black thursday

today was one of THOSE days at work. oddly enough, I was a spectator today. I watched four people have really bad days. and, while I was secretly glad I was not in their shoes, it just reinforces how whacked the ad business is. within said business, my place of work has grown a new, more potent strain of whacked. superwhacked or hellawhacked, perhaps.

all four people work with me on my one and only account. let's start from the bottom of the team ladder to the top.

junior, newest and youngest team member, got let go. fired. canned. bottom line was they should not have hired him for that specific position. he was qualified for a job elsewhere in the agency. but they figured they could teach him. the kid was right out of school and he just lost his first job. the mental spin cycle they just sent his fragile, fresh mind into makes my stomach knot.

I was let go from my first job after 10 months. I can only hope he looks back and realizes he was better off being let go. That's how I feel about my first job.

After letting Junior go, my HR-challenged management decided a personnel announcement should not be sent out...don't wanna alarm anyone. my office is one big quilting bee. without the facts, we'll spin a yarn Mark Twain would call bullshit on. THE MAN is out of touch enough to believe that no one will notice junior is not coming into work any more?

Management has a knack for screwing the pooch in grand style when it comes to Human Resouces. One ex-employee decided he wanted to part ways with us after being alerted to the fact that his exact job description had been posted on Monster.com by his boss. DOPH! The title was a dead match too. The only way it could have been more embarrassing if his name and phone extension had been in the ad. Yeah, makes ya wanna speed into work, don't it?

Above junior, we have diamond in the rough. smart as a whip, hard worker. all she needs is a few more months under her belt and she'll be moving on up that ladder. she's spread too thinly now and just lost junior as an assist. needless to say, she's bummed he's gone and stressed out by all the work.

in her defense, it's more than the amount of work. it's also the clients she has. all of them are volatile. every client has idiosyncracies: some are stupid, some are evil, some want everything NOWNOWNOWNOW. some are all this and worse. but all of her clients are demanding.

above diamond, we have Mom. underappreciated for all the work she does, and great at her job. she likes being the Mom of the group. she's also in an abusive relationship with our top client contact. if he's in a bad mood, he chews her out. she takes it. he'd be all four kinds of fucked without her and yet he still treats her like a tether ball. anyway, he was in a shitty mood this morning and took it out on her—once again. she puts up with it, and will continue to do so, but it sucks to see the fallout.

above her is top dog. he's at the top of our ladder, but worked and treated like a dog by our owners. he is responsible for diamond's accounts. so they're always putting out fires while I am trying to work with them on my account...it's tiring to watch. well, he finally threw a rod and vented in confidence to me. he's tired of it and has assigned a window of time he's willing to put up with it while trying to make a change for the better. if the change does not occur within this window, he suggests he'll walk.

it makes my day seem like a winning lottery ticket in comparison. I spent the whole morning in meetings, reviewing shit. by the time I got back to the office after lunch, I was useless. I spent most of the time rounding up contacts for junior to network with in the quest for job #2, while watching all of the above unfold and resolve. I'd spent 4 solid hours with my game face on so I could not have been real productive if I had tried.

Friday never looked so good.