Staff Meeting
First things first: I did get an iBook, and I am now taking it to work. But it can only connect to a wireless network (and when it does, only barely) when I’m working the front desk. I get no access in the back office. As I’ll explain in a bit, we now have scheduled time at the front desk, and I don’t have much of it. This is a blessing in the sense that I don’t have to deal with any actual people for the majority of my shifts, but a curse for my loyal and devoted fan, because I cannot blog from work.
So, compromise time: I’ll probably draft entries in MS Word from work and post them when I get home. The operative word, though, is “probably.” I got a lot of actual work done today, which was the purpose of investing in a laptop to begin with, and I plan to continue to get a lot of actual work done. Hopefully I won’t be too tired to blog when I get home in the evening.
We’ll see how it works out.
And now, on with the show…
I have a full, nine-to-five day on Thursdays. As I had been told last week but promptly forgot, we had a staff meeting scheduled at 11. Now, see, here’s how the hierarchy works here: there are student workers, then there’s Jenna, and then there are the actual workers. Jenna, like us, is a student. She just happens to be doing the work-full-time-take-night-school-classes-for-free deal that a lot of people do. The othersare actual college graduates who are, I assume, not working in their chosen vocations.
This particular meeting was for the student workers only. It was hosted by Jenna, who brought sort of frightening looking bagels and individual bottles of orange juice. Fortunately, I’d eaten breakfast and had a few cups of coffee. I was not hungry nor thirsty; rather, I had to shit and piss. (See, I used swear words. Comedy!)
In addition to myself and Jenna, the meeting was attended by Bianca, Gregory, and Eric. Two other student workers, who I don’t believe I’ve mentioned in any meaningful fashion, didn’t show up.
The first I’m going to call Julie. This name is an amusing inside joke that will be understood only by myself and one other person, who doesn’t read this blog. Sigh. The second I’m going to call Oh Face, since he’s a dead ringer for the “‘Oh’ Face” guy in Office Space.
So, Jenna started the meeting with this: “This, right here, is exactly what’s wrong with this office.”
We all looked around at each other, confused. We are not intelligent people.
“Everybody was scheduled to be here right now,” she finally explained. “Two people are not. What is wrong with this picture?”
She had a point. She went on to explain that tardiness is her biggest problem with the current state of the office. She has no objection to outright absences, not even excessive absences, as long as we call first. We’re the ones who are losing the money there, and it’s no skin off her back if she is aware of it.
The problem is the excessive lateness of the majority of the student workers. I’m not a problem, because I am compulsively early to everything, so I’ve never been late once, and unless there are dire circumstances, I never will be. Everybody else, though, is late pretty much all the time. Including Jenna, who admitted that immediately after admonishing everyone.
Among her other problems: excessive phone usage. We have an unsophisticated phone system. We don’t have call waiting, so when people sit on the phone in the back, how does somebody call from the front? And vice-versa. I’ve noticed this problem, too. Again, I have no friends or loved ones, so I don’t receive any personal calls at work. I’m exempt from this problem.
Cell phones are a problem, too. She’s sick of the annoying ringers, for one thing (aren’t we all?), but she’s also tired of people having drawn-out phone conversations. This line of reasoning I don’t really follow. I understand it if there’s actual work to be done, but there usually isn’t. Why can’t somebody have a phone conversation on their own phone when there’s downtime?
But, again, I have no friends, and even so my cell phone’s on vibrate, so no trouble from me.
Another problem from which I am exempt: visitation from friends. Now, my blond friend has said on a few occasions she might pop in on occasion, but that has not happened so far, and now I guess it can’t happen. And, damn, I finally wanted to prove to the other employees that I’m not a complete social misfit; I’m just a partial social misfit with friends who pity me.
Lastly, Jenna said, “If you break something — just say something. Accidents happen, and nobody’s here to blame anything on anyone.”
I immediately thought about the computer, which I broke and which is still out of commission. Now, I did admit that I broke it, but I claimed I was unaware of how it broke. This is a lie; I know exactly how it happened. And I was about to crack while she laid the guilt-trip speech on us.
But I didn’t. If I had, I’m sure there would have been no repercussions aside from the pat “don’t download software.” Still, I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. I also thought it best to turn beet red and sweat profusely. I do this a lot, though; I don’t think anyone noticed.
The final thing: the computer in the back, the one that still works (the fact that I don’t use it is probably the only reason for that), is loaded up with spyware. Everybody is aware of it, and everybody deals with it, but nobody knows how to get rid of it. Jenna suggested that we simply don’t download anything and hope it goes away.
I came close to suggesting they download Ad-Aware, but recalling what happened to the previous computer, I decided maybe that would be a bad idea. Plus, if and when the IT guy ever comes to fix the computer, he’ll find Ad-Aware and evidence of the damage it caused, and they’ll put two and two together and know I was the one who installed and ran the program.
So, again, I said nothing.
Then, Jenna unveiled a new point system. Apparently, point systems are a new (or possibly old) fad in the retail industry. Write-ups are an old, time-tested method of destroying employees’ careers. We have write-ups at my job; three write-ups equal a firing. But now we have points, Jenna explained. We start out with zero, and for each infraction we get a point. When we reach five, we get a write-up and go back to zero. Then, it starts over again until we finally get fired.
In short, we have 15 chances before we get fired instead of three.
“This is outrageous!” we, as a contiguous whole, exclaimed.
Gregory said, “At the Gap, you get eight points.”
“Fine,” Jenna immediately caved, “you can have eight.”
“And they get 10 at Old Navy,” Gregory continued.
“You can have eight,” Jenna repeated.
So, eight it is. Furthermore, we get two tardies a week before a point is taken away. And we get a 10-minute window before we’re actually considered tardy. And we get exemptions for various emergency situations.
In short, nothing has changed.
Okay, some things have changed: now we have assigned front-desk time. I’d thought about suggesting something like this, because it seemed like I was working the front a disproportionate amount of the time while I was on duty. I didn’t want to step on any toes, though, but perhaps Jenna noticed it, too. Basically, I only work the front desk from nine to one on Mondays, three to five on Tuesdays, and one to five on Thursdays. Which didn’t seem like much, but now that I think about it, it’s about as much as I’ve been working it.
So much for proportionality.
In addition to front-desk assignments, each of the workers has a specific task that they must perform to keep the office running as smoothly as possible. My specific task is to check the VoiceMail at least once whenever I’m on duty. I hope I can handle it. Although, because Oh Face never showed up, I ended up tackling his new duty of shredding paper and getting dozens of tiny papercuts all over my hands.
The good news, though, is that I wrote about 23 pages of my screenplay over the course of the day. This, for those out of the know, is approximately how much I’m able to write — in total, including work for other classes — in a week, pre-iBook.
In summary: laptops change lives, and I have papercuts.
Posted by Stan on November 6, 2003 9:52 PM | Permalink | “I’m a Living Joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace | Digg It
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