god is an astronaut
has become one of my very favorite bands.
about my job.
this disjointed rant and summarization of my hatred of my job is brought to you by the letter z.
i don’t really talk to anyone about what goes on in my life for the most part. i hadn’t written on omfgoggles in months prior to randomly redesigning it from the ground up and trying to document stuff in my life. i don’t really think it’s significant to most anyone, but it does make me feel better to get things out in the open and maybe get a laugh or two in the process. so, i’m gonna try to write more about what happens with me and less about what happens to others. let’s start by examining my “workplace” and my boss, because she’s a cunt and is a great source of extreme frustration and mental agony in my life.
i work for a consumer credit reporting agency. my title is “director of information technology”. sounds impressive doesn’t it?
a little background: our company was established in 1984. we’ve been under the same ownership for around half of that time. the majority of the management and employee structure of the company is family, except me and our sales guy jeremy. my boss is the owner’s daughter. other employees are related to each other in one way or another. for example, one cs agent is a new acct setup person’s brother, someone else is their neighbor, so on and so forth. the company provides consumer credit information (credit reports, related services) to brokers anywhere in the united states. by utilizing the magic of the intarweb and its many tubes, we can securely transmit credit information to requesters in a matter of seconds. usually.
what does my title and my work mean to my company, specifically, my boss? not much. i’m just another person to whom she may pass stuff she doesn’t want to deal with. ideally, as the director of i.t., i would be allowed free-reign in managing services (Email, hosting, everything tech-related). all that i am allowed control over are things she can’t claim/pretend to understand or things she doesn’t want to deal with herself. ultimately, where does that leave me? i’m effectively a helpdesk technician (more on this later on). my predecessor was fired by our boss for having “spy cameras in his alarm clock”. (she just wanted him gone.) since he left, i’ve lost a lot of my essential (interesting) job functions and responsibilities. the only solid contribution i’ve been allowed to make in the time i’ve been with the company has been one of the worst ideas i could have ever had, in terms of my sanity. i pushed the company to reducing phone and fax traffic by implementing a secure messaging platform to allow inter/intra-office communication without all the email, faxes and phone calls. more on this later, also.
some background on the twunt:
my boss is a complex person. to put it as succinctly as possible, she is an unqualified, overbearing control freak and alcoholic with no respect for anyone. she is, however, well qualified to run an information tech business–5 years of culinary school is just as good as any class you could take at anderson school of management, or any courses you could have in economics or computer science or real world practical experience in any of those fields. she fancies herself a techy and her uses that self-opinion as a way to justify making retarded decisions like using a hosting provider for email rather than letting me set up postfix on our underutilized dual xeon ibm server on our bonded T1s (the whole reason we proposed getting T1s to begin with..)
she is of the mind that if she doesn’t do something herself, it either:
1. won’t be done
2. won’t be done correctly
she’s also totally physically incapable of admitting when she’s made poor decisions or admitting that there may be better alternatives to her own ideas. any time something happens to the company (and i’ll go into this in more detail later on) she blames it on someone else. when she forgot to change a setting in our billing output from our software company, it was their fault. when she didn’t read the release notes in a quickbooks update that borked our entire database and she had to have it professionally recovered, she blamed intuit software. when she forgot to update the credit card information in our online remote control portal, it was their fault for not notifying her. also, when i said she was an alcoholic, i meant it. she has had more booze in her life than any self-respecting person should be allowed.
i’ve got a few fun examples of what a retard she is, too– i might have to go so far as to unarchive some message archives to share them with everyone. consider the following testaments to her ability to manage a business and comprehend basic concepts of our software platform and business model:
example one:
last week, i uncovered a bug in one of our credit software interfaces and reported it to our software company. around 25% of our client base would be affected by this bug, and it has no workaround yet. i notified the twunt, explaining in detail how the issue is going to affect our clients, and how it will likely cause issues for people using this particular application for loan processing. for those of you who care, it’s a credit interface for a popular loan brokering platform which causes accounts in our system with credit card only payment access (i.e. brokers with shitty credit) to perform abnormally, effectively prohibiting them from importing debt to income ratios and liability info (the stuff that helps them get loans and calculate eligibility) thus rendering their credit info and loan platform nearly unusable.
the whole statement went right over her head. she was so enthralled with whatever it is that she does during the day that she was unable to comprehend what i’d just told her. mind you, i’m not allowed to call her– she’s too busy. corporate IM and email are the only acceptable methods of communication. somehow, she took my statement of this potentially dangerous software bug as a request to disable credit card payment for these clients, putting them on a credit line instead (wtf?). so i had to rexplain slowly over the course of 20 minutes before she finally just asked me to keep her “in the know”. this signalled to me that she wasn’t sure who to blame for the problem and that she was happy i was dealing with it because it meant she didn’t need to–although, at the same time, it was probably also worrying her that because it was me doing it, that it might not be taken care of correctly.
logic? what’s that?:
another thing about her is that any person could tell her anything, and she’ll read it and her mind would “comprehend” it in such a way that it makes no sense. for example– (this is fun) if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. her logic would be something similar to this: if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, then it’s a head of iceburg lettuce and we had better take care of it before it destroys life on mars.
this is evident in the bug thing as well as other stuff i’ve approached her about. a coworker approached her a few months back because he hadn’t been getting calls. calls are literally the only thing he is expected to do all day. so, he approached my boss (via the coveted corporate IM network) and said “i haven’t been getting many calls”. she went into a longwinded explanation that it was impossible because our receptionist (an ancient, incompetent hag) documents every call she transfers and the transfer logs show that he’s had a ton of calls today and maybe he should ask me (wtf?) why i feel like i’m taking so many more calls than he is (wtf??).
now.. notice: he didn’t say anything about me. this had absolutely nothing to do with me, other than the fact that i’m his direct supervisor with no supervisory powers.
also: why would the fact that the receptionist documents the calls she [believes] she transferred to different people make it any less true that he hadn’t gotten any calls for the day? effectively, if someone calls in and asks for tech support, they will get me without fail for a great portion of the day. (btw: this is where the whole “i.t. director”/helpdesk thing comes into play again: i’ve got other crap that i’m supposed to do but can’t because i’m on the phone. so essentially, i can take calls and occaisionally take care of other shit)
payroll..usually is a good thing. it’s a chore with my company.
i’ll outline our archaic payroll procedure for you:
1. preformed timesheets are prepared in excel and disbursed to employees via email the period before they’re due
2. employees fill them out and on “pay day” send them to my boss by 0930 pst
3. she hand approves and verifies all time sheets for accuracy, making manual deductions from sick time, PTO, holiday, etc and sends them to the accountant.
4. the accountant reviews all the information, generates checks and prepares all the taxation and whatnot for each check and sends them back to my boss.
5. my boss enters the info manually into her accounting software (quickbooks..yuck) and prints checks for each employee.
6. she visits the company’s bank’s website and manually transfers the needed funds into the payroll account
7. paychecks are signed by the owner or her husband and are ready to go for the next business day where they’re disbursed either by picking them up at the office or mailing them to employees not near the office.
you still get paper checks? wow. — Jacob @ Bank of Albuquerque
in the 23 years we’ve been in business, payroll still amounts to printed paychecks handed out a day after payroll is manually approved by my boss (excel timesheets) and processed by some random accountant friend of the owner. i know you’re thinking now– “chris lives in new mexico. how does he get his paychecks?”. they’re mailed to me. when i started with the company, they would just first class mail my checks to me. it started out taking 3-4 days to get here, and gradually got worse, taking as long as 13 days to receive a paycheck. i approached my boss about looking into direct deposit, but my request was met with a swift statement of “we can’t do it.” since i was a relatively new hire, i didn’t want to press the issue. after a month of consecutive 2 week transit times for my paychecks to arrive, i finally requested that my paycheck be sent priority mail. (~$3 a pop). she thought about it and approved my request.
for a short while, i would receive my paycheck an average 4-5 days after payroll was completed. this was the norm for quite a while (i got accustomed to it, because it wasn’t really that big of a deal..inconvenient, yes, but not a big deal) sometime in june, i received my paycheck and deposited it into my bank account like i always do, proceded to pay bills and estimated taxes (since i don’t automatically have state taxes withheld). i keep a really close eye on my bank accounts and i noticed that my balance was reporting somewhere in the neighborhood of -$1000. i frantically called my bank to see what was going on and was informed by the clerk that my last deposit had bounced. (wtf?)
apparently, my boss had forgotten to complete the manual transfer of money from the high-yield savings acct to the business payroll checking account. (she blamed the bank, of course.) essentially, follow my list of steps and omit #6.
since i get my check last, the $20,000 in overdraft on the payroll account had been eaten up by everyone else’s paychecks. i contacted her (via IM) that my check bounced. and she was really confused for the better part of a half hour. she told me she’d call the bank and get it sorted.
now, the fun part. not only did my check bounce, but they have no way of correcting it electronically. she looked at sending money to me via western-union. i asked her about overnighting a new check to me and she told me it was too late for fedex pickup (3:00PST, can i get another WTF?) and the only recourse would be sending me a new check via priority mail. right on.
ultimately, her incompetence and unwillingness to look into digital payroll distribution cost the company.. *whips out a calculator* approximately $1100 in bank fees. (22 x $30 + $300 in bank fees i incurred which were reimbursed with two forms of receipts required..in case i tried to screw them?)
after conferring with many parties, including coworkers, parents, cadie’s parents, pets, etc. consensus was that i should email the owner of the company about the whole thing and include a request for direct deposit as a money-saver, work saver, postage saver, paper saver, general wunder-service.
quick background on the owner: she’s an extremely competent businesswoman who has made a ton of money on a niche product in a busy sector and has made a really good name for herself in the mortgage industry. she’s also cursed with making poor business choices. hiring her daughter to manager her business is big one. normally, she’s extremely easy to get ahold of– i could usually call her cellphone and talk to her. she’s also a pretty cool lady- flying me to CA to take care of moving data infrastructure between offices, flying me out when i was hired for onsite training and paying for $300-$400 in alcohol as an entertainment expense. pretty sick. this year, she’s been difficult to get ahold of because she’s been spending a lot of time away from the office. of course, i’ve never really needed to contact her til now.
the email of doom:
i typed up a really nice, professional email summarizing the whole issue (because i had a sneaking suspicion that my boss would never tell her mom) and included a proposal to help look for a way to set up direct deposit because of all the good stuff associated with it. i also outlined how much it “distressed me” to find out that they had no recourse in the event that something like this happened. i sent the email late on a saturday night and i figured i’d receive a call or response monday from the owner asking me questions or talking about the problem. instead, i received an instant message from my boss stating that the owner had forwarded the email to her (didn’t mention she’s also notorious for reading her mom’s email–and this is ok with both parties) and again with the simple answer: “we’re happy with our present payroll procedures but thanks for asking about it.” FUCK.
what prompted all this hatred this week? my friend in the office has been taking care of mailing my check herself, and i’ve been getting it really quick. unfortunately, she was out of the office this week, which left my boss to send my check. she forgot to until thursday. so.. it sat on her desk for a whole work week before she realized “oh, i better mail this.” so, essentially, again, i’m left without money to pay my bills and buy my sister (grr) a birthday present at the concert we’re going to..all because my boss forgot to pay me.
i’m debating whether or not i should spend the next few weeks forgetting to answer my phone, or forgetting to return emails, or forgetting to keep her apprised of situations that could land the company in trouble. maybe i could even blame it on someone else. if you’d like to be the subject of blame, please let me know by emailing me, and be sure to include a document outlining your qualifications as a scapegoat.
wow. all this just to outline how much i hate my boss? i suck. anyway, this barely scrapes the surface of the whole situation at work and doesn’t outline a any of the unsavory [read: potentially illegal] stuff. for those stories, you know where to reach me.
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOOOOSION
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