An Office Space Kind of Week

it would be kind of hard for me to personally experience and office space kind of week, as i work in a lab and as a grad student i'm in no danger of being down-sized or phased out, so of course i'm talking about chad. the other day he came in from work looking a little shell-shocked and proceeded to describe his day to me. it began with a one-on-two meeting with the big boys in his company (the ones he never sees or interacts with), whose first question was, "what would you say you do here? what's your job?" my first thought when he told me that was "i file tps reports." of course, they don't have tps reports, so chad told them what he does (which is pre-wire houses in progress for surround sound, phone, cable, lighting, security systems, program security systems, and install central vacuuming systems, although he wants to move into actually putting in the home theater systems and programming lighting, etc.). after a nice little chat about what he does, chad was then sequestered into a random office by himself. everyone else in the company (who were all freaking out as well, i'm sure) was also sequestered off somewhere alone. the big boys felt that their company was being run at less than top efficiency (which it definitely was) and that some re-organization and reshaping were desperately needed (which is true, from what chad has told me over the past year)... and they proceeded to fire ten people that day, including chad's boss, the guy who hired him and the only person in the company that chad felt any real loyalty to. happily, chad was not one of them. he does his job well and is not afraid to tell his dumb-ass of a "supervisor" when things have been planned badly.

i don't like chad's supervisor. he's a real idiot, and that condo job in orange beach last fall (the one where they "worked" very late every day, causing chad to leave for work at 5:30 every morning and not get home until 9-ish every night for months, the one where chad was miserable because the idiots he works with weren't really trying to get the job finished because they were digging the fat overtime pay - including his good buddy matt, i might add) was made worse by that dumb-ass because he liked the overtime, which he was getting even though he wasn't actually on the job site most of the time, and whose job chad was actually doing because otherwise nothing would have gotten done at all. yet, somehow, that guy didn't get canned. chad says it's because he neglected to reveal his role in the shoddy job planning that's been going on for the past year. oh, and during the orange beach condo thing, the idiot was reprimanded for sexual harassment but no formal charges were brought, so he didn't get fired. he took off his hard hat and swatted a girl's ass with it, a girl he'd been attempting to flirt with all week but who had rejected his advances. there were witnesses. i've met this guy, and he seems like a real sleaze ball... and chad and matt think he's on crack. seriously.

so anyway, chad actually likes the direction the company is going and thinks that they're phasing his idiot crackhead supervisor (who has been bumped down in the ranks) out. they're just keeping him in for now so they can get the new guy (who has been there all along in a sales position, but he's taking on new duties now) used to his new responsibilities. the idiot crackhead is afraid, very afraid. he knows that he should have been fired with that group the first day, and now he's trying to undermine the new guy and prove he can do things better (even though he really can't). he's just trying to save his job. chad's job is perfectly secure, though. he likes the new guy, i think. i've met him briefly as well, but he didn't really make much of an impression either way.

i hope that the new guy will get chad into what he really wants to do. he's sort of been stuck just doing what he's doing now because he's better at it than the other guys, so he always gets sent on those jobs. the new guy has promised chad that he will go on a programming job this week, though, while the idiot crackhead wanted someone else to do that one while chad went to do some wiring in another house. i hope the idiot crackhead gets fired (i think a company drug-testing policy would take care of that). he sort of makes chad's life less easy than it could be, which makes my life less easy than it could be.

all righty. gotta head for the lab. adios, amigos.