All hands meeting to go over latest company news. CEO details latest earnings, promotions, and then he gets to priorities.
Company Priorities for 1996
- On time delivery of all orders.
- Increase market share to 55%.
- 20 new patents.
- Safety first.
- Improve customer service.
Yes, “Safety first” was #4. #4!
(adapted from his Tumblr)
Liar, Liar, Put Your Hands Against the Wall!
I staffed for a company that made a ton of money being the middle men in a very specific area of sub-prime lending. Their original training was not only unethical, but borderline criminal. I was brought on as a contract recruiter for no more than six weeks, a tolerable length of time. But just like the Hotel California… you can never leave.
Until the FBI shows up.
We had a job opening that was open forever: VP of sales. It was our White Whale. Our in-house recruiting team was having a hard time finding anyone that was dumber than the CEO, but smart enough to do the job. (The CEO freaked out if anyone was smarter than him, so he was pretty freaked all the time.) He got so frustrated that he made our VP of HR hire an outside recruiter, a big hauty corporate guy that talked too loud and smelled a lot like a bar rail. So he brings in all the schmoozers, and they finally pick one that fit the Not-Too-Smart, Not-Too-Dumb part. He and the CEO really hit it off. Sure they did. They were both unethical and liked living off of other people’s money.
Things were always a little weird with the new VP of Sales. He kept using the company credit card on “accident”, then would give his assistant cash to go buy money orders to repay the company. He couldn’t cash his own payroll checks, rather asked the CEO to cash it for him through his account, which he did, because as I mentioned before… not the sharpest tool in the shed. He would send emails out to his sales force that had obviously been cut and pasted from websites and newsletters as he had not bothered to unlink or make all the fonts the same sizes of color. And when I had to find him an assistant, he couldn’t even answer simple questions about what the assistant would be tasked with on a daily basis. He kept saying, “Just get me someone good.”
There were so many red flags, but he was smooth and looked sharp in his $2,000 suits.
As a recruiter, I know that you have to come out with all guns blazing to be noticed in the hiring process. As a candidate, I also know that you better be able to back up the B.S. once you get in. This guy could not deliver. Meeting after meeting, the other VPs kept saying, “he’s a nice guy, but shouldn’t he know more?” Finally, one guy (I liked to call him Mr. Angry) calls a detective friend and within an hour, finds out that this guy didn’t even exist. Apparently, the bar rail smelling recruiter (who had long since spent his fee) hadn’t bothered to do a background check.
Neither had my boss, the VP of HR. Otherwise known as Cold Heartless Witch.
So Dumb-E-O, Mr. Angry, and Cold Heartless Witch start to look into Mr. Smooth. Turns out he was wanted in Washington for bilking little old ladies out of all their money. Here’s the story: After becoming a member of a congregation, he began telling folks that he was a Financial Planner. He made friends with the pastor and offered to give free financial advice seminars to his flock. Not only that, but he would donate a dollar amount per person for everyone that the Good Pastor could get in the door. And just like at the end of all financial planning workshops, there was a special offer. Mr. Smooth would handle all the congregants financial worries for less than the going rate. Beware a cheap deal dressed in expensive wool!! These trusting folks handed him everything. Deeds to their homes. 401ks. Life savings. In return for their trust, he liquidated everything and took off. A few years later, he was sitting in a corner office, over looking San Diego, telling me to get him someone good.
But just like all lies, they eventually come back to haunt you.
In Mr. Smooth’s case, it was in the form of an arrest a few feet away from my cubicle. I wasn’t actually IN my cubicle when it happened. They had asked the whole team to go in to a meeting room. Once we were there, they told us everything. I started laughing uncontrollably. Someone had finally scammed the scammers! Bahahaha!! The Cold Heartless Witch was caught with her hat down! Needless to say, my coworkers thought I had completely lost it.
We heard some loud talking and a little bit of foot stomping, and then we got to come out. I looked around and wondered how the hell I had ended up there. Surrounded by unethical liars. Talking people into working in an environment that rewarded questionable behavior. Working in gray cubicles in a gray building with gray faces all around. Within weeks, I ended my contract. And then I started blogging.
(adapted from her blog)
Pathetic Boss from anonymous
About a year ago, our company was in financial straits, made worse by an emotional public plea for money from the Boss to our paying Members. Needless to say, this situation was causing a lot of tension in the office. One morning, my coworkers and I walked into the tiny room that housed our department, and found a rather unusual scene. There were ashes ground into the carpet around my coworker’s desk, an ashy handprint on her chair, and a small dish of crumbled plant material on her desk. We pondered this situation a while: it was pot, and didn’t really smell like any drug we could think of. It almost smelled like something from a kitchen, though it was hard to be sure with the smokey smell that pervaded. When the rest of the office came in, we discovered that quite a few desks had ashes on them, another had a bit of burnt string, and the whole place smelled funny.
Suddenly, the receptionist came in, laughing, and waving a small bundle of dried herbs. “I know what happened!” she said. “The Boss likes to burn sage in her office when she’s feeling stressed, says it dispels the bad energies. She was here late last night, after everyone else went home. She said she’d lock up after everyone left. She must have gone around, waving the burning sage everywhere, and that’s what left the ashes!”
Right. She was alone, late at night, waving burning plant material over our desks (this is the woman who has burned out TWO office microwaves trying to make popcorn) to dispel the negative energies that had arisen from her own pathetic business decisions. We were a little uncomfortable with this, to say the least. When my coworker commented, “Hey, Boss, I found some funny stuff on my desk this morning, and I was wondering…” she turned bright red, and stammered “Oh! that’s just something…not important…just toss it out!” So she decided that burning sage in our office was the way to treat our financial difficulties, was too dumb to clean up after herself, and too embarrassed to admit it. That’s our Boss!
In my place of work, the Christmas season is always the busiest. Our season typically lasts from December 1 to February 1, for whatever reasons.
In December, the boss was there for a total of 15 days. They worked no weekends and “used up leftover holiday days”. During the month, we ran into various shortages in products and are unable to order more without her authorization. We lost out on revenue because of it.
In January, the boss took another 10 days of “leftover” holidays. I was given a project to work on for an outside party, but was instructed not to communicate with the third party except through them. A ton of questions arose about the project that I had to continually call the boss to have answered when short emails with the third party would have sufficed. The boss came back to work for a few days announcing a trip they had received as a gift from their spouse. Another five “leftover holidays” used up.
In February, I was called into the bosses office and lectured how I wasnt being productive enough over the last two months to warrant having me scheduled so much; then my hours were cut by 2/3. Had I not been there for the past few months, nothing would have gotten done…because no one can make decisions without the bosses authorization.
Kind of reminds me of this in a sad way:
Four meetings today. And then later, no doubt, a meeting with my boss about how I’m not getting anything done.
I was building a financial model to justify an acquisition. The deal kind of sucked so I was “encouraged” to find “synergies” to make it make sense. Even after finding a ludicrous number of questionable “synergies” the deal still sucked. I was then DIRECTED to change the discount rate in the model from 10% to 9.5001% then change the formatting of that cell in Excel so it would display 10% (due to the rounding function). Wow. Justifying a deal based on rounding. Niiiice.
Colleague sitting in social media meeting and asked French client if they have Facebook over there. Cue hilarity as another colleague jumped on it and pointed out the French have mobile phones and running water too - there was no brushing that one under the carpet, so you might as well go with the flow.
My boss asked my colleague to “cut and paste” some information from one document to another and he literally printed out both documents, used a pair of scissors to cut out the information and used glue to paste it on the other sheet.
At AT&T Yellow Pages we were in the post-deadline, final sales countdown before the book printed. We had meetings every morning to report on sales. The branch manager instructed us that we should snap our fingers for anyone with a sale and boo anyone who didn’t have a sale to report.
The reps who had completed all their work on time, and had no leftovers to work post deadline, were most likely to be booed.
I try to inject a little @MeetingBoy humor surreptitiously into my status meetings, made a joke about how we’d all get a penny raise at the end of the year if we printed on both sides, to my dismay my boss’ reaction was “EXACTLY”, like ‘Yes, you really get it”. I think that I now have a new project!!!
Me: I’ve attached 2 options, do you prefer the first one or the second one?
Boss: YES!
Meeting Boy