life in corporate hell

Wanna know why i want to quit my job?

Today i got a major talkin’-to at work from my boss’s boss, with my [fuckwit] boss and another boss in the room, looking like rotten teenagers who got ratted out by some wet-assed freshman; neither of them had anything to say because they knew that it was not my fault that i had almost no guidelines for a project i worked hard on and was now being grilled about.

It was all about the intranet site i built for them (99% from scratch, using only pre-made text).

• Who am i communicating with?
• Who have i been answering to?
• Who’s been giving me the orders?
• What kind of guidelines were given within which i was to operate?
• What kind of a time frame was it to be done within?
• Was there any talk about getting supervisor permission every time i opened a file or stroked a friggin’ key?

But the most important topic they really want to know is:

• Who’s paying for this time you’ve been paid for, when you weren’t doing your [normal] job?

The Bottom Line here is that they’re $140,000 in the hole because they were too greedy to make holiday money to bother developing their own business, and instead chose these torrential downfucks to do their job for them. And they did it badly. Which meant that

• That many packages arrived poorly packed and their contents broken, damaged, missing, or worse;
• That the systems they gave us to use barely functioned within the scope that we needed them to and insured that critical mistakes could not be corrected;
• That when their crappy website fucked up we had to wait in line for hours and sometimes much, much longer just to get really critically bad things (such as prices that were off by as much as $150/$4) fixed;
• That we had no control over any Real aspect of the business besides literally handing out free product left and right;
• That they lost half of their call center workforce over the fiasco;
• And that they had to give out appeasement money hand over fist to rightly angry customers just so they could retain their popular and swanky reputation.

It was a piss-poor business decision, and it has almost run the entire brand out of business. If it weren’t for the massive amount of money they did manage to make, they’d have been in the hole for a hell of a lot more money than $140k! Fortunately, they only have 4.5 years to go on their contract.

But i digress.

For this project i hand-coded about 3MB of code from scrath into Notepad (and in several cases, made neat, usable graphics using MS Paint, often better than some of the ones i had to work with). There are literally hundreds of products that our people now have better resources for. And towards the end, when they couldn’t get their heads out of their asses to flip the dreaded, and apparently difficult to operate, Folder Permissions Switch so that temps and new hires could see the thing running of the S:\ drive, i made another one for the P:\ drive. (Actually, i only copied it within minutes, and because i’m good at what i do and work smart, i didn’t have to change a single URI.)

The business structure of the online manual project was never formalized in any way.

A more cynical and pessimistic person might theorize that if enough people deny accountability for the online Quick Reference and Product Resource guides that i volunteered to do (and at least twice asked if i could just do the goddamn thing at home), then they could have a fraud case against me.

To wit: I used several dozen man-hours, at the foaming-at-the-mouth insane price of $10.70 an hour, to develop this thing, when it could easily have been done in just a few dozen man-hours if done by a team of Actual Professionals (which they evidently don’t realize charge a whole fucking hell of a lot more than i cost them). Which, i should mention, looks fucking sweet, functions exactly as it should, includes tons of useful content, and, ahem, validates (well, except for one little CSS hack).

Given the overwhelming amount of Real Work i had to do, i was often extremely limited in the time i could spend on it. During peak season (November through February in this case), i barely touched it, or didn’t touch it at all. When we slowed down, i was all over it. And that’s really only been in the last couple weeks. I’d say all in all i spent an average of maybe 30-90 minutes a week on the thing, which is why it was launched (before complete) about 4 months after i had first proposed it, and only got “finished” (more or less) this week.

It was not, i must point out, done from a bully-pulpit. I got talked-to in an even and pretty fair way. And although i am a bitterly cynical and pessimistic man (don’t knock it – surprises are always better this way), i’m actually quite positive – at this stage – that All They Want is to figure out which brand and department has to foot the bill for a fraction of my paycheck.

I forwarded every bit of e-mail i sent or received regarding the thing to my boss’s boss. He’s bound to see not only how unprofessional and unbusinesslike my writing is, but also that i have no culpability in the whole affair, and in fact often volunteered to Work For Free.

In any case, i am scouring Monster again.

Anybody know of any local businesses needing a non-fuckwit?