Insult and Fucking Injury

Today I found out that there's a good chance I'll be losing my job soon.

I didn't blog this, but last week I had lunch with The Big Tech Guy. It started when I called him to ask a question about the network, more specifically about something we'd been told to do by Samuel, the Not-Affilliated-With-Place-Where-I-Work Database Guy. I thought he was wrong about the source of the problem and went to TBTG to get confirmation of my hunch, which is that Samuel is speaking through an orifice other than his mouth. The conversation went from there and he invited me to lunch so we could talk openly about exactly WTF is going on here.

I spilled everything. My guts, the beans, the whole enchilada. (If, in fact, an enchilada could be spilled.) The cat was let firmly out of the bag. Pick your cliche--I did it. I was just that fed up. We--and by "we" I mean everyone here except the bosses, who dwell blissfully unaware of FileMaker Pro and all the injustices that can be done to it by an incompetent dweeb--are being held hostage to poor design, no testing, and hapless implementation. It's a clusterfuck, plain and simple. Our old database sucked--but everyone, to a person, has now voiced the same lament: I miss the old database.

I knew--TBTG told me--that a variant of this conversation would get back to the person above Beverly. I told him I was okay with that but that I'd prefer to have my name kept out of it as much as possible. Not that it would matter--there's only one place, maybe two, that TBTG could be getting his info. I knew it would come back on me before I opened my mouth, and I decided I would be okay with that, if and when it happened.

Well, it looks like it's gonna happen.

Today I got a very cryptic e-mail from TBTG, telling me he needed me to come to his office as soon as I could, that he'd heard some things and thought I should be made aware of them. And when I got there he told me: the bosses' boss--Beverly's boss--now has her spoon firmly in this steaming pot of stew, and a change is gonna come. Apparently they're thinking about several options, and among those options is reorganizing the entire department, bringing my group under the aegis of the big department boss, giving database duties to one of the department techs, support calls to another, and handing off the so-called "clerical" parts of my job to someone who would make a lot less money. (It gives me great satisfaction to know that I actually HAVE been doing three people's worth of work.) My position, along with several others, would be eliminated under this plan. It's not 100% definite that this is the plan they'll go with, but it's probable.

TBTG was very apologetic--his exact comment, and those of you who have voiced this sentiment in the comments sections of days past should find this very entertaining, was "You deserve so much better, and you have for a long time." He's got mad connections in the area, so I sent him my resume and he's gonna talk to some people. All of which is great, and for someone who was just informed that her job was on the way out, I was in remarkably good spirits.

Then I got back to the office.

The database situation has now brought certain operations to a complete standstill, and most catastrophic of these has been Noreen's program. She has deadlines that need to be met, and there is a very good chance that they won't be. And finally, FINALLY, months and months too late, Beverly and Amy have noticed that There Is A Problem. They figured this out early last week, when several promises were not delivered upon by Samuel or his minion.

Today things really reached a crisis point. I was told that one of the functionalities was complete and ready to go, only to discover that the new way of doing things had left me about six hours worth of data entry and verification. And even then, there's still hugely time-sensitive stuff that doesn't work. All day, Samuel tried to get a hold of his buddy, who doesn't carry a cell phone, to fix what's broken--and couldn't. When it became apparent that what needed to happen was not going to happen til Samuel could get hold of the Minion, here's the solution they gave me.

"Well, Gladys, you could take a laptop home and Samuel could call you on your cell phone when it's all ready and you could work on the manual data matching at home...right?"

So guess what I'm doing tonight?

Hint--it does NOT involve studying for my Food Service Sanitation test, which is tomorrow.

(I was also told "I wouldn't have a problem with you coming in early and doing the matching then..." Yeah, I bet you wouldn't, bitch.)

Now I get to go home and explain to LJ why I'm quite likely losing my job. Yay.