Sunday, March 18, 2007

Climbing the Ladder

It was with a heavy heart that I trudged my ass back into work today, although I found myself nominally excited at the prospect of watching some crappy cable news (even though deep down I knew said excitement would likely last no more than 20 minutes).

Unfortunately for me, it seems that during my absence there was another fucking re-org. Wow, color me seriously unhappy and annoyed. I’m not exaggerating one bit when I tell you that we just had one a month before I departed, which makes for a total of three in less than a year.

Christ, it’s like I’m working for my brother’s kids.

Embrace change, my ass. These fuckers have no idea what they’re doing—unless it involves avoiding responsibility (i.e. work, in general) and talking for hours on end without actually saying anything (preferably through concurrent meetings which will run late).

Another operations group has now been (for the most part) fully integrated with mine, and with the new folks came new monitoring tools, which now take up the remaining plasma screen on which CNN used to babysit me through a boring shift. The integration of this new group is, of course, being labeled as a “learning opportunity” mixed in with some prattle having to so with “world-class service”.

It should go without saying that henceforth I will be concluding every phone call taken at work with “You got world-class served!” I may tack “bitch” onto the end of that, depending on current mood and/or circumstances, and I may also break dance to drive home any points I want to make.

We’ll just have to wait and see, there’s a lot of room for creativity.

For example, when I start giving the finger to everyone who speaks to me at work because of their re-org-ing, I’ll have to remember to tell my bosses (at the eventual meeting I’ll be called to) that it wasn’t really the finger I just gave, but rather an “employee relations management challenge presenting an opportunity for individual and departmental success”. It will be very impressive while wearing my salmon-colored shirt and Bluetooth headset.

I expect someone will promptly propose making my issue an action item and then put me in charge of something since I will have, at that point, ceased doing any actual work, thus becoming a top candidate for new management. Once the promotion takes effect it will remain to be seen whether or not I will be able to give more of the finger or less. It won’t matter, I suspect, as I will be known from that point on as “the guy that gave so-and-so the finger”.

If all else fails, I suppose I could hire a stunt finger to handle my confrontations for me since I’ll be busy “managing”.