Want to here about something just so absurd, I could barely believe it myself. We have a sales director or VP or something at my office. He, and a few other people share a secretary or, an administrative assistant as they are called. Anyway, this secretary was telling me about how this guy, we will call him Cletis, is so bad with using his PC, he does not know how to delete a row in Excel. Now, this guy is like 55, has had a PC for over 10 years, and still can't work Excel?
He emails his spread sheet to this secretary. He then walks over to her and asks if she got it yet. We have 175 exchange servers and it takes a few moments for the email to come through. Anyway, he stands there for the 30 or 45 seconds it takes to come though. Shows her what row to delet, and then asks her to mail it back to him.
Now, this dude makes $170k a year, and he can't modify a fucking spreadsheet? How do these complete morons get these cush jobs making the fat cash? he's not much of a sales person either as sales suck all around at my place.
Even funnier, another sales type emails his shit to this secretary to print. Now, this other sales tard is configured to print to a big ass Ricoh copier printer. In fact, it's a shorter walk for him to go to the printer than to walk to this secretary. Of course, if he WAS to print his own shit, he has to spend the extra effort to figure out page size and maybe set margins and shit up. he has her do it but... wow... another dude making $150k a year who is too lazy, stupid, or arrogant to print his own shit.
Yeah, we are hemmoraging cash at my place and each month we dig ourselves deeper into a hole of red ink but, we can pay bug bucks to people who are either too lazy or too stupid to do their own job.
More fun from the corporate front. A re-organization was announced a few days ago. Megacorp is going to merge our division with another division. Their division president will take over and already there are positions, redundant overhead, being eliminated. Now, which position would you eliminate first if you were the brainchild of this impending train wreck?
Well, I can't tell you the best order but Megacorp, in it's infinite incompetence, has slated our only remaining HR person to be the first one laid off. Now, this is lame because since there will be other staff reductions, why lay off the HR person first? He is the one that has to do all the HR work in getting people's shit taken care of, but they will remove this person first. Some other corporate HR person, who does not know the people or anything will probably take care of the rest of the lucky individuals later on.
In the meeting, it was corporate BS as usual. Our new president was asked about any possible staff reductions and he went on about no one has examined that yet and any reductions would set us back 3 years and blah blah blah. After being here 3 years, I have learned that Megacorp will cut anything it can to realize any cost savings it may think it can get. Second, what the fuck is with 3 years? Who comes up with this crap? They lay people off here like I change my socks. Every day shit happens.
Then, our new president outlined his plan. The plan was not to try to gain profitability anymore my cutting costs, but to make more sales by adding features and products that customer will pay extra for. Although, a few sentences later, he said that our customer are cost driven and make their purchasing decision based on cost. Sounds sort of contradictory doesn't it? Your customers are very cost focused and will jump to the next competitor for the slightest cost advantage (some customers are Wal-mart, Sams, and so on), so you want to make products that you can charge more for and make more money? We make a commodity product that is easily substituted so few, if anyone, is going to pay an extra cost for our shit when ACME sells shit that works just as good for less.
This should make for more adventures in failure but, I don't think I wll be around to witness this next phase of fuck-ups.