Handy! |
I am feeling incredibly slighted at work today.
We did this very high-stress, quick-turnaround project for Classmat3s.com, consisting of a simple companion site for the upcoming Classmat3s TV show on Fox. Classmat3s is happy, we’ve got a whole plan for scaling the site up as more content is available and user loads increase, and so on. All in all, everyone is well pleased.
We don’t have a signed contract for the work yet, but why quibble over details?
So Fox and Classmat3s sends a bunch of us who worked on the project an evite to the launch party, which sounds cool until I pull up the invitation and see that it’s in some swank resort in CA. I jokingly forward the invitation to my boss saying, ‘we should go to this!’ And that’s the last I hear about it, and the last I expected to hear about it, since Saltmin3 isn’t really in shape to pop for a couple of plane tickets and hotel stays.
Until today, when the party is tonight. And G~, the sales guy, is racing through his morning so he can hop on a plane to CA to go to the party.
I was heartbroken like you couldn’t believe. It’s such a junket. The bizdev value is so secondary.
Even so, I make my peace with it. Sales often gets to do cool things that the regular human employees are denied. The occasional junket or free lunch and company-paid parking are the compensatory perks for having part of your pay in jeopardy and having to always be begging strangers for work.
But then G2~, the designer who worked on the site, is not around for a scheduled meeting. Turns out he’s off to CA as well to party with Fox and Classmat3s.
Good for him and all. But bad for me! What a slap that my designer gets to go, but I don’t? And they didn’t even talk to me about it. No one thought to say, ‘hey, Scott might feel left out here. Let’s at least talk to him and let him know our reasoning.’
There’s a little sexiness in having the designer there, sure. There’s some mystique to being the designer that it might be fun to parade him around. But don’t tell me that he’s going to chat up Saltmin3 more than I would be able to. And if you’ve committed to flying two people out, flying three really isn’t that much more of an incremental cost.
I found that out, and now I am just stumbling around the office, stunned. I don’t even know how to feel about being slighted this way. Who should I talk to about it? What should I say? It isn’t as if anything could be done about it now anyway.
They decided not to let me go to the party. Ah well. A quiet little the-heck-with--you jab in the ribs. Maybe they are just thinking of me as a wage-slave and so don’t care about how I feel about Saltmin3 and think the motivational bonus of a junket would be wasted on me. Maybe they just weren’t thinking of me at all. It isn’t as if they owed me a party or an airplane ticket.
But Lord, instead of a motivational junket, or the neutral of no one getting to go, I am now lying stunned in a pit of demotivation. It’s like a bad relationship. I’m feeling so badly about being slighted by Saltmin3 that I cannot even imagine us making up and getting along well and doing great things together. So I think I should talk to someone about it and get past this relationship issue, but it’s not like they owed me a party so I shouldn’t feel bad in the first place, and round and round goes the circular argument.
Alas. I could not be more bummed. I’m that poor kid in second grade with no valentines in the paper bag taped to the front of his desk, trying really hard not to tear up while everyone else bounces around, happy and oblivious.
I knew I was a wage slave already, though, right? It’s just a matter of letting go of the personal disappointment and focusing on the transactional nature of my employment here.
Crap.
Dear Scott -- get over it. Do you get a paycheck? There you go.
Posted by: ScottMcJ on June 30, 2003 03:06 PMBob Seger said it, and he said it very well: "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then". Touché. After eight and a half years of marriage, two and half years of running a business, and two children, I know a lot of things that I didn't used to know.
What depresses me is the astonishing number of things I did know then. I just don't seem to be able to do anything about them. Like Oedipus, I cannot seem to avoid my own fate.
For instance, I was just fired, and I couldn't avoid that. They call it being laid off, but the way I learned it, being laid off was a situation created by a lack of work to sustain your job. There was, and still is, plenty of work for me at the ole' salt min3. They just found some kid to do it at half my salary.
Never mind that I spent six years of formal education learning my craft, that I have plenty of relevant experience, and that I'm much better at it than my replacement is. Never mind that when the new boss took over he told me that my job was as solid as a rock. It feels like an earthquake from my perspective, and the fact that I'm not surprised doesn't help.
It only makes it worse. I knew this could happen when I was sixteen. I knew all about the business world then, or at least I thought I did. It is startling to discover just how right I was. The sleazy salesmen really do seem to make most of the money. The back stabbers I had heard about act just as they were reputed to. Apathy and boredom and shoddy workmanship and pecking orders are all there in abundance. The man who fired me will use me in his resume. He made the bottom line a little blacker and maybe even moved a decimal point somewhere one place to the right.
But he lied to me. And that lie is causing my family and I some very real pain and deprivation. I doubt that that worries him; he lies to customers all the time, and then brags about it. So I'm not surprised to be fired, just astonished that I ever took the job in the first place.
Hey I was going to be different. I was going to "write my own music, sing my own song and wake up every morning ready to dance." But no matter what I did, I was not about to wake up every morning dreading the coming day, not unless I was in prison for some highly idealistic cause.
When my small business became another statistic, I took this job. Now I don't have it anymore. All I have is bills, so I know that I am going to take another job just like it. I ran as hard as I could in what seemed to be the opposite direction as my father's, fearing his fate, and found that I have now gone full circle. I now know for sure what I thought I knew then. And I desperately wish that I didn't.
Posted by: on June 30, 2003 04:45 PMMy god that is well written. I am positively racking my brain trying to figure out who it is. The proper use of semi-colons and quotes would imply editorial, but the tensing seems to imply a recent layoff. I am drawing a blank. It is frustrating to be unable to peg the author of such marvelous prose.
Posted by: ScottMcJ on June 30, 2003 05:31 PMWhat did you expect? You've posted here that you're looking for a job elsewhere, even to the point of describing your interviews.
Why would they buy you a ticket to California when there was the chance you'd be holding down a cubicle at the bank by the time the thrilling event rolled around? Why would you expect more loyalty from them than you've given them?
Posted by: Aamondson on June 30, 2003 06:24 PMah, I take it back. I hadn't realized the Seger post was a cross-post from FC. Or that it makes up about half the posts on the message board the last nine months. Or even that it had been around for nine months. So there you go. Impressedment dissapaited.
Posted by: ScottMcJ on July 2, 2003 08:03 AMGet over thinking that shithole of an employer is ever going to treat you properly. Why are you continually surprised when they behave poorly??
Posted by: Big Pussy on July 3, 2003 02:54 PMIronically, I work for the aforementioned program and they've never let me leave my desk long enough to see it. They brought in bagels and ice cream on the premier date, but neglected to tell me. Is it a work thing or a Classmat3s thing . . .hmmmm
Posted by: Terri on July 22, 2003 07:52 PMare you really fine? we wanna know as are intrigued...love the gimps xx
Posted by: the gimp crew on May 6, 2004 11:46 AMEmail scottmcj hat scottmcj daht com : © scottmcj
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