start me up!

The Worst Office Ever!

I once worked for an outfit called Syred Data Systems. They no longer exist. They were a purveyor of storage networks, such as Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAIDs) (pictured). Between the time I hired on with them, and the time I left four months later, the number of their competitors nearly doubled, and was up to 50 when I left. That may be a factor in making them the Worst Office Ever.

And yes, I was fired. After seeing the office conditions visibly deteriorate over a four-month period, I was unable to lie and put a good face on my job. I told the proprietor the truth. More than once. Which made him angry, which made me angry, which made him tell me to piss off. He was a rotten, miserable boss, and he must take the blame for the Worst Office Ever, but it wasn't just because of his Induhvidualism. Here are the details.

• The inside temperature of the office was kept at 60 F. I was told that the proprietor had some sort of surgery that had cut off his ability to feel other than extreme temperatures. (Does such a surgery even exist?) So for him to be cool, we had to freeze. Imagine wearing thick sweaters in the office while it's 95 F outside. [Ultimately, Dogbert had something to say about this.]

  Dear Dogbert,
  
  It's freezing in the office and the manager won't put on the heaters because he claims he does not feel the cold. What is the best course of action in this sort of situation?
  
  Megan
  
  Dear YouAgain,
  
  Your boss is evidently a zombie with no central nervous system. But since he is also a manager, chances are that he has no spine. That means you can sneak up behind him and bend him into a doughnut shape, inserting his head into his sphincter. This works best if your boss has a chin or a pointy nose for the full Velcro [TM] affect. You won’t notice any impact on his ability to do strategy, but it might make it quieter around the office.
  
  Sincerely,
  
  Dogbert

• There were two bathrooms in the facility: his, and everyone else's. Everyone else's had a pipe leak that caused a puddle of water in the bathroom every time someone flushed the toilet -- this went unfixed for two months. Does he let the rest of us use his? No.
• In order to show off his soccer skills, he would take each of us out into the parking lot one at a time for a game of "soccer chicken." He would kick the ball across the parking lot and knock a can off one of our heads (a distance of over 100 feet). I refused to participate in this nonsense, and I think that was when he started not to like me.
• His wife came in a couple times a week for the bookkeeping, which is OK -- many entrepreneurs borrow support from their families in this way. But when an African-American woman came in to interview for a receptionist job -- a position that was never filled in the four months I was there -- he cut the interview short, telling me later that he didn't trust anyone black.
• He finally ordered three of us to prepare a SPAM to send to all of his previous and potential customers. I warned him that most people thought SPAM was invasive and that it was unlikely a single person out of several hundred on the list would buy a RAID because of it. That the plan was a mistake. He said "have you ever sold anything in your life? Well, I have. So shut up and do it." Later, when the ploy failed, he was surprised to have a couple dozen previous customers ask Syred not to e-mail them again. And he fired me.
• And OH YEAH! After I was gone for over a year, he lied to the State of New Jersey, telling them I'd "walked off the job," and inciting the State to request that I pay back unemployment benefits I'd received. It took me several months to set that record straight, and Syred was long out of business by then.

My first couple of months working for GreyPilgrim, Inc., the company didn't have a toilet at all, and their environment was better than this. The lessons to young entrepreneurs are as follows:

1. If you are going to go to the trouble of hiring someone, make sure you give them an environment they can work in. If you can't make them warm, at least make them empowered and enthusiastic.
2. If you aren't good with people, get some people on your team who ARE and let THEM run the day-to-day operations. I mean it: LET them.

I don't need to reveal this vindictive dipstick's identity -- anyone can run a Google search and find him. But he hasn't been active on the Internet in some time. The Net is an unusually pleasant place because of that. :-) Please, young entrepreneurs, run shops that value people. You'll never be sorry.

Labels: diversions

posted by Ron @ 6:43 PM