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gently caress my job. I've had all sorts of jobs before, but even the office-bound ones were always in a casual environment at a small company, and I never knew how bad it could get until I made the horrible mistake of taking this job. (Yes, I'm working on getting out.) Bonuses? Hollow laugh. I just had my five-year anniversary, which is depressing enough in itself, and had to go through the farce of getting the First Big Awesome Bonus which employees are entitled to when they hit five years: a check for $100, and a photo is taken of you shaking hands with the CEO. I don't know which is more tragic - that they actually believe this is something employees will find motivating, or that so many employees actually do. Everyone who works there is hundreds of years old, has never worked anywhere else, and has not seen fit to acquire any new skills since the 1950s. I'm almost loving 40 and I'm the "young kid" in the office. A member of our senior management is on record as saying "Work is typing. If you're not typing when I pass your cubicle, you're not being productive." Management in general follows the theory that skilled professional work does not actually exist; there are people who type, and people who tell them what to type. This also means that anyone in the company can be retrained into any other job in the company within a day or two, because after all, it's just typing different stuff. Yes, OF COURSE the receptionist can cover for you, just write out a list of what you do all day as a simple checklist and it'll be cool! Never mind your Master's degree, 14 years of experience and considerable natural talent, around here we know everyone's an interchangeable cog! This is why the person in charge of our IT help desk is an elderly former secretary who somehow even managed to avoid learning how to use MS Office during her 30 years with the company. She can type and answer the phone but that's about it. They downsized the secretarial staff, but because management liked her, they simply shunted her to the first open position elsewhere in the company instead of laying her off. This boneheaded move achieves two awesome things: crippling the entire company's productivity, while making the employee miserable because she doesn't have a clue how to do her new job and isn't capable of learning it. Let's face it, if you're a loving secretary and you haven't managed to learn MS Office in the 20 years it's been loaded on your computer, you are not capable of learning. We have an anonymous suggestion box. There's a security camera above it. It is well known to be the "Get Fired Fast" box and so nobody puts a suggestion in it ever, unless that is their actual goal. Working here is aging me ten years for every year I stay. I have to get out before I forget that this isn't normal - before I turn into one of the shambling zombies who accept it and talk about how grateful they are to have the job.
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Apr 22, 2010 02:01
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I would have left a lot sooner, but I got cancer two years into the job, which basically trapped me because I couldn't risk losing my health insurance and nobody else is likely to hire me when they find out. Yes yes, medical privacy laws, discrimination laws etc, but sooner or later during the interview process you're going to have to mention that you need flexible hours and/or time off every third week, and watch that offer disappear like magic. The cancer's gone now but I'm still on maintenance chemo so I know I'm stuck in this job until that's over. Once it is, I'll be out of this shithole so fast they'll just see a blur go past with a huge grin on top. I never worked corporate before and I can't wait to never work it again. Edit: the only reason I can get away with flexible hours right now is because the rest of my department covers for me on the days I need to leave half an hour early to get to a treatment and so far upper management hasn't found out. 
Humanoid Female fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Apr 24, 2010 |
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Apr 24, 2010 02:58
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Robot Hobo posted:She waited a month or two and then fired me over a combination of my poor attendance (spotless record before that) and not meeting my sales quotas. They were expressly forbidden from firing anyone over sales quotas, since we weren't actually supposed to have them on the goddamn tech support floor, but she used my poor attendance as a loophole, referring to my poor sales as "insubordination." (her explanation was that I didn't obey when she told me to sell more) At my company, "insubordination" can mean "having a different opinion from the CEO on any topic, even if he outright asks you for your opinion." I have seen a guy get fired for this.
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Apr 29, 2010 00:39
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edit is not quote
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Apr 29, 2010 00:40
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Mbwuto posted:Someone I know just got a job at a company that gives NO vacation for the first year and two weeks a year for the next five years after that. At 6 you get 3. That's the exact policy where I work. It's so hard for me to believe that this is considered normal and acceptable in the US. I even know people who have told me they wouldn't want four weeks of annual vacation because it would be boring and they wouldn't know what to do with it. Jesus Christ, you don't have to spend it in your living room staring at a wall, you know.
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Apr 29, 2010 20:35
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