revision99

You know how when you’re going to work, driving on the freeway?

You’re running a little late, so most of the worker bees are already off the road, at their jobs, so traffic is a little congested, but not too bad and you’re rolling along at maybe 45 MPH, and you’re trying to do the right thing, driving safely and leaving four or five car lengths between you and the car in front of you and you’ve got Delbert McClinton playing on the CD player and he’’s givin’ it up for your love and you’re cruisin’ and groovin’ and suddenly from the next lane over and without any warning or signal somebody pulls into that safe zone and cuts you off in a great big SUV. Now you have to slow down but if you do, maybe somebody else will pull the same stunt and you’ll be the chump again, so maybe you’ll just tailgate him for a while, that’ll show him, but then you realize that just as his huge pigmobile has completely blocked your view down the road so you no longer have any idea what’s up ahead, whatever selfish roadhog is driving that big Personal Global Warming Device probably can’t see you, either and so what’s the point, you might as well just choke on it and back off, the Big Guys rule everything anyway. So you back off and keep driving and the big SUV gets smaller and smaller in front of you until you can’t see it or even remember it anymore and then through some miracle you find yourself in another lane that’s moving along close to the speed limit and you and Delbert are grinnin’ and rockin’ down the highway and you get cut off again by the same SUV.

Doesn’t that chap your hide?

And then you get to work and you have to make an important phone call to another office and it’s really kind of urgent that you talk to this certain person at the other office and they have a switchboard operator and when you ask for your intended party by name she says “One moment” and then you get the Muzak in your ear. While you wait you wonder how long a “moment” will be, but it doesn’t matter because you’re going to be getting on with your important call pretty soon. You smile as you think of that operator at that other company you call a lot, who, no matter who you ask for or what you say to her, always responds by saying “My pleasure.” Ha! Is she getting pleasure from being a telephone operator? You think of her squirming a little in her chair and this fantasy is just starting to get interesting when the voicemail comes on in your ear. Oh no! You have to talk to this person, because you need an answer on a very important matter and you need it by noon or preferably right now. You don’t mind leaving a message, but what if he doesn’t check his voicemail, or what if he gets your urgent message but doesn’t get how urgent it is? While you’re pondering this you hear the beep so you go ahead and leave your important message and hang up but then back in your own office you’re doing stuff and time is passing and you’re not getting any calls and it’s like an hour later and you’ve only got until noon to settle this matter so you call again and before you can stop her and ask if your party is even at work today she says “One moment” and the Muzak starts again. This is not what you wanted but maybe the guy will actually answer this time so you stay on the line and you hear a ring, a hopeful sign, and your spirits rise but no, it’s voicemail again. You don’t want to antagonize your intended party by leaving another message so soon after the first one so you quickly press “0″ on your phone to get back to the operator but the system switches you not to the operator but to some woman in the mail room who has no idea why you’re calling her if you want to talk to him and she can’t or won’t transfer you to the operator so you hang up and call back and this time you don’t start by mentioning your intended party’s name but you say “I’ve already left a message today but I was wondering if Mister So-and-So is in the office today” and the operator, who is the receptionist, says she doesn’t know, and you want to say “Why don’t you go back into the office and look?” but you don’t say that because she has that same power over you that servers in restaurants have — you never know who’s spitting in your chicken piccata or letting you sit on terminal hold while your professional life trickles down the toilet, and so you meekly ask her to put you back into your intended party’s voicemail again and you realize you may never get to have your very important conversation, or at least not in time for it to do you any good.

That really planes my shins.

And you know how you have a blog and you write stuff for like five years, almost as long as a car loan, and for a long time you have a bunch of imaginary friends and you read their blogs and they read your blog and you comment on their posts and they comment back to you and you have some fun and some lively “discussions” and once in a while you actually meet one of your blog friends in person and it’s not always that great but sometimes it is, but you love all your fake friends so much and then you start making an occasional inappropriate remark on your blog and little by little your fake friends drop off and finally one day you write a post from your heart and it’s like totally politically incorrect and for the first time in five years no one comments and you realize you have no more fake friends at all?

I hate it when that happens.

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UPDATE: Thanks to Bains, who rescued the previous post while I was writing this one. I love you, man.

What have I done with my life?

Or maybe I should ask what has become of my life, because it seems to have slipped away. Oh, I’m healthy, but that’s just a technical matter. I’m not talking about the strength of my body, but the condition of my soul. I have made a lot of compromises, and I am trapped in the consequences, and now I look around and I wonder if it has been worth it. It’s gotten to the point that I’m afraid even to say what I want in my life, afraid that I will seem foolish, impractical, a dreamer. I’m running like the fox in a hunt, and the hounds are closing in. Will it end with me in a tree, paralyzed, or will I find an escape?

At this moment, I don’t know. And this is all before the real darkness of winter has set in.

I even bore myself.

Don’t even start reading my previous post about saving the court unless you have a full pot of strong coffee by your side, and don’t blame me if you fall asleep anyway and bump your head on your keyboard. I always start out with good intentions — I think I have an important topic to discuss, and I want to be pithy and punchy and quick and easy. You know: impactful, so as to actually have some effect on the reader. Alas, I don’t have that gift, and I end up meandering around the subject, bringing in side issues and going off on tangents. By the time I’m done I have to drag my thesis kicking and screaming back to center stage and make up some conclusion — which now seems artificial and forced and unsupported by all the stuff I’ve gotten into.

But there is one writerly thing I’ve figured out here at my crummy job in the past few months: how to sign an email to your fellow employees.

As I’ve reported here numerous times, I work for HugeCorp, a giant, heartless, marginally criminal organization. I wish I could be more specific, but they are probably logging my keystrokes, so I have to be vague. Someday I’ll start a new blog, anonymously, and really expose the doings of this company. But I digress, as always.

Because operational orders in a company this size (Fortune 100, you know) usually come from people you don’t know who work in some other state and don’t, in fact, know what you are doing or what they are talking about, you have to sort of make up your own work plan. This involves a certain amount of grudging cooperation between you and the other drones at your workplace. HugeCorp hires from the outside to fill the high-paying jobs, so nobody really cares at all about the good of the company, or doing things efficiently, or in any way trying to help anybody else with their daily drudgery, because it’s all about the paycheck and then going out to par-tay on Friday night.

Every now and then I think of some perfectly easy thing that one of my colleagues can do, some way they can file a report or make a journal entry or some damn thing that will cost them nothing in effort or time but might save me hours of spinning my wheels trying to get the same thing done two days later, after all the original data has been forgotten or filed away. To this end I have to sidle up to the colleague in question, open a “friendly” conversation, get down on the floor and roll onto my back, showing my belly in a display of submission, and make the gentlest possible suggestion that they might want to try doing this certain task this way instead of that way.

It’s just coincidence, of course, but most of the time my suggestions turn out to be for the good of the company. I couldn’t care less about that, but three months later, when no one has complied with my request and they are denying to the controller that I ever even mentioned it, I really wish I had made my request in an email instead in the humiliating groveling way described above. That way I could prove that I was a good employee with only the good of the company at heart, and get somebody else in trouble, to boot. Win-win, I say.

So now I email, and here’s (finally!) the insight I set out to tell you about.

Email can be impersonal, and folks can easily get an attitude about your email telling them how to do their job. Not that I am doing that, but that’s how it’s interpreted by my one-track nose-to-the-grindstone worker bee drone colleagues. I was getting nowhere at first with my emails. Sure, I was generating the evidence I’d need down the road when it was time to get people in trouble, but I wasn’t getting anything done right now, because, you know, that ‘tude thing.

Then I started signing my emails with an exclamation point! All of a sudden my garden of happy cooperation is flowering! I have no more affection for these people or enthusiasm for my crummy job than I ever did, but when I add that exclamation point, everything just warms up! People want to help me!

Dear Obnoxious Fellow Worker,

I know you’re so self-absorbed that you barely even know I work here with you, but I was wondering if for once in your life you could think of someone else and let me know right away when HugeCorp sends you a new Field Bulletin, so I can begin my compliance effort.

Thanks!
Larry Jones

You see how that works? No matter what tone I take, that friendly little “Thanks!” at the end makes everything all right. I admit, this example is a little extreme, but for the average email that I send around here, I find that if I just say “Thanks!” at the end nobody comes storming into my office to tell me that they just don’t have enough goddamned time to add one more task to their daily routine, no matter how much it would improve the workflow, or (more likely) just passive/aggressively ignores my email.

So I get action, and I get the documentation I’ll need in the personnel investigation when I’m accused of not being a team player. As I said, win-win!

These signs were up at my office last week:

I pulled this one down this morning. The fact that I work with people who could do this must truly be my last and final degradation.

Hope I still have some friends here.

I know what happens to bloggers who don’t post often. Most of us say we’re only doing it for ourselves, but of course what we want — what I want — is to be read, to be understood, to have a chance to explain myself, to demonstrate to the universe that I’m a good person.

But I don’t have time for that right now, so here’s the short version quick catch-up:

• The new band is now called Big Noise, and it took up most of my free time for the last two months. We’re doing a few songs that I wrote, but mostly it’s a party band, so we’re doing fun covers that you can drink to. I don’t like to sound like everybody else, so I’ve spent a lot of time finding obscure music to play, learning it, transcribing it, arranging it and teaching it to the band. This has been hard for me, but exhilarating at the same time. All the pressure of trying to showcase at The Roxy and get a record deal is off, and what’s left is pure, sweaty, rockin’ fun. Still, it’s time-consuming work, so, no time to blog. (I’m not apologizing, just sayin’.)
• Now I find out that even the cheesiest dive in town (yes, I’ve checked) wants an audition CD before they will talk to me about booking. I guess I’ve been out of circulation too long, but I thought I’d be able to go and talk myself in at some neighborhood bar, and they’d be grateful to have me. But no: now I have to book a recording studio and record a demo. Rehearsing for parties is different than getting ready to record, so now I have to start a new phase with Big Noise, wherein I try to hear if the bass and the kick are working well together, if the harmony intervals are as they should be, etc. This is because if you make a mistake at a party, someone may hear it, but no one will really care as long as there’s dancing and an adequate liquor supply. But if you release a recording with a mistake on it, people will be able to play back your bad playing or singing as many times as they want, and sooner or later any lame-o will detect the errors and from that day forward they will hear nothing else, just the mistakes. Not conducive to getting booked.
• The strutting, loudmouth egomaniac about whom I have previously written, the executive who has ruined all my fun for the past year at my day job, was fired. Actually, sources tell me he sneaked into the building on Friday morning before we opened and cleaned out his office, sneaking away again without speaking to anyone. I know he was fired, because if he had left voluntarily he’s the kind of jerk who would have called a meeting and given a speech, a speech in which he would have talked about himself for an hour or so, then told us that he loved us and he hoped that the things he’d taught us would serve us well, but he was moving on to a higher calling. In fact, he practically killed our business, decimated our staff and destroyed the morale of everyone who didn’t resign. He wore a suit like nobody’s business, but he had no idea how to run our operation, or, I suspect, any commercial venture. I guess I shouldn’t be, but I continue to get amazed that a big, fancy corporation like HugeCorp still gets taken in by con artists like this guy. I could tell he was jive as soon as I spoke to him. Why can’t they? Anyway, leading up to this blessed event, pressure at the office had been building to an exquisitely high pitch, as I and the few professionals too stupid to leave tried to hold everything together. Once again, not much time to spend with you, my precious few bloggin’ buddies, although if you would pay my rent I’d blow off the job in a minute.

I compose blog posts in my mind all day, and — also in my mind — I email all of you with love and good cheer at least once a week.  I hope you’re getting it all.  More soon.

I need some philosophical advice.

Here’s the sitch: My latest boss (eight months now) is a smug, obnoxious, strutting, self-involved and ruthless stuffed shirt. Of course it goes without saying that he’s also incompetent. And, I have to assume he knows I don’t like him. He was hired from outside as the top executive at our location, and since he joined the “team,” the team has disintegrated, with more than half the staff walking out or — even worse for him — transferring to other locations within the company, which is like saying “I’m OK with the company, I just don’t want to work for you.” During his short tenure, profitability and morale have plummeted. So in addition to being an asshole, his job is probably on the line. Trust me, I’m doing all I can to expedite his departure, but that’s another story.

All of a sudden, HugeCorp has decided to restart a program they abandoned a few years ago, and here’s where the fun begins. The program is called ESI, or Employee Satisfaction Index. Yes my friends, Hugecorp now says it wants to be an “employer of choice” within the industry, and to that end they are going to survey the current employees regarding their experiences and attitudes about their jobs, and their supervisors. They want to find out what we all think about our bosses and how the place is being run, so they can keep us satisfied. This may or may not be bullshit. Certainly they have shown no inclination in the past to care about what anybody thinks, but that doesn’t matter, does it, because now I am going to get a chance to have my say, and I will surely poke a sharp stick into his puffed-up ego.

So the day after we all find out there’s going to be these ESI surveys (the week after next, by the way), Mr. Potato Head calls me over to his desk and lets me watch him fill out my own Employee Evaluation form. Without even reading it, he gives me the top score in every category straight down the page, and then writes a nice complimentary note at the bottom (even if I did have to spell “meticulous” for him). So I am now the perfect, model employee (as if I weren’t already!).

Over the past week he’s been stopping by my office periodically, to make sure I have everything I need, shoot the breeze for a moment, see if if I’ve had lunch and just generally schmooze me. Remember, he knows I don’t like him, and our relationship to date has been, shall we say, cool. So the obvious conclusion is he knows he’s a jerk and he’s got about a week and a half to get on my good side so I don’t torpedo his ass in the survey. Of course I will torpedo his ass anyway, because he royally deserves it, but here’s what I need help with:

I could ask for a raise.

I brought the subject up several months ago, and never got an answer (which means “no,” I guess). But he’s now somewhat more motivated to make me happy these days. My dilemma is that this kind of extortion would be wrong, even if I do royally deserve a lot more money. Also, this walking sack of rhinoceros dung should be fired for the mess he has made of our operation. He should have to wait in the unemployment line in hell for all eternity, and if I make the kind of diabolical bargain he wants me to make he will get a reprieve from HugeCorp, or maybe even a promotion (yes, they are that clueless).

Plus, whatever money I got out of the deal would be Satan’s money, rotting and putrefying in my pockets and stinking up my soul. I already feel like I need to sponge off after every one of his glad-handing visits to my office. Could I stand to be in bed with this arrogant shithead?

Of course there’s a chance I wouldn’t be able to get the money anyway (HugeCorp might decide to block it, for example), but assuming I could, should I? I mean, I have had to enter into a suicide pact with a coworker, because I hate the job so much. I don’t know if I could stand closing ranks with management and becoming the “right” kind of person.

So that’s my dilemma. What do you think? The Devil’s Bargain, or The High Road to A Squalid Death?

If anyone is wondering whether I work for a stoopid company…

…check this out. HugeCorp issues “General Field Bulletins” from time to time, to keep us all alerted to the latest wacky plans they come up with. I downloaded one at random this morning, just for a laugh:

Purpose

To communicate to all users that the Log report section has been re-architected. Instructions will be provided to guide the user through the training and implementation of the new reports.

Background

The Log was re-architected primarily to speed the running of the reports and to provide a more user-friendly interface. Additionally, a need was identified to provide dynamic reporting to better serve the requirements of all users.

That’s right. They’ve “re-architected” the Log. Because, apparently, “…a need was identified…”

Does this give any of you a headache? Because it does me. I’ve spent my whole life trying to save the world by making my bed every morning, keeping the nouns and the verbs in their separate pens and sending the intransitive constructions to the Parts of Speech Rest Home.

And now this. And I’ll bet the people who did the re-architecting don’t even know what’s in the Log.

My main computer at home is farkled, so I have to work on that when I can, instead of blogging.

It has been a rough couple of months at my crummy job, and I am worn out from the stress. I don’t feel like fixing this computer. I feel like going out and buying a new one, but the screws have been tightening at work, and now it’s a close call as to whether I will get fired or quit pretty soon. So I have to conserve my money, which means I will have to geek around with the computer until I get it working again, which means I may not be writing for a little while.

Being in this position at my job makes me feel like a loser. I’m smart and educated and I’ve worked all my life, a much longer time frame than I even want to admit right now, and all I have to show for it is a crummy job from which I will never have the wherewithal to retire, part of a corporation that doesn’t have a clue, in an industry that makes most of its’ money doing things that would be illegal in a just world, under the thumb of a swaggering, big-mouthed egomaniac who in a battle of wits would be unarmed.

I try to let the shit roll off me, and considering my underlying attitude I guess I’ve been doing that pretty well. I try to tell myself that being there is like going through the looking glass into an upside down world, and that my real life starts when I walk out each day, but the corporation is so in my face lately that it’s getting too difficult to forget about it when I’m not there.

I wish I were earning my living doing something I loved. I have said that I would play blues in a corner bar for hot dogs, but I really can’t do that. I don’t want to go into the whole mess right now, but I have responsibilities and as bad as the crummy job is, it gives me a regular — albeit minimal — paycheck and health benefits.

So I have become the gray, plodding, broken man that I mocked when I was a brash youth, and I owned the world. Sorry, Dad. I didn’t know how life can beat you down, how you can get hooked on the money, trapped into doing things you loathe, running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

And feeling the knot of fear in your stomach when you realize you’re not even staying in the same place. You are slipping behind.

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I’m OK. Maybe what I wanted to say is that, while I’ll be busy working on the hardware for a bit, 2007 will be a big year for revision99, so stay tuned. As always, my heart skips only for you.

Last night I was stuck at the tackiest “Christmas Party” ever.

In lieu of a real party, we closed the doors at work (at 4:00 PM, big deal) and had a dinner on the premises. There was no music. There were no decorations. We didn’t have Secret Santas. There was no indication that we were celebrating anything, or observing any ancient tradition.

“Gifts” had been extorted from our various vendors, and were distributed by means of raffle tickets and a drawing. Yes, that’s right: We called the businesses that supply us and told them that we expected them to donate stuff to our Christmas party, or else we would have to rethink our relationship with them in the new year. And yes, we are a Fortune 500 company.

Gifts. You know – things you give to others, people you love or want to impress or for whom you want to do something nice. I understand that certain holidays, most notably Christmas, have created a sort of ritualized gift-giving frenzy, whereby we feel that we must give to certain friends and family and associates. But still, at least we know who’s getting the presents, and the giving bears some resemblance to the real thing.

Our event last night was fully disconnected from the entire concept of giving. The “gifts” were from people who didn’t want to give them, to people they didn’t know. A bald guy got a hair curler. The 19-year-old receptionist got a jug of Johnny Walker Black. The guy who got the golf balls was trying to trade them – for anything else.

I didn’t want any of the tainted booty. I knew it would be cursed, so I threw away my raffle ticket and stayed in my office. In the end I was forced to put in an appearance, and I must say that the food was fantastic. One of our employees, a guy from New Orleans, operates a family catering business on the side, and he cooked up a phenomonal cajun feast for us all. He spent the whole day on the meal, and it was worth it. About half of it was still here in the morning, so all I have done all day is eat.

Except for the gumbo and the sausage and the crawfish, this event was easily the low point of the worst year of my professional career, and helps keep me focused on getting the fuck out of this gig. I hope I am able to do that.

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On a much happier note, Blue Girl and Neddie Jingo have recorded a Christmas song, collaborating long distance on a sweet little masterpiece for the holiday. Blue Girl is in my Reciprocity blogroll, and Neddie Jingo is someone I’ll be reading a lot more in the new year. Some of you may recall that I did something like this with y’all last year on a protest song, but they have taken the collaboration idea to a new blog level, and it is wonderful. If your computer can play music, click here to hear the song.

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Finally, I might be talking to God this weekend, so let me know if you want me to ask anything.

I really, really, really need to get a new job.

It’s Friday night, approaching midnight, and I feel like I have just finished a week of running in front of the bulls at Pamplona. I don’t want to complain abut this too much — after all, at least I have a job. It’s a steady paycheck and subsidized health insurance. But since we were bought out by HugeCorp things have gone from bad to worse. I have tried to maintain some sense of balance, and after almost fourteen years at this place I have seen a lot of self-annointed bigshots come and go and I know that no matter how bad things get it’s just a job and my real life starts when I walk out of there each day.

But money touches everything and HugeCorp, like all corporations, exists only and purely to make as much money as possible, and it is like a giant machine, whirring in the basement (or the penthouse), grinding out new schemes and initiatives and procedures, blissfully unaware of what it’s like to be me, trying to implement them and still find time to get some work done. Some of the schemes make some sense in theory, or at least it’s possible to discern the good intentions behind them. But when they are brought into the workplace and start bumping up against reality all their flaws are exposed and eveything the planners didn’t think of takes place and there is chaos, anger and frustration.

I usually like chaos, but I am angry and frustrated because I am starting to see that I am a square peg and I will never fit into any of these HugeCorp round holes. For years we could both ignore this incompatibility, because they paid me and I efficiently did their work. But they are losing interest in getting work done. What they want now is to seem to be getting work done, so investors are impressed by the prospectus and the stock value goes up.

Another thing investors like is cost-cutting, so this week all the office supplies were moved to a warehouse a block away from the building where they are used, where they are being cataloged and shelved. This started without warning or explanation a few days ago, and by today most of our day-to-day stuff we need to work was gone from our premises. So when I was in the middle of a print job on the main laser printer and it ran out of paper, there was no fucking paper anywhere in the building. I asked the woman who had previously been in charge of supplies, and she told me to go to the other building and ask for a ream.

Really. Do I need more of a hint than that? Not only am I getting reamed, but now they want me to ask for it.

OK. I get it. It’s a huge corporation and they want to be as efficient as possible. They want to enhance the bottom line by saving money on supplies by making people accountable for what they use. But because of the stupid, arrogant, thoughtless, haphazard way they went about doing it, I – and the other twenty people who use that printer – had to stop everything and wait for someone to hike down the street and ask for a ream.

It was me, of course, and I didn’t ask. I took four reams of paper and hiked back to the office. I loaded the printer and asked the former supply-woman where she wanted the rest of the paper, and I asked her to call the warehouse and let them know how much paper I had taken, since no one had been there when I arrived. Just helpful Jones, trying to keep all the wheels turning.

For this rogue behavior I got to have a special, ten-minute closed-door meeting with the (new) general manager and the (new) controller, who together have worked there a total of six months. I won’t go into the grisly details of my reprimand, except to say that even though neither of them could refute my logic that I was just trying to get the whole fucking office back to work and ensure that another such delay didn’t occur in a couple of hours, they insisted that I had to play by the new rules (which had never been revealed to me, but that didn’t matter), that there could be no exceptions and it was too fucking bad if I didn’t like it. And, oh, yeah, neither of them was responsible for the new rules – they just happened spontaneously. (I actually used the word “spontaneously” in our conversation, and it appears that neither of them know what it means.)

So, to summarize:

• Stoopid rule.
• Productivity suffers.
• Circumventing the rule and actually working gets you in trouble.
• No one is responsible.
• I really, really, really need to get a new job.