Seven angels, four kids, one family

After we’d had our number three or four days, I got my first telemarketing call.

The telemarketer attempted to address me by name and got it wrong, but close enough for me to know it was really intended for me.

After her spiel, I said, “I’m just astonished you even have this number, since we’ve only had it a few days and haven’t given it out to anyone. Thanks, bye.” And I hung up.

The next day and two more calls later, I realized: my Do Not Call registry didn’t transfer from one number to the next.

Five minutes online was long enough to fix that particular oversight. But here I am now, wondering: how do they know at the DNC registry that I’ve moved and opened up that other number? How did my personal information disseminate so quickly?

More to the point, how did my personal information get to someone telemarketing fine services and products (in this case, she wanted to sell me sixty magazines or tell me I’d won a free week at a timeshare or maybe magazines about sixty timeshares — I couldn’t care less) in only three days, but it then takes thirty-one days to remove my name from their lists? 

Their computer-generated lists?

This isn’t like junk mail, where it’s printed six weeks in advance and sitting in a warehouse. These phone calls weren’t placed in late May. 

All very strange. And to whichever company sold them my number: may the fruit vanish from your fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt.

This is the last of my job from heck documents. By the end of my time there, I had an X-Files poster up over my desk (they’d moved me into an alcove beneath the stairs, and no, I hadn’t read Harry Potter yet) and I used to say that if the poster came down, they’d know I’d quit. This was the job where, if I didn’t see my manager’s car parked outside, I would walk in thinking “Maybe she didn’t wake up this morning” and feel good until she did show up, proving she was still alive and I still needed to deal with her. That job was bad for my soul.  The other two pieces are at http://philangelus.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/job-from-heck-soft-soap/ and http://philangelus.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/the-job-from-heck-this-is-top-priority/

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To: Middle Management
Re: Morale problems among staff
High Priority
______________________________

It has been noted that the staff is currently undergoing a morale problem, namely that morale has gotten too high. Managers should take the following steps for the immediate rectification of this problem:

1. Micromanage staff. Check up on the most simplistic details of their jobs
2. Make weekly changes to procedure.
3. Nestle everyone in a niche and forbid anyone to leave it
4. Discourage experimentation and any shred of individuality, down to the color schemes on their desktops.
5. Create subgroups and secrets in order to promote factionalism.
6. Continually add to people’s responsibilities.
7. Make sure each person has to report to at least three managers at any given moment. Do not allow these managers to speak to one another about what tasks they have assigned the same person.
8. Everyone has something of which he is proud. Ignore it, or better, belittle it.
9. Break the rules for some to imply favoritism.
10. Discount employees’ personal experiences in favor of what you perceive as the way the world really works.
11. Walk away while employees speak to you. Don’t listen to staff if you can because they’re supposed to be complaining. Talk at length yourself.
12. Change your stories. Change the goals.
13. Assign a priority to each task: top priority. Interrupt other top priority assignments for yours, which genuinely are more important.
14. Praise often and lavishly and as insincerely as possible.
15. Create multiple missions.
16. Don’t reveal the big picture; release only the minimal information necessary for the minimal accomplishment of one’s tasks.
17. Ask for mediocrity.
18. Set unrealistic goals for paltry rewards.
19. Make people do work which you don’t follow up on.

The swift implementation of these goals will soon resolve our company’s morale problem, assuming the managerial staff can do something as simple as this. Morale correction is our top goal! Generate a report for the upper management outlining your progress, due by 2:30 this afternoon.

More of the Job From Heck. My Patient Husband and I wrote this together to deal with our frustration at some of these situations. As before, writing something like this is legal, and strangling one of your three managers (or all three of them) is illegal and immoral.

The other two posts in the series are The Soft Soap Memo and The Morale Memo.

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Managers: having trouble determining a schedule? Want to inject a little element of uncertainty into your favorite employee’s life? Then try out the new random priority generation tables! All you need are two ordinary six-sided dice, and you’re on your way!

Table 1: Random Priority Generation Table (2d6)

Table 2: Top Priority Sub-Table (d6)

Back before I had Kiddo#1, I worked for a magazine publisher and advertising agency that created websites for local businesses. It was a total mess. By the time I left after six months in the job, I had seniority over everyone who wasn’t a manager (bar two or three.)  I had three supervisors who micromanaged, backstabbed, and told me everything was top priority.

I’m going to run three of the sarcastic documents I created during my time there. I needed to relieve stress. I found these when packing to move, and I’m glad I decided to write something funny rather than killing a manager or three.

The post below this will be the first piece I created. It arose because of an actual incident (they were watering down the soft soap instead of buying new soap) and when I’d had enough, I “snapped” in a literary fashion. I showed this to a couple of people in the office, and then disaster struck: one of the employees photocopied it. And left the original in the copy machine.

One of my managers found it, and she read it saying, “This is… Oh, it’s a joke!” I don’t know if she realized I’d written it. They always considered me either too stupid to breathe (“this is how you circle the item number”) or else a master of perfidy (“we want you to spy on the other employees and tell us what they’re thinking”) so it’s difficult to know. They already treated me so horribly that it wasn’t possible to tell if their mood toward me cooled after this surfaced.

Tomorrow we’ll have another one, based on their managerial style. Enjoy!

–

The full list:

Top Priority

Morale Problems

Soft Soap

To: Staff
From: Management
Date: 3/20/97
re: Soft Soap
___________________________
It has come to our attention that management is having to spend too much time in the ladies’ bathroom watering down the soap. Please be conscious of this effort on their part and acknowledge it with proper cooperation in this regard as befits respectful employees.

Soap is a fringe benefit of your job. We do not charge for the soap, and we expect you to be conscious of this benevolence on our part. When we learn of abuses such as employees taking two squirts of soap when one would suffice, we are forced to consider methods of dealing with this perfidy.

We are not policemen and would like to maintain the atmosphere our organization has become known for throughout the state. Self-policing is the key here. Kindly take note of your own behaviors: if you begin the water running before you squirt the soap, if you take more than one squirt, if you lather your hands more than ten times (or longer than thirty seconds) and if you use more than one (1) paper towel in drying your hands, you are a part of the problem and not part of the solution.

One squirt of soap suffices to remove 75% of the bacteria on anyone’s hands. Studies have determined that ten lathering episodes (also known in the literature as “hand-wringing events”) are sufficient to distribute the soap to all fingers and both palms. The upper side of the hand is not necessary to lather. Longer lathering does not noticeably increase the cleansing process and only wastes time and water which are by rights company resources.

Thank you for your prompt attention in this matter. Hopefully we will not need to address it again.