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Employment Woes

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life, Rants

Wednes­day morn­ing, my super­vi­sor pulled me aside to tell me since man­age­ment wants to go into beta just before I take 2 days of vaca­tion. And since one of those vaca­tion days con­flicts with a week long Microsoft train­ing course I was signed up for they are pulling me out of the class. I wasn’t happy about it. She wasn’t either but the deci­sion came down from on high.

Wednes­day after­noon, a co-worker and myself had to drive 4 hours to my cur­rent employer’s home office. Instead of head­ing straight to the hotel, we stopped along the way to get din­ner. We ended up hit­ting the hotel around 8 PM. When we checked in there was a mes­sage ask­ing us to call our super­vi­sor. Nei­ther one of us liked the sound of that. We tried call­ing her back but got her answer­ing machine. We left a mes­sage and I went to my own room. I had been lay­ing down for just about an hour and was think­ing of hit­ting up the hotel’s hot­tub when the room phone rang. I picked it up and it was my super­vi­sor. She was call­ing to tell me the com­pany had decided to close our office once the lease runs out. Appar­ently, there’s going to be some sort of tran­si­tion plan if you want to move out by the home office and con­tinue work­ing for the com­pany. But as I told a co-worker, I’d rather slit my wrists then move to keep work­ing for this com­pany. So I’ve got some­where between 4 — 8 months to find a dif­fer­ent job¹. Need­less to say, I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night and I wasn’t feel­ing moti­vated for teach­ing the next day.

Thurs­day, I went into the office. I chat­ted with a few peo­ple and they were all sym­pa­thetic (and want­ing to know what we were going to do). Then I checked on the class­room and it wasn’t setup cor­rectly, so I got to do some last minute run­ning around to get it fixed. Then I taught, try­ing not to put them to sleep. The two big prob­lems with the class were that it had to be put together at the last minute and I had 3 dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple attend­ing the class. Each group hav­ing a dif­fer­ent, non-overlapping skill set; mak­ing it impos­si­ble not to be too basic for one part of the class while being totally over the head of a dif­fer­ent part. *sigh* Still some peo­ple seemed to get some­thing out of the class and nobody actu­ally snored through it.

Thurs­day night, we drove home.

Fri­day, I went into my soonish-to-be-closed office and while it was a dark humor going around; most peo­ple seemed hap­pier than I’ve seen them for some time. Maybe good things will come of this moronic deci­sion. Who knows? I just know that I’m going to be much more moti­vated to find a dif­fer­ent job (I’d been half-heartedly look­ing already) and the company’s cus­tomers who pay sup­port fees are going to get seri­ously pissed off².

So if any of my read­ers are in the East­ern Iowa area and are hir­ing, maybe you could let me know?

¹ We’ve got some kind of exten­sion on the lease so it’s anybody’s guess when exactly our office will be closed, but we do know it will hap­pen some­time between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber.
² From what I under­stand the major­ity of the company’s best help desk per­son­nel are in my office. So the cus­tomers will have to wait longer to get some­body to talk to them about their issue(s) and then wait even longer for that per­son to fix their issue(s).