It gets very tiring to work for a company that constantly says things like, “We will begin laying off many thousands of employees beginning tomorrow. This round of cuts is expected to be over by June of 2042. We hate to have to do this right before Christmas, but our CEO really wants that new backyard Jumbotron.”
Yes, indeedy. My love affair with AT&T is being tested yet again by the announcement (yesterday) that about 12,000 more of us are getting canned between now and next Summer. I say “canned” only because my sainted mother would be ashamed of me if I said, for example, “shit-canned.” Employees in the video operations sector are probably not going to be cut (in fact, that area of the business will probably grow); but you may recall that I am no longer with video ops – I’m with metrics. I’m the guy in metrics who writes the reports for video ops, and I work in the video operations center (VOC) in Georgia, but my paycheck comes from the metrics people in Texas. I’m also the newest employee in metrics, although I have seniority over just about everyone (including my boss) if you go by years in service.
So, to answer the question that I’ve heard from about 50 people who presumably were trying to cheer me up by reminding me that I could be living in a dumpster eating tennis balls and salsa next month, I have no idea if I’m getting fired anytime soon. Actually, it’s not just that I don’t know. I don’t care, either. If I were to get worked up every time NYNEX or Vanstar or BellSouth or AT&T said that they were having a firing party, I’d never have any fun. It used to bother me, but about 5 years ago I just got so sick of it that I stopped caring.
I take that back. I care in the sense that I wish that the top executives in all major companies would have to live with the idea that bad things might happen to them. Things over which they have no control. Things from which they may never recover. I wish that all the CEOs in the country were informed by their pediatrician – tomorrow if possible – that their angelic little 4-year-old daughter, who won the “Best Li’l Miss in Texas” talent show as recently as last July, had possibly been infected by a rare solar burst virus last month and that there’s a chance (although not one that can be quantified) that she will become magnetic sometime between now and next July and – should that happen – she stands an excellent chance of being crushed to death by the next large metal object she sees.
Let ’em try to sleep with THAT for a while.
But enough bitching for one day. On to other things.
There’s something about this time of year. For 6 or 8 weeks every year, everything takes on a sort of finality for me. A sense of ending or change or pointlessness or something. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it always kicks in around the middle of November and it generally goes away in early January. It’s the feeling that you might have had (I know I did) near the end of a school year. There are still classes to go to and there are still tests to take and you still have to eat and sleep and shower and do everything that you always do; but, in the back of your mind, you know that you’re just going through the motions. It’s the end of the school year and you can hear people just outside of your classroom window talking about their summer plans and you can’t concentrate on anything the teacher is saying to you because it just doesn’t matter what she’s saying.
You know what I’m talking about? That feeling of, “Just let me get to the last day. I didn’t get the grades that I should have this year because I didn’t really try, but next year I’m making the dean’s list.”
I’ve always suspected that this “conclusion consciousness” in the real world has something to do with the combination of an approaching new year (when we all make resolutions, whether we want to admit to them or not…and when, within 6 hours, we’ve failed to uphold 90% of them) and the fact that everyone tends to take a lot of vacation days between Thanksgiving and January 1 – which means that no real work gets done and those few brave souls who do manage to make it to the office generally spend 75% of their time there chatting among themselves and making coffee. You take long lunches. On occasion, you get a huge burst of energy and compose (I almost said, “pen”) an email to your boss to bring him up to speed on all the glorious things that you intend to accomplish by the end of the week.
You, of course, mean every word of your email. You do intend to get a great number of things done by the end of the week; but then you hear some folks just outside of your office window talking about what they’re going to do on their Christmas vacation or what they’ve just done on their Thanksgiving holiday and you can’t concentrate on any of the things that you said you’d do because it just doesn’t matter if you actually do any of the things you said you’d do.
And let’s face it: your boss doesn’t care if you do them, either. He’s too busy trying to figure out what he’ll do if his daughter becomes magnetized to worry about whether or not you rearrange the filing cabinets.
That’s the sort of mindset that I have at the end of every year. Scary, isn’t it?
On the work front, I’m getting better every day with ColdFusion and Oracle. I’ve managed to locate and correct a number of problems that my predecessor had in his code, and I’m slowly rewriting all of the metrics pages so that they can take advantage of a single query (rather than having a different query for everything). It’s odd that nobody in metrics seems to have grasped the incredibly simple concept that all metrics are basically manipulations of the same three or four numbers. You’ve got dates. You’ve got events (phone calls or broadcasts or sales or whatever). You’ve got failures. All anybody cares about, when it comes right down to it, is one thing: “How many failures did I have for how many events during what time span?” It’s baseball. George Brett went 109-for-347 with 6 homeruns and 23 strikeouts during the 89 games that he played in 1981. His batting average (BA) was .314. Or, U-Verse broadcast for a total of 79,248 hours on 608 channels and had 1.43 hours of downtime during the first week of November. The defects per million (DPM) rate was 216.
It’s all the same thing, people. There’s nothing fancy about statistics. That’s why I enjoy them.
In football, Furman finished the season at 7-5 and didn’t make the playoffs for the second straight year. Folks on my website are calling for the firing of the entire coaching staff, the public caning of the school’s administration, and the symbolic castration of the starting quarterback.
A few of them are also buying my pictures, which is nice.
Over Thanksgiving, I took Julie up to Dianne’s new house in Travelers Rest, where we were treated to some excellent cooking and a nice visit with Mom, Dad and Trude. I then drove back to Atlanta and promptly slept for about 19 straight hours. I enjoyed that quite a bit.
I still have about two weeks of vacation left, which I’m supposed to take by the end of the year. I have no idea when I’ll be able to schedule that – or what I’ll do if I’m not at the office. I guess if those are the worst problems I’ve got, then I’ve got no right to complain.
I’ve now wasted a good 30 minutes of my workday. I guess I’ll stop writing. Buh-bye for now.
TWD