC, to save money into spaces so small that staff in each location are practically sitting on top of each other. We’ve closed one office in Michigan and laid off at least two staff members that I know of, and we’ve had a highly paid member of the national staff resign and Management has chosen to spread his duties around rather than replace him.

While the pay cuts weren’t really a surprise, I was still a little bit shocked by Management’s cheek in presenting them. My boss laid out the facts: everyone making more than $30,000 a year is taking a pay cut starting November 1 for the 22 weeks. The brackets start at 10% and go up to 20% with “Senior Managers contributing more.”

And that was it. No mention of furlough days, no mention of compensating staff for lost salary after finances improve. Nothing. Just a flat we’re going to cut your pay by 15 percent. When I asked about furlough days my boss implied that people who had volunteered to take more than the five days they required us to take in spring 2009 hadn’t actually taken them. [Read more…] about 85% of something is more than 100% of nothing