Job

Let's do the time warp

October 29, 2009 – 2:55 pm

I went out with some of my soon-to-be-fired coworkers last night. It was a lot of fun but I exercised poor boozing form and today feel awful. Today is our last 'real' day on the job, since tomorrow will mostly be us dumping our company laptops and Blackberrys and probably having Security escort us out the door. But of course, the real work has been drying up for some time. I get a couple of emails a day with some small matter to address and the rest of the time I can sit here wondering when the crushing enormity will hit, when I realize the money is running out and I still don't have a job …

I've never been out of work more than a month or so, and that was when I graduated with my MA in Poetry and couldn't find work in my lil' college town for 3 months. Since then I've been gainfully employed. I get so antsy when I'm out of work usually, it spurs me onto the job market like Garfield on lasagna. You should see what a Yes-Man I turn into when I get in the interview room. It's quite a skill.

But I haven't yet felt that fear seep in, mostly in part to the generous severance package ($$$) I have been given. One wonders what it costs a company to keep an employee at a desk in their office, what overhead arises, since they're basically giving me 6 months' salary to leave right now. I guess there's a way things are done in Corporate America, though much of its lessons are lost on me. My whole time here has been full of inexplicable decisions by management, with strange, almost insidious behavior from the those in a position to fire vast swaths of the company. I have to assume it all makes sense to someone, cuz I sure don't get it.

I'm all packed up here, it should be pretty simple to walk away from this office. I'm still having no end of trouble getting my new mobile phone to work; I suspect the Radio Shack management might have a thing or two in common with my (ex) company. But, rest assured, I soon will be texting, tweeting, sexting and swtweexting, sending missives rife with bad usage to my similarly-dyseducated cohorts. OMFG. Hey, wasn't that part of the title over CBGB's?

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Phones | Comments (2)

The Finish Line

October 28, 2009 – 9:35 am

I'm a couple of days away from employment freedom and financial slavery. Work has dried up nicely, most of my work has been farmed out to people around the globe, or just forgotten entirely. I have about a day and a half of official workday left, and then on Friday I have to come in to dump all my office gear and then I fly the coop.

I just picked up my own cell phone to replace the Blackberry they let me use for the past year. I'm gonna miss it, especially the whole not-paying for anything on it. I decided to go with a pay-as-you-go plan from Virgin, as my calculations put it at the absolute cheapest for the best service. So far that has been sort of true.

I am on my 2nd phone so far, the first one had a defective camera, so they just gave me another. This one seems to be having trouble running its applications, giving me lovely Java errors when I try to access the Email program. Yes, I'm getting a bunch of non-phone related stuff on this, if only because I would like to continue to appear to be a "with it" with my "finger" on the "pulse" of something. Which is hard when the damn thing won't work.

So it looks like it's back again to Radio Shack for me! It has dawned on me that perhaps the root of the problem is that I shouldn't have gone in that godforsaken store in the first place. Radio Shack has been in decline since kids stopped building crystal radio sets, and in their death rattle they decided to become glorified cell phone stores. And yet, they can't even seem to get that right. Why is it still so hard to get things that just work when you purchase them? Everything has to be riddled with issues and no one knows how to fix them.

They will invariably just give me another phone, which probably has something wrong with it as well. I have 1.5 days to get a working phone (the Radio Shack is right across the street from my office). After that, god help us all.

I'm going out for drinks with the ladies of my office today, though, that should be pretty interesting.

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Bad Stuff, Phones | Comments Off

You're gonna make it after all

October 20, 2009 – 1:59 pm

"Do you sell bags of gum?"

The question was pointed towards me, standing in the 'gum' aisle at Walgreen's, trying to decide what bizarre flavor of sugarless gum I would most desired (today it's "Mango Surf"). I turned to the woman and replied, "Um … I don't work here …" She apologized, adding how annoying it must be to be mistaken for a drugstore employee. But considering my situation these days, is it really?

I was wearing a tie, as I am forced to do in the office, and I was standing next to a cart full of candy meant for restocking the shelves, so maybe I looked like an earnest go-getter from a previous era. The astute casual anthropologist will note the staff at Walgreen's wears drab polo-style shirts with the company name on it; I was wearing a dark green shirt and a skinny tie I bought in 1993. Maybe I just look like the kind of guy who should be working in a Walgreen's.

I thought of retorting something witty to the woman, like "Well I may not work at Walgreen's but boy, can I market to the older, ultra-affluent set. And their wealthy, layabout children." But I held my tongue. What skills have I gained from my time at this office, what will I take with me to a potential new employer?

I was talking with my coworkers (also soon-to-be laid off) and we determined that all the people we hate in the office are those who do the least, foisting their rightful work onto our more capable shoulders, simply because they outrank us. And as that Dilbert guy noted years ago, the stupidest people really do seem to be the ones who are pushed to the top of the management chain, where as Scott Adams says "they can do the least harm." People with true skills stay mired at the bottom, where they prop up the company's infrastructure. I fear I've been getting pushed into dumbening for several years now.

I've been at this job, in one form or another for over 9 years now. I have the word "director" in my job title. I, as previously noted, wear a tie to work. But what skills do I have? When I first got here I was semi-skilled, with a knowledge of hand-coding HTML and such, which at the time was still something in demand. Now my skillset has atrophied, as I spent valuable programming time on conference calls, flying back and forth to Asia to have pointless meetings with people who would later fire me only because I live in New York and they found this somehow distasteful.

Legions of nerds have come since; they have learned many programming languages as well as the other skills at which I was sort of adept at once, like Photoshop and Quark Xpress (I mean 'InDesign,' apparently no one uses Quark anymore!) Meanwhile I was filling out a Business Requirements Document and sending pestering emails to the regional marketing contacts asking them to update their office list for the website. I can think of ways to render this on a resume, but it fills me with shame to do so.

Plus I'm not even sure I want to continue down this path. Ironically, a fairly well-paid position as a Project Manager might be easier for me to get at this point than the modest remuneration of the semi-skilled 'web grunt' jobs of yore. Maybe I should shoot for that Walgreen's job!

Note: I have 8 days left at this job!

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Bad Stuff | Comments (3)

Seems like there's a damn good reason to worry worry worry

August 24, 2009 – 1:15 pm

Powder I keep waiting for the heat to subside, but it keeps being hot. I have so many projects to complete this summer, projects I specifically waited for summer to begin, only to find myself unable to complete them because I'm sweating so much I can't hold a paint brush or get a proper grip on the staple gun.

Hotplate

Of course, soon, I will have all the time in the world to do my little household tasks. Unemployment is looming, but for the time being the focus of my paranoia is not so much on the actual getting of a new job so much as on why I'm not sweating over it enough. Maybe it's because I'm doing all my sweating climbing the stairs. But I can't get really freaked about not having a job, which I find odd since I haven't been out of work more than a couple of months since college, and nearly all of those situations were in fairer economic climes than this. It seems like all the people I know who lost their jobs since the economy gave out are still not working regularly, and it recently dawned on me that even though I am technically an adult who moves in certain tech-friendly circles, I somehow don't have any friends or old school chums who are ultra-successful, who have invented something unique or written a one-hit wonder song. In short, my friends are no help in my desire to leech off somebody's good work so I'll have to go ahead and get a job after all. Unless I win the lottery, and I'm starting to think that Quick Pick machine doesn't like me and keeps giving me bad numbers.

crouched

I'm trying to formulate a plan for a new web site project, something to demonstrate some skill and maybe be of some use to somebody as well. Considering all these cats we have I have concluded I should build a site to help advertise these cats for adoption, though I don't know who will actually see the site since I'm not exactly Nick Denton. But it will be good to exercise my web muscles and give me something to do at the office since I'm clearly not expending any effort in that area anymore. It's totally way hard to give a hoot about this job now that I know it's going away. I just plan to keep my head down and make sure I come out looking okay in the end.

Now, I just need a name for our home-grown cat shelter adoption joint. I'm thinking of something with the word "hoarders" in the title.

Pictured (from top): Powder, a lovely 14 year old princess I catsat for last week, Hotplate, recent TNR victim, and Granita ("Granny"), recovering from spay surgery in the basement, possibly the mother of pretty much every cat in the neighborhood.

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Adoption, Cat Fixin', Cats | Comments (3)

What I look like under a microscope

August 4, 2009 – 2:46 pm

If you thought this site was single-minded before, get ready for "All Job-Loss Talk." As usual, I'm about 18 months behind everybody else on the trends, so you're probably all full up with whining about losing one's job. So maybe I won't do that, even though I sure am thinking about it. I guess I would care more if I liked my job. But here at the flute end of things, I gotta say that the tedium had long won out over the interesting parts of this work. Ideally I'd like to get out of this business altogether and work in a field I actually care about. And I would … if I hadn't bought this damn house!

The one big trade off of my lousy job was that it provided me with, literally, more money than I knew what to do with. I saved up enough to jointly buy a house, and then had enough left over I was able to let every cat in the neighborhood move in with us. It was the thing that allowed me to say Yes to stuff I would never have been able to otherwise; in some cases it became the thing that forced me to say Yes (would I have all these cats if I had the self-control that limited funds provides?).

So now I am guessing that whatever job I can finagle, it won't be as much as I've been making. I've been looking at my expenses and if I whittle it down to the bare necessities, I might be able to get by doing production art work for a temp agency, which was my very first job in this town, and still one of my favorite things to do (hours spent nudging graphics and tweaking layouts). But that's not a career, and maybe it's time I got one of those.

So I'm going to spend the next 3 months trying to really think of what I'd like to do with my time. Since I know I can scrape by for a while if I have to, I'll try not to let that little voice (who sounds just like my Dad) flare up too much with comments of "Hey! You! You have to get a new job RIGHT NOW. Don't wait for the severance!" I don't know if it will yield anything useful, maybe the best way I can serve humankind is through 6AM conference calls with testy Flash developers and belligerent middle managers.

By Jimmy Legs | Also posted in Good Stuff, Money | Comments (4)