I, however, am not a weeble.
I might fall down.
The heretofore unmentioned ChaosManager, Anais, who has assumed temporary command of my (work) life, pushed me today to answer the will-you or won't-you question about taking on some of the 'Nuts on a freelance basis. She also said that she thinks most of the NIMO are not planning to inflict themselves on me (or any other professional), but planning to manage their own accounts. So, you know, now I'm inclining toward saying, yes, I'll do it, because I have no grudges against the not-crazy 'Nuts.
But Gidget, who is on the verge of being able to hire me but not quite there and maybe not going to be there until the end of summer or some time like that, Gidget is not willing to work with any of the 'Nuts. So, if I take them on, I have to trust that they will, in fact, send me checks each month. Checks that do not bounce.
Life being the continuing source of irony that it is, it turns out that my unemployment benefits, should I collect them, are actually very little less than the amount I'm making under the new, discounted salary plan here, so definitely more than I'd make from freelancing for a handful of Assorted 'Nuts.*
I was raised to work for a living, so I'd rather work. I'm just saying. Crazy people + not enough money to live on, vs. no crazy people + just about enough to live on while I look for something better.
This conversation, you will be interested (or, you know, not) to hear, even though I've already inflicted most of it on you, could be largely academic.
Turns out that Jason's version of "stretching" my final day here is less a question of another four or five days than it is another few months.
*wobble*
Don't get me wrong. I'm still going to be laid off. It's just more like I'm being given three months' notice, instead of three weeks.
*wobble*
Or something.
*wobble*
I've already cleaned out my desk, you know. Mentally, I'm already taking a long, leisurely break (one day) before diving full-time into the job search and signing up with a temp agency or two for some extra income. I've already laid the groundwork with Bernie and Buehler, to inspire them to come up with some freelance stuff I can do for them. Gidget is already looking for projects I can do freelance for her in the interim.
*wobble*
It's not definite yet, but the week after laying off 50% of the Argonut Café staff because we were on the verge of sinking faster than the Titanic, Jason is suddenly talking about having the money to hire yet another outside company, this one to handle the website changes and improvements that Gidget and I begged for last spring. And I guess he's decided I'm the one who knows how to make it happen or how to tell if it's working or--heck, I don't know what he's thinking.
*wobble*
___________
* Those of you concerned that I might (a) eat less and lose some weight; or, (b) be forced to stop smoking for lack of the money to pay for such an expensive and slow method of suicide, well, you can relax. I won't be wealthy, but I should be able to keep a roof over my head, gas in my car (wish me interviews!), and some food on the table. How much food depends on how much COBRA is going to cost me.
It's blizzarding outside and I may go home to work this afternoon, but in the meantime I'm in the office and in need of a break.
And, you know, I want to whine. I am being laid off. In the worst economy since the Great Depression, I'm about to be unemployed. They are outsourcing my work. The Argonut Café no longer wants to deal with the crying and complaining from the Argonuts Afield when their advertising fails to magically produce a hundred thousand dollars in business each month.
Fine. I get it. As I told Jason, this is not my first time at this particular rodeo. I saw the writing on the wall quite some time back. I've been hoarding my pennies and cutting back on all my expenditures and I won't have to collect food stamps for a while.*
But! (And, let me add, !!)
Jason came to my desk yesterday, looking embarrassed and saying he had an "interesting situation" or something like that. I rather expected to be told that they'd decided they could do without me starting right that minute.
But, no! It seems there was a two-hour call with the NIMO yesterday, and you know what? They told him they don't want to change how their marketing is handled. They want me to keep doing it.
!!
After making my life a misery for the past four months, the news that they won--that they are now free to do it themselves or hire whatever outside company they think can do better--this news upset them.
!!
Jason came to my desk to tell me this, to apologize because he still doesn't intend to reinstate my job but to say that maybe my "final" day of April 10 might be "stretched," and to ask if I'd like to take some of the Assorted Nuts on, on a freelance basis.**
Why is it that I'm always losing my job, but always having to fight to actually become unemployed?
___________________
* I love being pathetic
** Am I cynical or justified in being just a teeny bit concerned that he might fight my unemployment claim, saying they offered me work and I refused it?
Posted by AnneZook at 11:00 AM | Comments (5)And now? More Mandatory Fun!
Posted by AnneZook at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)It's not quite the "final" curtain for me - but it's getting close. It looks like it's also close to the final curtain for the company.
They had another round of layoffs today. 9 people. Considering there were only about 14 of us left, that's a pretty clear sign they're going down, don't you think?
I got a temporary reprieve. I'm here until April 10, during which interval I'm supposed to 'transition' all of the accounts to outside management. Then I get two weeks' severance, which is generous. (A company doesn't have to give you severance if they give you two weeks' notice of a layoff.)
Jason called me in for a special one-on-one meeting because he didn't want to have to tell eight people they were out of work today and then turn to me and say, "but not you." Also, rather surprisingly, to say many nice things about me and the phenomenal job I've been doing. !! It's even possible he meant part of it--he came up to me later and mentioned that if I do freelance work, he has a friend who wants to small PPC campaign. !!
I have too many thoughts to organize them properly.
It's hard to walk around the office and see everyone crying because they're losing their jobs today and not be a part of it, you know? The fact that I'm going to be close on their heels notwithstanding. (I have trouble with Survivor's Guilt.)
But I'm grateful for the extra two weeks because it's another paycheck. Also, I have accumulated "vacation" time they'll be paying me for, which will help.
I've been very careful, financially, for quite a while now. I don't have a lot of savings, but with this much notice, I can scrabble together enough money to live on for two or three months. And then, if I haven't found gainful employment yet, there will be unemployment.
But! Jason is still sneaky. I mean, he can talk airily about 'transitioning' the accounts but I got the real story from Vela. The locations are being given the choice to go with outside management or to manage their own accounts. The idea is that I will teach the people who choose to manage their own accounts. Me! Teach the Assorted 'Nuts how to 'manage' their own accounts. !!
By the way. I got an email from Webstrainer this morning that they're rolling out an entirely new interface and everything is going to be new and special in a couple of weeks.
*brain explodes*
I can't talk about this now. I keep getting interrupted by people coming over for "goodbye" hugs.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:48 PM | Comments (7)The upcoming issue of the 'NutNews, which I'm still editing since I've been unable to find anyone else in the building who recognizes a sentence fragment when they see one or who understands the use of a comma, contains a highly biased and incredibly misleading "grassroots alert" warning the 'Nut franchisees that the Employee Free Choice Act means the end of secret ballots and labor unions and the death of small business and in their own interests and the interests of their employees, they should fight it with all their might.
I see Jason's fingerprints all over this and maybe you'll say that I shouldn't care, but I filed a complaint with Vela and said that the newsletter is not the place for partisan politics.
I stopped editing long enough to do one other thing, too, and that's to go into the online template for the newsletter and remove my name and email.
This isn't going out with my name on it.
Posted by AnneZook at 10:24 AM | Comments (2)This place, as Vela said to me the other day, is a freakshow.
We're having Mandatory Fun this month.
There was a Guess The Baby contest. Everyone was supposed to bring in a picture of themselves under the age of two (I think) and then we all had to look at grainy photocopies of the pictures and guess who was who.
Since I rolled out of bed both late and disinclined on Monday, I wound up working from home and didn't get my picture submitted.
They spent three days 'celebrating' St Patrick's day and I don't think there's an Irish person anywhere in the office. The 'party' culminated with green beer (Coors. Ugh.) and one of those giant birthday cookies for Grace, who has a March birthday, on Tuesday. (She didn't show up at the party, in spite of the email announcing that attendance was mandatory, so we ate the cookie for her.)
Now we're having mandatory PTO. This company is one of those who eliminated 'vacation' and 'sick leave' in favor of a single bank of Paid Time Off days. And, apparently, the company is on the hook for too much time on the books in some weird fashion I don't understand.* Everyone has to take a day, anyhow.**
And? They're going to a "use it or lose it" policy.
A company that has cut every department by 50% or more and where the remaining staff members are now doing two or three full-time jobs each, where employees have been told to come in on time and stay as late as they have to, to get the work done, is now going to take away our vacation because no one is taking time off.
Boggles the mind, doesn't it?
Anyhow. I'm taking Monday. I double-checked with our Controller, Fun Bobby, who also acts as our HR department,and that's all they need at this point - for everyone to get eight hours of time off (expense) off the company's books.
Aside from that, Jason, who is On The List for too many offenses to remember at this point, spent last Friday's NIMO ('Nuts with Internet Marketing Opinions) meeting calling on me for my opinion and mentioning the things I want that he thinks should be priorities.
This was not, you understand, about praising me or actually being supportive of my priorities. No, it was about not-so covertly dissing Vela. I am not amused by being used that way.
Vela has updated her resume and her online profile and is already scouting her next job.
What with all of this, I'm doing the same. I've touched base with both Buehler and Bernie (!!) and am scheduling lunch with DiamondGirl.
Gidget, of course, is never off my radar these days. (She getting stronger. Slowly but surely.)
______________________________
** Okay, yes, I understand it. But it's boring.
** Anyone but me ever notice that you used to have up to five days of sick time a year, if you needed it, plus ten days of 'vacation' time--then companies started rolling them in together and suddenly you got ten days of PTO? A very slick way to cut down on benefits, no? And the single largest reason I can think of for all of those plague-infested people to continue to drag their infectious bodies into the office day after day. If they stay home sick, they get no vacation time until next year.
The other hot trend in smaller companies is to cut down on 'holidays' (many are ceasing to give the day after Thanksgiving and if Christmas falls on a Thursday, they expect your butt in the office on time on Friday), so one head cold means you basically never get a break.
By the time you add Reaganomics-inspired cheap labor policies (lay off or fire 25% of your staff and work the rest of them harder), it's no wonder "productivity" seems to climb every year in this country.
Basically, our entire economy has been a 'bubble' since the '80s, but that's a digression. (It's a pity that being opinionated and writing rants and spouting ill-informed opinions isn't a paying job.)
Posted by AnneZook at 09:39 AM | Comments (3)Email, surfing the 'net, reading online magazines, abusing rightwing ignoramuses, none of my former amusements amuse me any more. I'm just not into them.
It's work stress - I don't have time for a lot of daytime surfing at this job and almost always work through lunch.
It's friend stress - Gidget is much stronger than she was and actually able to drive herself short distances and whatnot, but her doctor's appointment this week found a new infection and they've changed her antibiotics and doubled the dosage, so she's a long way from "well." I drove out to her house on Sunday (27 miles!) to explain how to manage an advertising campaign. Then I took the data home with me and created it for her and uploaded it, to save her the exertion.
It's my own illness - I didn't realize until I actually started feeling better that that last virus had hung on for three very long weeks. I mean, sure, I knew that by 3:00 every afternoon, I was falling out of my chair with exhaustion, but I'm not smart enough to have figured out that maybe I was still sick. (Can you blame me? I mean, Vela and I were unquestionably taking enough abuse every day to justify feeling beaten with a stick after a few hours.)
Most of it, though, is Rapunzel's fault. My beautiful niece (well, one of my two beautiful nieces) recommended a DS game called Harvest Moon to me last fall. I put it on my Christmas list and, lo! Santa provided!
I can barely begin to estimate how many hours I've put into this game in the last two months. Conservatively, I'm thinking 250+. Almost every spare second I've had, that's certain.
The poor R.C., who actually owns the DS, got a new game from Santa as well, but she never gets to play it. I'm starting to think the $130 investment for a second DS might be wise.
If she takes her game box back, how will my chickens get fed? Who will harvest my crops? Who will give the little red-headed girl a present every day? Who will rescue the Harvest Sprites? Ohmigod, it hardly bears thinking about.
This game manufacturer produces games with an occasional tendency to freeze up and corrupt your file. I read about it in the walkthrough I found online. Me, being me, I decided to take my chances. And, yes, last week my file froze up. Six (game) years into it all, I had to start over. That's normally the sort of thing that would put me off a game permanently, but with this one I just paused to mourn the loss of my $99,000,000 (took a lot of fishing to earn that!) and started over.
Today we had Mandatory Fun at the office - a "healthy food" potluck lunch. I tried out a new quiche recipe that I wanted to take to a brunch on Saturday. It was a reasonable facsimile of a food-like substance. Would have been much-improved if I'd remembered the salt and pepper. Shrug. I might rethink the mushrooms, too. Mushrooms are good in quiche, but the color puts me off.
For those of you keeping score at home? On the work front, leads were up this February by 20 percent over last February. News like that will probably get me fired. (That is, if Jason isn't already contemplating doing without me after I told him last week that his new pet program has been a waste of money, resources, and the dwindling hours of my life.)
There was a whole thing around me being snippy at MadBoy in an email and being made to apologize to the world at large, but I'm over it and it's too tedious to go into detail about. (Basically, he bragged that his ability to spend $20 for online marketing and not get anything for it proved that I don't know what I'm doing.)
The news that we're not paying most of our vendors, any of our free-lancers, or even some money we owe to some of the Argonuts Afield does not inspire confidence about this company's future. I'm starting to hoard my pennies against the next bout of unemployment.
The economy is not this company's fault. However, Jason's tendency to throw $50,000 at outside consultants every time one of the 'Nuts questions a Home Office policy, instead of backing up his management staff is this company's fault. If we had the money we spent last year on projects commissioned from outside sources and then thrown away before implementation? We wouldn't be in financial trouble at all. We wouldn't have had to lay off staff and we wouldn't all have had to take a pay cut. (Which gives you a broad idea of just how much money we wasted last year.)
None of which excuses my decision to bypass working this afternoon in favor of blogging, but I hadn't updated in so long it was ridiculous.