Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Emplyee Appreciation, indeed

Employee appreciation, indeed. This week is employee appreciation week at work. Instead of valuing good work all year round, we get one week of free food (Monday: pastries & coffee, Tuesday: greasy pizza & calzones.. the ice cream social is coming. My old boss has deemed it: make the employees fat week) which everyone (no matter how inept) shares in. Today’s festivities include an outing at some place with miniature golf which is over an hour away. I don’t think anyone in my group wanted to go, because it is far away and because we don’t interact much with the people in the other groups that are invited, we won’t know anyone there. So my boss said we could instead just take the afternoon off. The sad thing is that although the day is supposed to be a big team building event made to make everyone feel valued, I, and most of my coworkers are most excited about having the afternoon off and just getting away from the place. I think that says something (maybe that I work in a Dilbert cartoon).

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Creative Response

Our creative guy has sent me a Dilbert as a another response to my post about creative vs. technical types. As usual, Dilbert calls it like he sees it.

*disclaimer: I know all technical types are not bad at UI.. but when they are bad, they are really bad.

Friday, September 20, 2002

Workplace funnies

A couple of entertaining incidents from my day:

1. I stumbled across this article today: Use an inventive approach when working with ‘Creatives’. Even I, as a person in a technical group winced at how this article talked about creative types as if they were another species whose mission it is to annoy the technical people. It was pretty one sided from the technical perspective. So I passed it on to our creative type because I do like to rile him up sometimes..

here is his response:
I am so offended. As if we should allow the Techno Weenies to design the UI!

Look at that guy. He probably is a Trekkie who never gets any…

2. We are entering the testing phase for our release and our QA lead sends out a document to all involved on how to use the bug tracking software. Most ignore it and it’s the usual free for all. So he sends out a follow up email:
p.s. instructions are in the “must read” document called Bug Tracking Instructions.doc

Elizabeth Smith of The New Yorker says “…….Bug Tracking Instructions.doc is a real page turner, I couldn’t put it down”
John Henry of Time Magazine says “…….Bug Tracking Instructions.doc could be the next Magna Carta!”

Tuesday, September 03, 2002

3 is the magic number

Today I came in and a big interoffice envelope was on my chair. I thought: is it benefit sign up time, already? But NO.. it’s a package all about Employee Appreciation Week which is at the end of Sept. In it there is tons of information on how we can have a bulletin board that lists employee accomplishments and tells us we can have a party (with balloons!)… like an ice cream social b/c it “shows appreciation through a universal medium - food!”. But the best part is the book: 301 More Ways to Have Fun at Work (note: we never got the first 301 Ways book). Wow.. my morale is soaring now. I don’t know why they think treating us like we are 5 will make us feel valued. Perhaps actually rewarding good work might be rewarding (gasp!). And the worse part is, whenever they pull stuff like this it’s usually followed a few months later by bad news.. like layoffs, or no raises or bonus reduction. Yeah, an ice cream social really makes up for that. I guess I should be grateful to have my job since so many people don’t have that luxury. So I’ll just keep telling myself: I do like my job, I do like my job, I do like my job..

Monday, September 02, 2002

lolly, lolly, lolly…

I didn’t actually open the book 301 More Ways to Have Fun at Work, but I’ve been told some of the ideas in the book include: asininely* dressing up as bubble bees and taking a can of spam** to various places and having your photograph taken with the can of spam. good grief! Not to mention that it has a top 10 list of fun places to work and one of the entries is: “any dot com” company. I think I should check out the copyright date on the book, eh?

* this is an adverb
** frightening meat like product, hopefully only available in the U.S.