A New Petty Low

I've spent the last four weeks working as a contractor for a company that makes big, gas-guzzling vehicles. It's been a treasure. I've been calling it The Salt Mine, out of affection, of course.

First, they told me I should put my hours on a sticky note and put it on the corner of my desk. So people would know when I was supposed to be in my chair. Then they told me I could only have a 30 minute lunch. Then I sat in my cube for a week without any computer access, because in spite of them knowing for three weeks before my arrival that I would be there, no one bothered to request sign on info far enough in advance for me to actually have it until a week after I'd been there. Sitting in my cube. Watching dust collect. Oh, I did clear out the 47 voicemails that the last occupant had left (a person who still works for the company, just down the hallway in fact). They were calls from vendors who had not been paid. SINCE AUGUST. The voicemails went back TO AUGUST.

In week two, they told us we couldn't park in the parking lot anymore; we'd have to find parking "in the neighborhood." A muddy, former train-track alley was offered, so I parked there. For a week, until I got a tow notice on my car.

In week three, the very helpful Help Desk helped delete every email I'd received, after my in-box became so full it kept crashing my computer. Even after deleting every email, my system was still wobbly and continued to crash on and off for a week, since no one on the other end of the phone, at the very helpful Help Desk, was listening to my issue. They kept setting up archives ... to run next week. I need it to run NOW. Finally, a nice little IT geek who was REAL and in the FLESH finally sat down in front of my wobbly, tweaked-out mail box, and in 10 minutes he fixed what others on the phone had massaged and flailed at for a week. I baked him a thank-you cake.

In the meantime, of course, every vendor who'd corresponded to me and sent me copies of their unpaid invoices ... now had to be told to send them again. The love they felt for me was palpable. I'm still a bit singed from that round of grumpiness.

On a Friday a couple of weeks ago, I went in to work to find my desk had been pilfered. Someone had shoved some shelves over, rifled though my papers (and there were stacks, nay, drifts of them, after only a couple of weeks -- they are really not cutting edge, did I mention that?). And this same mischief-maker had -- inexplicably -- stolen the cup of pens I'd put on my desk. This was no glamour cup. It was a humble coffee cup, taken from their own kitchen cabinets and filled with pens from their own supply cabinet. What the fuck, right? Well, after my manager "insisted" that I report the theft, a day or so later, I found the cup. Shoved into the corner of my cube, out of sight behind some things that sat in the corner from the last sad sack of shit who worked there. A single blue ballpoint pen was missing from it. Only one other person in the office uses those pens, a fact I noticed after the only pens one could find were felt tip. I'd scooped up the ballpoint after it was laying on the copier, abandoned. That one pen had been taken. Nothing else. A lesson to me for using someone's pen? Perhaps.

I spend my days being harassed by vendors who demand payment, who for some reason haven't been paid in months. It's certainly not my fault; I've been there less than a month. None of them have been told that their accounts were being moved to servicing in a new location. None of them were told that the old staff who used to handle their accounts were "just contractors," and they were being let go. They are all cranky, frustrated, and all-too-willing to take our their Pay Me Now frustrations on whoever picks up the phone. So I don't answer the phone.

And then they send emails! Great scathing diatribes that threaten credit holds and legal action. It's a lovely, supportive environment.

When I'm not being screamed at or menaced by vendors, I'm hounded and dogged by employees, who cause senseless fire drills about bills that are not even DUE YET. I'm fielding boatloads of emails -- literally hundreds a week -- from vendors who have not been paid in months. And an employee wants me to dance and jitter over a bill that's due on Friday? When it's Tuesday?

One of my fellow contractors is from India. Her name is different but not impossible to pronounce it. I pronounce it easily enough, and I'm from Heart of Hickville, Arkansas. Yet no one else in this department seems to even bother to TRY to pronounce it right. They add syllables. They abbreviate it. They wave their hands and sigh in frustration as their stupid tongues trip over the consonant in the middle of her name. It is not that hard. Oh, what a paradigm of cultural sensitivity, this place I'm earning my paycheck.

In addition to not paying other vendors, this company also hasn't been paying the vendor that's providing my services. So my company -- let's call them Clueless & Co -- calls me and asks me to "see what I can do to get them paid." Clueless & Company is right here in town, but rather than send a rep from Clueless over to build a better relationship with their client, Clueless instead makes me the bad guy, instead asks me to set up collection conference calls with the employees I sit across the hall from.

I am surrounded by classy professionals on this gig -- in and around the Salt Mine.

Yesterday, the department's manager failed -- again -- to show up for a regular weekly "crisis management" conference call. She was on-site, yet again in another meeting that ran late. (It runs late a lot.) But instead of shooting me an email on her handy-dandy laptop, she just no-showed. And when she finally DID show up, she was aggravated  with me for not using her conference code to initiate the call. For an agenda I have no visibility to. I guess she thought maybe we'd just chat amongst ourselves and trade recipes? Watch that dust collect again?

Was "mind-reader" in the job description? I should get paid more for that, right?

Today was the icing for my cake. Since I don't take that 30 minute lunch they so generously offer, and since I don't take any break to speak of, and since I am a professional who knows how to multi-task, I use my smart phone -- to check email before meetings, to keep in touch with my spouse, to check in on friends. It saves me using the traditional phone, and it's hell of a lot more quiet and private. It also lets me check on the status of my grandmother, via emails from my mother. (My grandmother is having mini-strokes, and she needs near-constant supervision.) Today, the same manager who can't be bothered to come to her meetings (on time or at all) or communicate with her staff, asked me "why I text so much. I carry my phone everywhere. Am I in or out?"

Excuse me?

Dear Stupid Manager: if you'd take three minutes to find out anything about me, you'd know that my background and my work history qualify me to be YOUR boss. I earned my CPA certificate. I acquired my accounting degree with honors. Who among your staff even has a college degree? I have spent the last 20 years earning my own keep, growing a pretty challenging career, and I know how to manage my time and my work load. I don't need you to micro manage me. I don't need your petty, brainless employees hall-monitoring my every move. It seems to me, Stupid Manager, that your people don't have ENOUGH TO DO, if they have time to fret over what I'm doing and not pay attention to their own work load.

P.S. I quit.