The death of a good company to work for.

Thank you now kindly fuck off

Here is an example of how my company, Megacorp, treats it's employees. We have a operations director who manages all the operation at our several facilities in Canada. He has been with the company like 10+ years. Has moved up and around and generally, is respected and competent. He worked for Smallcorp before Megacorp bought us a few years back.

Anyway, he gets an email.. a FUCKING EMAIL telling him he is fired. An email! BBAHAHA!!!!! This kills me.

Even more hysterical, our division president was let go. This was announced early November but really, he knew about it for 3 months. Some organizational changes were made and he was moved to some BS position. Anyway, here hs is, 3 months, total access to all systems. He lands a job and wants to leave and his bosses are giving him a hassle about confidentiality agreements (which are almost un-enforceable) and other shit. Heck, he has had total access for 3 months and no one gave a shit. Now he has found a new job and his bosses are all uptight.

Overpaid morons

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.

1,2,3,7,4,5,... out of order?

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.

Projector on the ceiling

Well, our Business Unit president came to me today asking about mounting our portable Toshiba projector on the ceiling. We have one of those screens that drops from the ceiling but the projector is a portable unit and sits on the table. We called the electrician that works in our building and he said he could mount the unit (assuming we have a bracket) wire it up to the AC for $800 or so. We asked him about running a cable from the VGA input on the projector down to the wall or something so it's easy to attach to a PC.

Why they come to me I have no idea. However, I pointed out some possible pitfalls of mounting the current one and why we should just get a new one. 1) The unit has no remote. To, turn it on, you would have stand on the table. 2) A 50 foot VGA extension wire would be needed and the signal may look like shit after it went 50 feet. 3) The projector is really old and murphys law says that 3 months after you mount it, you will have to buy a new one and possibly a new mount. 4) It's the only portable one we have.

Well, I spent some time and found a nice unit, that has a remote control, that takes a component video input, and a converterbox/signal amplifier that takes a VGA signal, boosts it, and converts it to component video, and 50 feet of component video wire. This is the exact thing you need to push a video signal 50 feet. The total cost was like $2400. Add in the $800 for the electrician and the total is $3200.

They decided not to do that and to go with mounting the original unit that is 5 years old. This out to be fun to watch. The best part will be when someone breaks their leg falling off the table they will need to stand on to turn the unit on.

In the electricains quote, he was not including the cost to wire in a separate switch and circuit for the projector. That would probbaly cost another $600 to $800 and when you add in the $400 or so they will charge for the bracket, the cost savings is not $2400, but more like $1200. Add in having to buy another projector for portable use, and you just used up that $1200.

What can I say?

Light at the end of the tunnel

If you have been following these posts, you realize that I came from a company called Smallcorp to a company called Megacorp via a merger. Megacorp bought small corp in 2002. Along those lines, Megacorp has been trying to sell 1 former smallcorp division (8 locations) that do not fit in with Megacorps strategic plan. (Yeah, as if they have one).

Anyway, they have been trying to sell these places for 3 years. Finally, after 2 possible buyers, the 3rd one may be a charm. The first offer, spring of 2004, was not good enough for Megacorp. The buyer offered 50 million and Megacorp wanted 55 million. So, the deal fell through and megacorp too a hit a bit later on writing down the value of these places to 38 million from 55 million.

About 6 months later, with another sucker on the line, the deal was supposed to go through for 37 million or so. The buyer's financing fell through and thus, no deal. S0, Megacorp took another hit and wrote off another 20 million which brought the value down to 18 million.

Wow, no wonder out stock is in the TANK. A company Megacorp thought was worth 80 million in 2002, in which they had an offer of 50 million for in 2004, that they turned down, ends up selling for 18 million, or there abouts.

Wow, shrewd eh?

Solution to employee turnover - Part 2

Well, Megacorp has followed through on the post I had about moving the help desk from Altanta to a rural area of the US. They moved it 3 hours south of Atlanta to a town where, if you look on the map, has no major towns near it. They wanted rural and believe me, the got it.

What these fucking morons also got was %100 turnover. No one, not one employee relocated for this new support center in the middle of nowhere. So, calling the Help Desk has been a very interesting experience lately. Imagine having NO ONE on staff who has been there more than a week or two and all are currentlt being trained ( I hope) to do their jobs. It has been fun to sit back and watch.