Thursday, June 03, 2004
Working 9.5
...hours that is. Summer's here a bit early and the call for overtime has been going out. I did two days in a row now, mainly because I'm taking tomorrow off and had a holiday on Monday.
Had a visit from the CEO of Bloatmeal and the head of our particular division today. Not me personally, of course. A meeting was called and while it was not mandatory, was "highly recommended". Anyway, I wish I could come up with a witty summary of the meeting, but it was really all a bunch of business stuff which I don't fully understand nor really care about. Kind of the live version of the e-mails he sends company wide now and then. (Without the links to Playboy... oh, wait, I didn't post that story. A while back he sent an e-mail telling about new customers. The mail included links to the various customers' web sites. One of the customer's listed was Playboy and the attendant link was the regular commercial site. As far as I know, nobody's scolded him for sending inappropriate e-mails.)(Oh, great, now the Google ads up top are going to be advertising pictures of nekkid women. With my luck, that'll happen and my mom will discover the site.)
Anyway, I digressed big time. The only thing about the meeting I found interesting was as we were all gathering in the room. The division head, let's call him Mr. Stan, went around and shook everybody's hand and said "Hi, I'm Mr. Stan." He made no attempt to pretend that it was a personal greeting, but by golly, he greeted everyone in the room. Mr. CEO, in contrast, just came in and started speaking. The closest he got to making contact with us was when he encoraged us to introduce ourselves if we saw him in the hallway. Now after the meeting ended and the bigwigs disappeared, some folks were cracking jokes about Mr. Stan--wondering why we didn't bring in any babies for him to kiss. But I have to say that his little greeting was a durn nice gesture. He probably didn't remember anyone's name or anything, but he took the time and risked ridicule to make that one bit of contact.
And that kind of brings me back to the overtime thing. I was thinking about the overtime situation and how we get the constant e-mails proclaiming our dire situation and pleading with us to work "as much as we can stand." Actually, a more successful appeal, at least as far as I'm concerned, would be if they sent us all an e-mail telling us to take the weekend off. Just a little gesture saying that yeah, we're busy and we need you to work long hours, but we care about you, too. Go and have fun. That would be a more effective motivation to get me to work extra--at least for the following week and weekend. Or maybe I'm being too idealistic. I don't know.
Had a visit from the CEO of Bloatmeal and the head of our particular division today. Not me personally, of course. A meeting was called and while it was not mandatory, was "highly recommended". Anyway, I wish I could come up with a witty summary of the meeting, but it was really all a bunch of business stuff which I don't fully understand nor really care about. Kind of the live version of the e-mails he sends company wide now and then. (Without the links to Playboy... oh, wait, I didn't post that story. A while back he sent an e-mail telling about new customers. The mail included links to the various customers' web sites. One of the customer's listed was Playboy and the attendant link was the regular commercial site. As far as I know, nobody's scolded him for sending inappropriate e-mails.)(Oh, great, now the Google ads up top are going to be advertising pictures of nekkid women. With my luck, that'll happen and my mom will discover the site.)
Anyway, I digressed big time. The only thing about the meeting I found interesting was as we were all gathering in the room. The division head, let's call him Mr. Stan, went around and shook everybody's hand and said "Hi, I'm Mr. Stan." He made no attempt to pretend that it was a personal greeting, but by golly, he greeted everyone in the room. Mr. CEO, in contrast, just came in and started speaking. The closest he got to making contact with us was when he encoraged us to introduce ourselves if we saw him in the hallway. Now after the meeting ended and the bigwigs disappeared, some folks were cracking jokes about Mr. Stan--wondering why we didn't bring in any babies for him to kiss. But I have to say that his little greeting was a durn nice gesture. He probably didn't remember anyone's name or anything, but he took the time and risked ridicule to make that one bit of contact.
And that kind of brings me back to the overtime thing. I was thinking about the overtime situation and how we get the constant e-mails proclaiming our dire situation and pleading with us to work "as much as we can stand." Actually, a more successful appeal, at least as far as I'm concerned, would be if they sent us all an e-mail telling us to take the weekend off. Just a little gesture saying that yeah, we're busy and we need you to work long hours, but we care about you, too. Go and have fun. That would be a more effective motivation to get me to work extra--at least for the following week and weekend. Or maybe I'm being too idealistic. I don't know.
