Just another day...

For the third installment in my jaded look at corporate worklife for Fifty-Somethings like myself, I thought I’d try to describe a typical day at the office, without revealing anything that could speed along my eventual dismissal. I’m told companies generally don’t like candid portrayals of their internal workings, so I’ll try hard not to do anything that could give my identity away. Sorry, but these are the ends we must go to in search of the Truth.

It was a fairly typical Monday, except for the fact it was Tuesday, but still the first day back after a Labor Day weekend. Since there was no weekend shift, I arrived to a darkened office with no one else yet on the job. I log into my workstation and the half-dozen or so programs I’ll be using in the day ahead, surrounded by motivational banners hung in the days before our current cost constraints. “Working smarter, not harder” reads the one directly in my view, though the “t” in “not” is obscured by a power pole, making it the more-accurate “Working smarter, no harder”. Another to my left reads “[this department] rocks!!” Again, I don’t want to acknowledge our location or type of department in light of the above-referenced cowardice, but the important thing is that whoever we are, we do rock. (Not sure when “rocking” came to be the ultimate corporate compliment, but somehow it has, at least at my company).

Slowly the rest of the roughly 15-person shift arrives, many of them late. Punctuality is not a valued trait here, except when it comes to temporaries who can be easily fired. An hour after I’ve arrived, we have one of our two coordinators, most of our coders, but none of our code-checkers, except for me. When some work does start to trickle in, and I’m outnumbered by the coders roughly 7-to-1, I ask the coordinator where the other three checkers are. Turns out one is on short-term disability (STD is the unfortunate acronym – we’re big on acronyms here), one is on vacation, and one is “running late”, as it’s always phrased, though you’d think the “running” part would be getting them here faster. This last person finally arrives another hour or so later, and promptly takes up her usual position on the phone, dealing with some family emergency or another.

Once the work tails off to its usual non-existent pace, I take a few minutes to check on the work of some of the offshore groups I’ve trained. They usually do a pretty good job, at least with the more straightforward varieties of our product, but today I’m able to spot a significant error they made on a job where perfection was stressed in the work instructions. Somehow, the client-supplied spelling of “confidential” has become “confidentia” (a condition related to dementia, perhaps?). I’m able to catch and get the error corrected before much damage is done, and receive a hearty “thank you for highlighting our failing” from the English-as-second-language Asians. I’d have to send an email to my manager to receive any further recognition, which believe it or not I actually do, as he’s instructed me. But I know the matter will end as soon as I click the “send” button.

After a while, another manager ambles up to ask how I’m doing on a project given me Friday. As inept as we are at so many things, we do a bang-up job of contemplating our corporate belly button. In this project, that navel-gazing takes the form of devising an assessment to make sure another site that assesses work after-the-fact is assessing it fairly. We apparently lost the key to this assessor assessment so I’m charged with re-creating it. The thought crosses my mind that perhaps I’m the one who’s secretly being assessed, to determine if I’m worth keeping in the next staff reduction, but I dismiss it as the understandable paranoia of American industry in decline. The assessment is deadening work, but at least it keeps me off the crossword puzzles for a while.
The rest of the day progresses slowly and without much incident. My coworkers are killing time in their usual fashion – paying bills, discussing their daughters’ ballet schedule, reading the paper, exploring the Internet. There’s really nothing else for them to do with our workload like it is, so you can’t blame them for being slackers. We tell ourselves “they also serve who only sit and wait”, because our clients truly are unpredictable in when they’ll need us, but it sounds like just a sad excuse.

I start checking emails for a group I’m not officially part of, but who deals a lot with the offshore production sites. Sometimes I can pick up some valuable information about what my office’s fate might eventually be. Two emails stand out in particular – each outline new, reduced hours of coverage for other locations that have apparently undergone staff reductions. Once again, I’m getting that little jolt of job security out of someone else’s misfortune. I have no shame.

Thankfully, the end of the day is approaching and it looks like I can once again answer affirmatively when my wife greets the mighty breadwinner by asking “Still have a job?” There’s a bit of a late scare when I see the department manager personally carrying his over-flowing shredder refuse to the bin outside. His face is grim but I take some comfort in the fact that he hasn’t mixed the shreddings with used coffee grinds, as abuse-prevention experts advise for the disposal of Vicodin. Some of those sites I’ve just been reading emails about actually report to him in some round-about way, so perhaps that explains his grimness.

Finally I get to clock out and head home. We have two timeclocks to choose from – one a few minutes faster than the other – so we’ve learned to clock in on one and out on the other, to make the day a few minutes more bearable. I’ve cynically included this fact in my training of new-hires. Another day, another $208.74 (before deductions).