Backdated Post No. 1 (November)

Written months ago:

I am feeling incredibly frustrated and anxious today. Not sure if it’s work, home, or PMS. It could be any of those, or all of them, I just hate chalking things up to PMS because then it becomes completely random and out of my control. It’s like admitting you’re mentally deficient.

Anyway. B came into my office today to say that I need to account for every minute of time spent on my various responsibilities so that we can see if there’s some source of support out there. Otherwise, we just can’t sustain it….me.

So howz that a couple of days before Thanksgiving? “Julie, you need to justify your existence in this company because, although there’s a whole department worth of work to do, we just can’t justify paying you to do it.”

How frustrating is it to see the adjoining department wallowing in their multi-million dollar budget, sucking up thousands in annual bonuses – the purpose of which is simply to eat up admin by the end of the contract performance period – while I am asked to justify my existence as the sole labor resource in the department that is at the core of my company’s mission? How frustrating?

What I think happened is this. The BB (Big boss) decided that another layer of executive management would help her to manage the whole company more effectively. It takes some of the pressure and load off of her, and allows her to take credit for all that they help her achieve. To do that, they had to redirect and create more admin.

So….when the capital investment returns came to my department – from activities generated by my department - they were ciphoned into other dept.s to fund in part or in whole their new executive level umbrella managers. When lump sums of admin came into my department – generated by activities from within my department – they were sucked up into accounting hyper space never to be seen again.

Now – there’s no money. Nothings making any money. So, therefore, the activities within my dept. cannot be sustained. More to the point, I cannot be sustained.

I’m not saying that my dept. was the only one affected – just illustrating the lack of fairness in this most recent development.

No, indeed, many other departments suffered downsizing. Workload staying the same, staff hours cut or staff eliminated or laid off. Even better, shift some revenue producing work out of a dept. struggling to make ends meet – but providing the greatest amount of mission specific direct client services – and give that work to the department that has the biggest admin budget in the whole company. Take a resource away from the one’s who need it and give it to the one’s that don’t.


But wait – it gets better. When you shift that work to the rich dept., you also don’t increase their staffing levels. Figures.

I have a feeling that the wealthy neighbor dept. will be in for a rude awakening when no $5k bonuses are handed out because much of that was spent on funding the much much needed upgrade to the physical appearance and functionality of our building. Least that’s the latest rumor.

The fairness point being that they apparently see it better to eliminate my position and load my work onto my boss – the “new” exec. Level umbrella manager guy person – rather than keep me. It stands to reason you will get more out of a person with a Masters than a person with on the job experience. I understand that. I just think it’s wrong. It’s almost as if we’re working against our own mission. We’re almost – and not necessarily in my case – creating the people and situations we work so hard to help and overcome.

SO…..I thought I’d apply at Lowe’s since there will be a new one here in the next year. Then I ran across this website called retailers.com. It is a discussion forum for retail employees to share info, ask questions, or vent. Seems Lowe’s is a sucky place if you’re not upper management. Seems they’re very Wal-Mart-ish in their approach to providing full time employment and/or benefits. Oops – you’re seasonal…see ya next summer.

Plus, they force(d) their employees to participate in a gallup survey about working conditions. Each person was assigned a pin number that they had to enter before completing the phone survey. The phone survey took place at work – frequently at an assigned time and in the presence of management staff. Leads to a lot of conspiratorial thought and not a lot of freedom of expression.

Now I just don’t know what to do. Wait for the axe? Or head for the hills? If only If ONLY…If only H was capable of supporting the fam.

Peace~Love~Lottery Winnings,
Me