|
|
|
typical Byzantine creepiness
Monday, January 24 2000
When I got home from work, I found Matt Rogers and Kim hanging out chatting. They had a conspiratorial air about them that indicated they'd been dissing me behind my back. This vibe irritated me a little, but it was not an especially big deal. The thing that irked me more was their goofy bursts of inappropriate laughter, which, I later learned, were the result of a hearty session of pot smoking.
One of my colleagues from work came by to visit me for a little while and we had a chance to catch up on a little of the office gossip. He brought my attention to the recent firing of two long-time VPs of marketing, something I hadn't even noticed. Evidently they hadn't been performing well under our management system.
Indeed, I can vouch for the fact that one of these VPs was an exceptionally poor project leader. Before I was to leave for my Christmas vacation, I was her only remaining developer for an online election system. But no one had told me what I needed to do for it and I was working with the understanding that it was on hold. Suddenly, two days before I left for Detroit, she sprang some deadlines on me that fell somewhere within my vacation. What could I do but laugh? She ended up having my colleague Jay waste a week on it, but nothing release-able ever materialized.
What with the new "objective" job performance ranking system in our company, our relative company worth is posted for all to see. The original version of our rankings, unveiled at a five hour company meeting some weeks ago and posted in large fonts by the front door, was so inaccurate and flawed it had to be scrapped and redone (and posted in small fonts in the kitchen). But the effects on company morale have been pervasive and lasting, especially given the fact that those in management didn't figure amongst the people ranked. The foot soldiers of the E-commerce team all fared exceptionally poorly in their ranking and were up in arms for awhile. And my visiting friend tonight, a guy who normally loves his job and puts in obscenely long hours, was actually unhappy enough with his ranking to go in search of another job. (This is yet more proof that "motivation by stick" usually results in an overall drop in a company's productivity.) "There are lots of jobs out there," he assured me, "even for someone like me." His job insecurity goes up and down with every company meeting, and the recent sacrifice of two VPs has him nervous, but when the injuries aren't fresh, he can joke about it and wax philosophical.
After my co-worker friend had gone, I chatted with Matt Rogers about deeply conceptual things like brain uploading. I also worked some on a painting I've been doing over the past several days. Here is my progress so far:
Tonight was Matt Roger's last night hanging out with us before his road trip with his mother would turn around and head back north. I was in a generous mood and gave him my old ATI All In Wonder card so he could begin experimenting with making video constructs on his computer.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?000124 feedback
previous | next |
