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).
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
The challenges of corporate training
As I noted in my first post yesterday – the by-now widely read and discussed “Greetings FiftySomethings” – my work in the corporate world is primarily as a trainer. Since this lacks cost-center value in the current economy, my training department was recently dissolved and I was put back into live production, processing financial documents.
I probably prefer live production, when there’s actually something to produce, but such has not been the case lately. Since we’ve spent most of our production time sitting around with little or nothing to do for the past several months, I was excited recently when asked by a higher-up to give a weeklong training session to two of our temporaries.
First, a little background. Because we’ve been in a hiring freeze for the last year or so, when we do need some additional help, we get it through temporary staffing agencies. These folks can come in for a week of training and generally be good enough to fill a seat and at least look like they’re doing a passable job. Then, when the next corporate bottom-line panic comes along, these people can be terminated with a simple call to their agency – no messy scenes, no paperwork, no exit interviews, no etc.
About ten percent of the time, it works well enough that the temp becomes a perm. Usually, the most we can hope for is that they show up regularly and not fall asleep at their work station (virtually all of the temp positions are on the night shift – midnight to 8am). If this happens, management views them as good enough to keep around, at least for a while, regardless of whether they’re any good or not.
Our history with temps is not a proud one. We once hired someone with one eye whose job was to read documents. We hired another reader we discovered on the third day didn’t know how to spell. (I’m always careful to proofread their resumes while they’re still under consideration but incredibly enough, typos don’t disqualify them.) We once hired a typist we eventually discovered couldn’t manage more than about 20 words per minute, and most of those began with “xyvzx”. We hired a young wild-eyed bald guy who was so into Renaissance reenactments that he’d bring a knife to work and clean his nails with it. One group I was training in a windowed conference room took a 10-minute break on the first morning of our five-day session, and I watched in disbelief as two of the participants got into their cars and drove away, never to be seen again.
The twosome I trained a few weeks back were designated by their supervisor to receive an advanced kind of quality training that they really weren’t experienced enough to receive. I’ve made failed arguments against this in the past, but have decided just to go with the flow. I was getting overtime for the training, and that’s about the most positive thing I can find in my work these days.
Janie and Bertie arrived in the training room at the 3am start time, and did their best to stay awake while I overviewed the basics of what we would cover. I had just trained Bertie in basic reading only a few months before, and found her to be the well-read talent that we usually don’t attract. She took notes, asked intelligent questions, and did well enough on all the exercises to demonstrate an understanding of what was going on. Janie, on the other hand, had struggled with her basic training six months previously and wasn’t about to do well with this advanced stuff. We trainers like to encourage give-and-take with our classes by repeating the old there-are-no-stupid-questions line, but Janie proved repeatedly that this was not the case. Most questions included a mispronounced term she should’ve been using on-the-job virtually every day. “When do we update the TLC?” she asked, apparently referring to the table of contents, or “TOC”. “What is squaddling again?” The term is actually “quadding”. During one overview on the subject of when to correct apparent client mistakes, she raised her hand and asked when she would be entitled to a quarterly bonus. That’s not a stupid question?
Anyway, we limped through the training, trying to cram what was supposed to be a 36-hour module into about 16 hours. I was able to take out a lot of material they didn’t need to know, but we still arrived at the end of class on Friday without having covered about a quarter of the work. I gave them a reading assignment to do that would cover most of this (like that was going to happen) and said I’d try to catch up with them during downtime the following week to finish our work.
On Tuesday I came in at my normal 5am start time and noticed all the production tables were empty, a sure sign there’s nothing going on. I approached the shift’s production coordinator, who sits right across from Bertie, and explained how we’re going to spend the next few hours finishing up our training. I get a funny look from the coordinator, who whispers “Bertie and Janie were both laid off last night. Their last day is Friday.”
The sad thing was that not only was I not surprised, I actually laughed. It’s not the first time something like this has happened in our office, and I guess it sort of reinforced for me how dysfunctional we truly are, which makes for very little pressure on a trainer’s or anyone else’s performance. Later in the morning, a manager approached me to apologize for the awkward misunderstanding – “don’t think your time was wasted; we might be able to bring them back after the first of the year when things pick up”, she offered lamely. But in the end we just laughed together about how silly it all was.
I said my good-byes to the pair as they left for the last time Friday, wishing both of them luck and suggesting we might work together again some day (sure). Bertie asked if I could write her a letter of recommendation, which I gladly agreed to do. I thought Janie would similarly request a “letter of resuscitation”, but was glad she didn’t.
I probably prefer live production, when there’s actually something to produce, but such has not been the case lately. Since we’ve spent most of our production time sitting around with little or nothing to do for the past several months, I was excited recently when asked by a higher-up to give a weeklong training session to two of our temporaries.
First, a little background. Because we’ve been in a hiring freeze for the last year or so, when we do need some additional help, we get it through temporary staffing agencies. These folks can come in for a week of training and generally be good enough to fill a seat and at least look like they’re doing a passable job. Then, when the next corporate bottom-line panic comes along, these people can be terminated with a simple call to their agency – no messy scenes, no paperwork, no exit interviews, no etc.
About ten percent of the time, it works well enough that the temp becomes a perm. Usually, the most we can hope for is that they show up regularly and not fall asleep at their work station (virtually all of the temp positions are on the night shift – midnight to 8am). If this happens, management views them as good enough to keep around, at least for a while, regardless of whether they’re any good or not.
Our history with temps is not a proud one. We once hired someone with one eye whose job was to read documents. We hired another reader we discovered on the third day didn’t know how to spell. (I’m always careful to proofread their resumes while they’re still under consideration but incredibly enough, typos don’t disqualify them.) We once hired a typist we eventually discovered couldn’t manage more than about 20 words per minute, and most of those began with “xyvzx”. We hired a young wild-eyed bald guy who was so into Renaissance reenactments that he’d bring a knife to work and clean his nails with it. One group I was training in a windowed conference room took a 10-minute break on the first morning of our five-day session, and I watched in disbelief as two of the participants got into their cars and drove away, never to be seen again.
The twosome I trained a few weeks back were designated by their supervisor to receive an advanced kind of quality training that they really weren’t experienced enough to receive. I’ve made failed arguments against this in the past, but have decided just to go with the flow. I was getting overtime for the training, and that’s about the most positive thing I can find in my work these days.
Janie and Bertie arrived in the training room at the 3am start time, and did their best to stay awake while I overviewed the basics of what we would cover. I had just trained Bertie in basic reading only a few months before, and found her to be the well-read talent that we usually don’t attract. She took notes, asked intelligent questions, and did well enough on all the exercises to demonstrate an understanding of what was going on. Janie, on the other hand, had struggled with her basic training six months previously and wasn’t about to do well with this advanced stuff. We trainers like to encourage give-and-take with our classes by repeating the old there-are-no-stupid-questions line, but Janie proved repeatedly that this was not the case. Most questions included a mispronounced term she should’ve been using on-the-job virtually every day. “When do we update the TLC?” she asked, apparently referring to the table of contents, or “TOC”. “What is squaddling again?” The term is actually “quadding”. During one overview on the subject of when to correct apparent client mistakes, she raised her hand and asked when she would be entitled to a quarterly bonus. That’s not a stupid question?
Anyway, we limped through the training, trying to cram what was supposed to be a 36-hour module into about 16 hours. I was able to take out a lot of material they didn’t need to know, but we still arrived at the end of class on Friday without having covered about a quarter of the work. I gave them a reading assignment to do that would cover most of this (like that was going to happen) and said I’d try to catch up with them during downtime the following week to finish our work.
On Tuesday I came in at my normal 5am start time and noticed all the production tables were empty, a sure sign there’s nothing going on. I approached the shift’s production coordinator, who sits right across from Bertie, and explained how we’re going to spend the next few hours finishing up our training. I get a funny look from the coordinator, who whispers “Bertie and Janie were both laid off last night. Their last day is Friday.”
The sad thing was that not only was I not surprised, I actually laughed. It’s not the first time something like this has happened in our office, and I guess it sort of reinforced for me how dysfunctional we truly are, which makes for very little pressure on a trainer’s or anyone else’s performance. Later in the morning, a manager approached me to apologize for the awkward misunderstanding – “don’t think your time was wasted; we might be able to bring them back after the first of the year when things pick up”, she offered lamely. But in the end we just laughed together about how silly it all was.
I said my good-byes to the pair as they left for the last time Friday, wishing both of them luck and suggesting we might work together again some day (sure). Bertie asked if I could write her a letter of recommendation, which I gladly agreed to do. I thought Janie would similarly request a “letter of resuscitation”, but was glad she didn’t.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Greetings FiftySomethings
So let’s see what this blogging stuff is all about…
I’m calling this blog “FiftySomethingMan” because I hope it’s mainly going to be about the challenges (many) and the triumphs (hopefully there’ll be some) of being a middle-aged, middle-class sorta-corporate-type in 2008. I’m facing much of the same stuff in my work life that a lot of people are dealing with right now – downsizing, outsourcing, cutbacks, restructurings – and I thought it might help get me through to keep some kind of chronicle as I seem to spiral toward unemployment or forced early retirement.
Sounds like fun reading, right?
I’ll also reserve the right to go off-topic periodically and write about something completely unrelated to work but that still might resonate with my Fellow Fitty’s. (“Fitty”, as I understand it, is a hep modern term referring primarily to the hip-hop performer “Fifty Cent”. Like most baby boomers, I try desperately to stay up with these things, but know in my heart I’m failing pathetically.) Not sure yet what those topics might be, but we all know there’s plenty of annoyances out there to keep us aging boomers complaining.
I guess I should start with a little about myself. A key fact – my true name – will go undisclosed at this point, as I’m hoping the anonymity will give me more freedom to write frankly. I’m a 54-year-old man, living in the suburbs of a major southern U.S. city with my wife and teenage son and our three cats. I’ve lived in the South for almost 30 years now and, even though I spent my life before that in Florida, I don’t consider myself a typical white Southerner. Thanks to parents who lived in the Northeast until just before I was born and several years of college education, I consider myself an enlightened progressive who is generally uncomfortable around all the NASCAR dads I come in contact with these days. I have a few hobbies, but probably not enough, and until just recently defined myself primarily by the kind of work I do.
I work in the financial services industry, helping process documents the Securities and Exchange Commission requires corporations to produce. I’ve done this for the last three decades. I consider myself very good at my job, and have been recognized as such by my company with a nice salary and extras that have included training opportunities around the world. In the last few years, however, this training “perk” has been diminished by the fact that it’s mostly Asian workers making a tenth of my pay that I’m training, and I’m basically showing them how to take my job away from me and my coworkers. I could’ve declined the opportunity but the movement of our work offshore would’ve just as easily gone on without me. I was convinced at one point that I was positioning myself as an intermediary who’d be able to maintain his position with the company even after all the work had transitioned overseas, but now I’m not so sure.
My office is located in a drab warehouse office park in a part of town more accustomed to the transportation industry and its giant trucks than to people working on disclosure documentation. They hollowed out a small corner of the warehouse to install us, our air-conditioning and our computers, but kept us close enough to our blue-collar “pick-and-packers” to remind us of the muggy fate that could eventually await us. There are probably about 40 of us left in the air-conditioning, down from the 80-90 we had only a few years ago. Most of those who have now moved on to another worklife left of their own choice, sensing how they’d eventually be shown the door anyway. Plus, there’s been a parade of countless temporaries who come and go like summer fireflies, many staying long enough to be trained by me and put in a few months before finding full-time work elsewhere.
Where we stand in the current economic downturn is not a good place: our clients are the suffering megabanks and investment houses you hear about in the business news, and the work they are able to give our company mostly goes to those able Asians I trained so well. Only six months ago, I was making almost half my take-home pay in overtime. Then it started getting slower and slower and we all knew something bad was about to happen. We actually breathed a sigh of relief six weeks ago when our department manager called a rare meeting to announce we were going on a four-day workweek and virtually no overtime. When we were summoned to gather ‘round and saw his trembling hands and nervous manner, we were actually relieved to hear we were only receiving drastic paycuts and nothing worse. Yay!
That seemed to relieve the pressure for him to do something for a little while, but as we continued to plod through the summer doing crossword puzzles and cross-stitch, the fears rose again. And then last week, news of layoffs elsewhere in the company started spreading (no formal announcements, of course; just farewell emails and unreturned phone messages) and again we’re wondering how much longer before the axe falls on our sorry necks.
As I write this now – ironically, on Labor Day weekend – I am perversely comforted by the new job losses. For at least a few of the departed, I’ve been asked to pick up some of their duties. Others’ absence may require a little more overtime from those who are left. These tea leaves give me another temporary jolt of job security.
I feel guilty for such a heartless attitude. It reminds me of how two of our cats will attack the third one whenever she cries out with a stepped-on tail. In a sense, we’ve become no more than animals looking out only for ourselves and our own families (if they’re lucky). The global economy is ruled by the law of the jungle, I guess, even though like my cats we’ve been semi-domesticated.
What will follow in future postings (I think that’s what they’re called) are stories of how and if I survive this downturn, and what happens if a pudgy grey-haired guy is thrown out into the job market only a few years short of what would have been his retirement. Maybe the attitude I’ve cultivated while working with hundreds of twenty-something trainees halfway around the world will somehow serve me when I end up interviewing with one of their American cohorts, trying to get myself another job.
We’ll see.
I’m calling this blog “FiftySomethingMan” because I hope it’s mainly going to be about the challenges (many) and the triumphs (hopefully there’ll be some) of being a middle-aged, middle-class sorta-corporate-type in 2008. I’m facing much of the same stuff in my work life that a lot of people are dealing with right now – downsizing, outsourcing, cutbacks, restructurings – and I thought it might help get me through to keep some kind of chronicle as I seem to spiral toward unemployment or forced early retirement.
Sounds like fun reading, right?
I’ll also reserve the right to go off-topic periodically and write about something completely unrelated to work but that still might resonate with my Fellow Fitty’s. (“Fitty”, as I understand it, is a hep modern term referring primarily to the hip-hop performer “Fifty Cent”. Like most baby boomers, I try desperately to stay up with these things, but know in my heart I’m failing pathetically.) Not sure yet what those topics might be, but we all know there’s plenty of annoyances out there to keep us aging boomers complaining.
I guess I should start with a little about myself. A key fact – my true name – will go undisclosed at this point, as I’m hoping the anonymity will give me more freedom to write frankly. I’m a 54-year-old man, living in the suburbs of a major southern U.S. city with my wife and teenage son and our three cats. I’ve lived in the South for almost 30 years now and, even though I spent my life before that in Florida, I don’t consider myself a typical white Southerner. Thanks to parents who lived in the Northeast until just before I was born and several years of college education, I consider myself an enlightened progressive who is generally uncomfortable around all the NASCAR dads I come in contact with these days. I have a few hobbies, but probably not enough, and until just recently defined myself primarily by the kind of work I do.
I work in the financial services industry, helping process documents the Securities and Exchange Commission requires corporations to produce. I’ve done this for the last three decades. I consider myself very good at my job, and have been recognized as such by my company with a nice salary and extras that have included training opportunities around the world. In the last few years, however, this training “perk” has been diminished by the fact that it’s mostly Asian workers making a tenth of my pay that I’m training, and I’m basically showing them how to take my job away from me and my coworkers. I could’ve declined the opportunity but the movement of our work offshore would’ve just as easily gone on without me. I was convinced at one point that I was positioning myself as an intermediary who’d be able to maintain his position with the company even after all the work had transitioned overseas, but now I’m not so sure.
My office is located in a drab warehouse office park in a part of town more accustomed to the transportation industry and its giant trucks than to people working on disclosure documentation. They hollowed out a small corner of the warehouse to install us, our air-conditioning and our computers, but kept us close enough to our blue-collar “pick-and-packers” to remind us of the muggy fate that could eventually await us. There are probably about 40 of us left in the air-conditioning, down from the 80-90 we had only a few years ago. Most of those who have now moved on to another worklife left of their own choice, sensing how they’d eventually be shown the door anyway. Plus, there’s been a parade of countless temporaries who come and go like summer fireflies, many staying long enough to be trained by me and put in a few months before finding full-time work elsewhere.
Where we stand in the current economic downturn is not a good place: our clients are the suffering megabanks and investment houses you hear about in the business news, and the work they are able to give our company mostly goes to those able Asians I trained so well. Only six months ago, I was making almost half my take-home pay in overtime. Then it started getting slower and slower and we all knew something bad was about to happen. We actually breathed a sigh of relief six weeks ago when our department manager called a rare meeting to announce we were going on a four-day workweek and virtually no overtime. When we were summoned to gather ‘round and saw his trembling hands and nervous manner, we were actually relieved to hear we were only receiving drastic paycuts and nothing worse. Yay!
That seemed to relieve the pressure for him to do something for a little while, but as we continued to plod through the summer doing crossword puzzles and cross-stitch, the fears rose again. And then last week, news of layoffs elsewhere in the company started spreading (no formal announcements, of course; just farewell emails and unreturned phone messages) and again we’re wondering how much longer before the axe falls on our sorry necks.
As I write this now – ironically, on Labor Day weekend – I am perversely comforted by the new job losses. For at least a few of the departed, I’ve been asked to pick up some of their duties. Others’ absence may require a little more overtime from those who are left. These tea leaves give me another temporary jolt of job security.
I feel guilty for such a heartless attitude. It reminds me of how two of our cats will attack the third one whenever she cries out with a stepped-on tail. In a sense, we’ve become no more than animals looking out only for ourselves and our own families (if they’re lucky). The global economy is ruled by the law of the jungle, I guess, even though like my cats we’ve been semi-domesticated.
What will follow in future postings (I think that’s what they’re called) are stories of how and if I survive this downturn, and what happens if a pudgy grey-haired guy is thrown out into the job market only a few years short of what would have been his retirement. Maybe the attitude I’ve cultivated while working with hundreds of twenty-something trainees halfway around the world will somehow serve me when I end up interviewing with one of their American cohorts, trying to get myself another job.
We’ll see.
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