This morning I had my interview for the supervisory position. It was easy enough, IÂ’ve been in management long enough to know what kind of answers they wanted for the questions asked. My entire interview lasted about 50 minutes. Mainly because I always go into great detail when answering questions.

It also is because I turned on the olÂ’ Contagion charm. Most of you havenÂ’t seen this rumored trait in me. In fact most of you probably think this something IÂ’m making up. Those that have seen it in action know exactly what IÂ’m describing. ItÂ’s about 25% humor, 25% positive attitude and 40% friendliness and 10% subtle flirting (unless IÂ’m dealing with males and then I substitute with positive attitude). Over the years IÂ’ve relied on that charm to get three jobs, two promotions, a wife and countless other things.

Only four people, including myself, put in for the position. For three of them it would be a big promotion, and one of the others is a friend of mine. She wants this position bad, very bad. This would be a big promotion and raise for her. The last couple of times she put in for a supervisory position she was passed over, as was I. What IÂ’m wondering is what will happen if I actually get it and she is passed over again. ItÂ’s nothing but a change in duties for me, where for her it is an important promotion.

That train of thought is all for naught. They pretty much told me at the end of the interview that IÂ’m not going to get the position. Since itÂ’s not a promotion for me, itÂ’s a lateral transfer and they donÂ’t like doing lateral transfers. They would rather promote someone. Either way I should know for sure by the end of next week.

Posted by: Contagion at 04:00 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The next salvo in the Contagion work saga took place yesterday. At 3:00 PM the other office asst. manager (Whom I now report to as they are “combining” offices. Yea, this sucks.) comes over and asks me if I had received the new flows for customer surveys. I told her I hadn’t heard anything about it. She tells me she’ll have it forwarded to me and if I have any questions to ask her. She told me that I would be responsible for tracking them. Great, I needed more on my plate.

I leave work at 3:30 PM, so when the e-mail came I just glanced at it and figured I could set up the tracking it today when I had more time. By the time I actually received the e-mail it was about 3:15 PM. Over night I had forgotten about this new project until about 8:30 this morning. When I pulled open my email and started reading the new guidelines, I could feel my blood start to boil.

The first thing I noticed is that this “new” flow went into effect last week, everyone knew about it but me for a week now. Next I noticed that I’m not supposed to just track them, but I’m supposed to also review them. If there is a complaint on one, I am supposed to ensure that someone works it and responds to the member. Since this effects every inventory manager in corporation, I wasn’t as upset over that. The fact that they held it for a week before telling me pisses me off.

Those damn things spent a week building up and they all had to be out today. Every single one of them had to be touched, reviewed and assigned today. There were 304 of these things to be exact. Most of my day was spent sorting through these things and assigning them to people to work. Meanwhile my counterpart from the other office has been doing it for a week now, so hers was a daily manageable 40.

Now donÂ’t you go worrying, I did just fine. What they underestimate is my ability to deal with high-pressure situations and short deadlines. At 2:15 I finished the last one. Setting a divisional record, I cleared 304 surveys. I canÂ’t wait until Monday. In my mind I can picture the smug looks on their faces when they ask me if or why (because you know they wonÂ’t check first) all the surveys werenÂ’t done. Then I can smack them down with the hammer of Greatness that is me! The best part was that I took 40 minutes to donate blood and I still got them all done. Not only where they done, but they where done properly.

Now if youÂ’ll excuse me, IÂ’m going to go build up a mass of troops and kill me some French! Slaughtering the villagers makes me happy

Posted by: Contagion at 04:14 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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With all the raging at work about how bad I am, it inspired me. They all seem to think I suck at my job. It seems that the current promotions have been based on incompetence and desperation to get someone out of a position. They even made a crack about this today in a meeting about an employee that is incompetent. I believe the exact quote was, “Well I guess we know who the next promotion goes to.”

Based on this, I put in for a promotion. Well, itÂ’s not really a promotion; itÂ’s a lateral transfer. IÂ’m putting in for a supervisory position. Yes, people will actually directly report to me if I get it. There will be no raise or even a tangible benefit to this. Why would I put in for it then? Because right now my current position is in a dead-end track, there are only 2 more positions I can promote to in it. Those positions open up rarely. The last time was 5 years ago, and the people in them donÂ’t appear to be going anyplace soon.

If I spend some time as a supervisor it opens up a lot more opportunities for me. IÂ’m all about the opportunities. Anything that makes me more marketable is a good thing. Sure, maybe itÂ’s wrong for me to work hard to make a better life for my family and myself. (At least that seems to be the message the government is sending me.) IÂ’m still going to do it. Maybe this will be the move that leads to my total world domination.

There is a very good chance I wonÂ’t get the position, not because IÂ’m not qualified, but because they donÂ’t like doing lateral transfers. They would rather promote someone into a position then transfer someone. ItÂ’s rare that they actually do a lateral. ThereÂ’s also the fact that IÂ’m not the most well liked person on the management staff, maybe thatÂ’s because I have a penis. Yes, you read that right.

The total management staff in our office is around 85% female. They are a very tight group and tend not like adding y-chromosomes to their numbers. Now, to be fair the office itself is about 75% female, so it could be the ratio of applicants to positions. Then again I know of 3 male management position individuals that were fired or demoted for trumped up harassment charges. I know personally two of them and the remaing one the other management admit it was BS.

Either way I guess IÂ’ll wait and see what happens. We just have to see what is mightier, sucking or the penis

Posted by: Contagion at 06:00 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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It just never ends. Tuesday in our morning state of the office meeting, we were discussing same day responses to inquiries and the obstacles we have in meeting our goals for them. Out of the blue, the manager I now report to (from the other office) states she wants me to start running the reports and giving feed back to my minions that donÂ’t have below a 92% same day responses. This request comes at least once a year from someone who thinks they are the first person to come up with this brilliant plan. IÂ’ve been doing this job for four years and not once have I ever thought of doing that! < /sarcasm>.

In fact a couple of years ago, I was damn near being a Nazi about it. That is when I discovered that itÂ’s not possible to find out the exact percentage of the individual CSR. Sure, corporate gives us reports saying what each individuals percentage is, but itÂ’s wrong. They know it, and any Inventory Manager worth a damn knows it. Meanwhile my counterpart is smiling and nodding like itÂ’s a great idea. To burst the bubble, I spoke out.

“It’s not possible. The reports are inaccurate. They may show someone had an 80% closure rate, but it’s not their fault. They transferred the inquiry to someone else and they finished it. The person that originally took the call doesn’t get credit for the closure, even though it’s closed. I tried this a couple of years ago and all I succeeded in doing was dragging the morale through the mud. The employees end up getting upset that we are chastising them for doing something that they didn’t do, and rightfully so.”

Well that wasn’t good enough; nope they still wanted to do it anyways. Of course, the wonderful support from peers really helped me, that’s right; they cowered in their chairs not saying a word. This went back and forth for a good 15 minutes. Then I made this statement, “Look, I’ve done this before. It doesn’t work. All we succeed in doing is pissing off the employees. This has no benefit to anything. I can’t get the data you want and I am not about to stir up trouble and make a bigger headache for me just to prove I’m right. I’ve been using this software for 4 years, if you don’t want to learn from my experience then do it yourselves.” For the record, most of the people in the room had only been dealing with this system for about 8 months, and even my peers that have been working on it as long as I have acknowledge that I am the guru of what the software can and can’t do.

At the meeting, they decided to discuss this more at a later time. WednesdayÂ’s morning meeting arrives and there I sat. Sure enough in walks the other office manager all smiles with a stack of papers under her arm. As soon as the meeting starts, she says that her and my counterpart found a report that shows what each person's same day responses are. I kept my face schooled as she spoke about this great find. Just so you know, this report has been on the system for 6 years, they damn well should have known about it before yesterday.

She passes the stack around and wants everyone to take one. Soon enough all of the supervisors are Ooohing and ahhhing like the yes men they are. With a slightly smug look, the manager looks at me and says, “What do you think?” I grin big. Unknowing to her, she just played into plan perfectly. I figured they where going to try to blindside me, so I came prepared. Standing up I personally hand to each individual in the room a packet that includes an example of the same report. Next I proceeded on this little spiel, “I didn’t figure you would believe what I said yesterday so I took the liberty of gathering some examples of how this report is flawed. Since I didn’t want to spend much time on this, I figured two examples would be sufficient, if you would like more just come see me after the meeting. Here we have production on two of our employees. Employee A shows at a 100% same day response, employee B shows at a 90% same day response rate. Based on what you where saying yesterday you would want me to provide feed back to Employee B, while praising employee B, correct?”

They all acknowledged that was correct.

“Here is the problem. Even though the report shows that employee B had a 100% same day response rate, she never takes a phone call. She is one of my off the phone employees. Thus, she is closing other people’s inquiries. In fact if you look at employee A, two of her inquiries that she didn’t get counted for was closed by employee B. If you turn to page three you will see a separate report, this is a list of all the inquiries employee A started yesterday. You will notice that 2 of them where closed by employee B. They are the highlighted ones for your convenience. Now the other 3 of Employee A’s non-closures are sitting in our Technician queues.”

“Employee A did nothing wrong, all of her pends where proper. Yet you want me to give her feedback and tell her to do better? I think not. I think we as management need to give feedback to the people that are supposed to work these items and aren’t. To me, part of being a leader is knowing not only when to address and issue, but with whom.”

When I finished I think any one of them would rather have been hunting buddies with VP Cheney, than sitting in that room with me. They conceded my point and dropped it like a bag full of rotting mayo and horseradish. ItÂ’ll be interesting to see what happens today.

Posted by: Contagion at 03:54 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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