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Green to red and I walk from my machine. |
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Got a machinehead,
Better than the rest
Green to red, machinehead
What a long strange trip it's been. Except, that's a blatant damn lie. It hasn't been strange. It's been boring and stupid, and full of bitter disappointments.
On september 29th, I walked out of the menacing turnstyles at IBM for the last time. My heart was alight and a twitter with joy, the yoke of mindless, tireless, endless, hellish work had been lifted, and slackjawed relief swept in. I cast away my badge with glee, and left long strips of rubber in the parking lot.
So, now I'm free to tell the long, crap-filled tale of my days at "Big Blue", and my work for one of the largest networking companies in the world. Is it a thrilling tale full of daring and intrigue? No. Not in the least. Is it a tale of the unbound ******** and copious amounts of bullshit that two large companies can spew, and in the process pull devious and underhanded tactics against their employees? Oh, yes.
So, if you're interested, read on. If you're not, thanks for stopping by, and the next journal update will be more interesting, I promise. I make fun of Priuses.
Anyways, on with the story.
Three and a half years ago, I got a job working at IBM. It's the usal love story of boy quits pizzaria, boy finds job, boy loves job, job takes several years of boys life. There's laugter, tears, and gratuitous ********. Since, by and large, this is a long tale of misery, I'll do my best to keep it short. Primarily so as not to bore my reading audience, but also because.. well, there's only so much time I'd like to spend with my memories of that corporate oubliette.
I started my cubicle drone days working on the Amtrak desk within IBM, smack dab in the middle of building 22. (Otherwise known as monkey farm #467A) If you stopped at an Amtrak station between July and December of 2004, and the person who gave you your train ticket looked at the computer like it was programmed in Sanskrit.. Well, then you've met the slobbering masses that called my helpdesk. I once spent *twenty* minutes discussing the difference between the right mouse button and the left mouse button with a startling example of humanity. Oh, the uncountable joys of Technical Support Callcenters.
Halloween rolled around, and each desk in the hallowed halls of "Big Blue" takes part in an annual Halloween decoration event. During our daily instant-message chat, people were tossing ideas around for how we should decorate. Suddenly, an idea sprang to my mind. An awful, horrible idea. So, playing it cool, I drop into the chat, "How about a train wreck?" There was silence. The seconds tick by, and I'm waiting for a "lol" or "no way". Then, in chorus, my teammates rally and proclaim "That's a great idea!". You can imagine my speechlessnes. It was a joke. A simple joke. Bad taste, horrible idea, politically incorrect... Yeah, it has all the trademarks of a fine joke. Minds began percolating. Managers are polled. Resources are allocated. Decorations are bought. In the darkest, blackest regions of space, planets align to form words in the sky. "This is all your fault."
October 20th rolls around, and an email goes out to the entire team. We are having VIP's onsite to check up on the desk. The upper eschelons of Amtrak are blessing us mere mortal with their presence. I gladly accept the email, part of me deep inside relaxing, knowing that the Halloween decorations will be changed. There's no way we're going to do this with Amtrak VIP's dropping in. No one need know that my joke was taken seriously. Were I a religous man, I would claim divine intervention had occured, to save my cubicle-monkey butt.
Halloween morning I trudge in, eyes on the floor, mentally preparing myself for another day, silently switching off my brain and sense of self-worth. There's a flash of silver up ahead. It looks like.. Tin foil. It's mildly crumpled. There are words on the side. Amtrak? Oh christ, no. They did it. The cubicles, once such stark corporate places of drudgery and the slow mind death are now festooned with crumpled silver walls, scorch marks, mangled Amtrak logos, and passenger gravestones. They turned it into a train crash. The VIPs come in. They peruse the wreckage. The peruse the cubicle monkeys, hard at work. I'm dressed as Hunter S. Thompson, with a hawaiian shirt, aviator sunglasses, and a cigarette holder. My copy of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is propped against my monitor, so people stop asking me why I'm dressed like a Hawaiian. When the VP's come down my row, I hunch lower in the seat, and pretend to be intenseley focused. (I also closed my open Gaia windows, and penny-arcade comics. I'm a good little drone.) They look mildly perplexed, their faces a mask of confusion and mild horror. Or at least, so I'm told. I was preoccupied recompiling my resume' in my head.
No one ever mentioned the halloween decorations.
As soon as was humanly possible, I moved to the Cisco desk.
As a sidenote, I was on the Amtrak desk for about six months. In that time, twenty three members of that desk were fired. By the time I transferred out, I was the third most senior agent. Job security is for pansies.
Some of you may recall the sordid tale of my first vacation request. I'll recap for those uninformed.
Yegads, this is getting long. So, faster faster faster.
Fast forward to one year with the company. One year of soul-crushing, endless monotony. However, the money is allright, the hours are semi-decent, and while I find it monotonous, boring, and asininely restricted by protocols, I keep working. Besides, there is light at the end of this tunnel, as there's a con coming in July. Not wanting to miss out, I request for allotted time off, six months in advance. July is a very busy month for vacation requests, and I wanted to be first in line. Four months before my trip, my PTO is approved. Two months before my trip, they ask me if I would mind changing my schedule, to help cover an understaffed shift.
They lure me with promises of pay raises. I agree, noting that I'd only switch if it didn't mess with my vacation request. They say that it'll be after my vacation, so no sweat.
Two weeks before my time off, they change my schedule. My PTO is then denied. They tell me it's denied because my schedule is different, and just change the days and times to my *new* schedule, and it'll be approved. I do so. It's denied again, this time by my managers manager. I'm told it's denied because "I didn't give enough notice." I talk to her, telling her it was put in six months before, but had to be resent because of my schedule change. She tells me I shouldn't have agreed to the schedule change then, and my PTO is denied. This is now three days before my trip. (Mind you, at this point, I'm one of maybe 5 people on our 30-person crew who even aquires PTO. There was a bidding war between contract companies, and
everyone on the winning contract company took a 10% paycut, and lost their PTO.) I tell her that i've already purchased an airline ticket. she tells me that I shouldn't have bought one until I had my request verified. I let her know that it was approved, and under that assumption, I had purchased my airline ticket. I'm then told that it's not her problem. I'm also informed that if I don't show up on my requested days off, I will not have a job to come back to.
So, I've got two days to find somone to cover my shifts. During the 4th of July weekend. In the end, I ended up paying a coworker $50 a day to cover 4 shifts. So now, I'm out 4 days pay, plus an additional $200. If I hadn't gotten a cover, I'd be out $350 for the ticket, plus Con tickets. Yeah, I loved my managers. I loved them so much, I wanted tos tab them. With knives. Covered with feces. And tuberculosis.
Does the tale end here? One brief, angry encounter? Oh, how I wish it were so. Time passed, as it does. I was asked to move to weekend shift, and would net a small raise if I did so, also, my benefits were now applicable. I just needed to file the papers. My first manager left. A new one came in. His name was Jared. The best thing I can say about him was that his ability to avoid doing his job was nothing short of goddamn EPIC.He spent a total of 9 months with our happy family. 9 months of avoiding phone calls, ignoring emails, not being found anywhere near his office, and generally doing anything and everything *but* his job. Oh, and that raise I was promised for switching to weekends? I got that. Two weeks after he was replaced by my third contract manager. Same with my medical benefits. In the span of time in which I had no benefits, I collapsed my left lumg. Hospital and operational bills cost me a total of $2300. (A year later, I collapsed
My right lung. With benefits, my total bills were ~$75. Benefits are full of win.)
With my third contract manager not yet in place, I was asked to move to night shift. Yet again, a raise was offered. I've now been with the company for a smidge over two years. Why night shift? Because the previous night shift had all been fired. At once. Prospects looked mildly grim. However, what's life without the prospects of absolute and utter failure? A filthy dream full of lies, communism and propoganda, that's what. A devious misapropriation of the truth! A goddamned, vomit spewing... I digress. I took the offer, because within fools, hope springs eternal. We all have them, that one friend who says "Hey, maybe if I poke that bull in the scrotum for the forty-seventh time, he won't gore and abuse me savagely."
Yes, sometimes I can be that person. Sometimes through this hard shell of cynicism, there is a blief glimmering ray of humanity. I have redoubled my
efforts to kill whoever is tending to that light.
I'm going to sidetrack again for a bit, and explain what I did for Cisco Systems. One would assume that people working for one of the largest networking companies in the world, the employees there would know, perhaps, the first thing about computers. And one would be wrong. So completely wrong, that if right was a point on the globe located around Madagascar, wrong would be located near Phobos, in orbit around Mars. There are near endless stories i could tell about stupid customers, stupid calls, and stupid problems. I've heard of Bologna in Cd-Rom drives. Guiness and keyboards. Four VP's, four stolen laptops, and four smashed windows, on four BMW's at a Ruby Tuesdays. Project leads having one copy of a multi million dollar project, the only copy, on their laptop. Which is locked in their house. While they are exploring deep African jungles. To put it bluntly, the
people who "keep the internet running" are dumber than a sack of hammers.
More to come with next update.. this thing is getting frikkin' massive. Of course, there's a lot of things to detail.
Until next time.
 Twistex · Tue Dec 04, 2007 @ 11:54pm · 9 Comments |
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