Office Politics

I don't think I've ever worked for such a disorganized company, at least not one with an actual HR department and policy handbooks and so on. I'm not sure if its a function of the boredom of the job, but the drama involved is pretty off the scale of my experience. So far this week we've had three people leave, and its only Tuesday!!

Yesterday they decided to change our break structure, in response to our request, since we now have longer shifts. But they totally botched the implementation, because we wanted to space out the breaks more, and they moved them closer together!! Then the manager came in and basically told everyone to stop complaining because the decision had been taken "with many factors in mind" and that the change was non-negotiable. Then she slammed the smokers for complaining and said they had to tough it out and learn that the world had changed. When she left Julie just left, and told us not to tell them to see how long it would be before they noticed. (About 4 hours) Then the manager told us that we should take our breaks as we always had today, but then we told her that our usual break was already over!! Shows how much she actually knows what was going on. So then we went to the lunch room at our new time, which was supposedly moved so that there would be fewer people there, but sure enough it was a total mad house, unlike our old break which we basically had run of the room for. So, she's pretty much managed to alienate the entire department in one stroke. I wonder if they taught her that in management school?

The other strange thing is that they've hired a new guy (two, but one quit after one day) and they seem to be intentionally isolating him from the rest of the group. He has different break times, and they've forced him to sit over in the corner far from the established "veterans". So we haven't been able to talk to him in two days. The theory being that Jan, our mid level manager, doesn't want him to start talking to her "enemies" over in the main group of employees. Now it looks like at least three of us are planning on quitting at the end of this week. So much for the plan to claw back the 55,000 page backlog.

And this is a publically traded company!!

On the plus side working there is now better that 99% of today's TV, and the drama factor alone is enough to keep me coming back for more.