CoffeeBear.net

F’ing Management

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life, Rants

Today was a bril­lant exam­ple of why man­age­ment sucks. I was work­ing mer­rily along¹ test­ing a par­tic­u­lar area of the soft­ware. Then I had to tele­con­fer­ence –he said with extreme venom and hatred– into a meet­ing for a test­ing project that I’m not cur­rently work­ing on but that I would much, much rather be on. For extra fun, that tele­con­fer­ence –again said with extreme venom and hatred– call was taken at my desk. A desk which I might add is in a cubi­cle, a pri­vate office. A cubi­cle which hap­pens to be located next to the loud­est @#%&@(^&!#($)^*^()#$^#%&^@$(^#$(^#)(%*@&($#^ f’ing sup­port group in our build­ing. They’ve got email; they’ve got phones; they’ve even got IM but when this group wants to com­mu­ni­ca­tion; they just scream crap out.

Any­ways, I took the con­fer­ence call and lis­tened in watch­ing my clock count away the wasted min­utes of my life. When the meet­ing was finally over; I got back to work­ing on the @#(%@ project that I am cur­rently assigned to. I’d only got­ten a few min­utes into work­ing when I get a meet­ing announce­ment for another meet­ing today. In fact, just 20 min­utes away but the only infor­ma­tion that the announce­ment gives me about the meet­ing is a sub­ject line of “Test”. WTF?

It’s com­ing from one of my man­agers² and he’s sent out dozens of meet­ing announce­ments before with­out any prob­lems; so why would he be try­ing to test the sys­tem out that way? 20 min­utes later, I got the answer.

Appar­ently, UPPER man­age­ment decided that every­body in the com­pany is going to have to take this gen­eral apti­tude test but had told middle/lower man­age­ment that they weren’t sup­posed to say any­thing yet. Then Human Resources started send­ing out meet­ing invi­ta­tions to sched­ule peo­ple for the test. So our man­agers were pulling an emer­gency meet­ing to do spin-control and fight the rumor mill. There was one prob­lem with that plan.

Some of the team I’m on –includ­ing me– work out of a dif­fer­ent build­ing, in a dif­fer­ent state and we’re not sched­uled to take this stu­pid test until next week. As such and as our HR per­son isn’t a com­plete f’ing idiot; she didn’t send out the invites yet because she wasn’t sup­posed to. So the only thing that the emer­gency meet­ing occom­plished for me was to start freak­ing me out instead of help­ing me stay calm. I hadn’t heard a word about this test until I went to this meet­ing and then I got treated to roughly an hour of how they couldn’t tell us yet because man­age­ment said they couldn’t and you have to do what man­age­ment says and they won’t use this as the sole fac­tor of whether or not you keep your job as that would be nuts and I’ll fight against that thing I said they’d never do tooth and nail. Rii­i­i­i­i­i­i­i­ight. Like I’m going to believe you’re going to fight that hard for me when you just got done say­ing you didn’t already tell us because man­age­ment said not to and you have to do what they say.

I feel sooooooooooooooo reas­sured. *sigh*

¹ As mer­rily as I ever get at work, first thing in the morn­ing.
² Work isn’t quite as bad for me as it was for Peter Gib­bons; I’ve only got 2 direct super­vi­sors instead of 4 (or was it 6?).

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