Contagious Mismanagement

For quite some time, I have complained about my HR Manager, Mr. Shit4Brains. While I realize poor managers tend to attract and develop more bad managers, I am a bit surprised this happened in HR.

While I am not surprised about who can only be described as the worst HR Manager in the history of any HR department, I am surprised about his subordinates (my direct supervisor and her peers).

These people have been at my company long enough to remember how it was before Mr. Shit4Brains took the wheel of our proverbial Titanic. These are the same people who appear to share the department-wide frustration with his lack of knowledge, micromanagement, and embarrassing decisions.

Is this playing both sides or have they officially joined the dark side? Were they worn down, do they want to make their staff feel as micromanaged as they do, or do they enjoy the pseudo power they feel keeping us down?

S4B has always been an ass but these people thrived back in the days when we had autonomy and growth opportunities. Now they rarely delegate anything meaningful and usually steal credit for anything worth talking about.

Those of us in HR see this all the time but I cannot believe it could happen among my coworkers. HR professionals know how this ends. It's our job to deal with departments that have these types of problems. While everyone in HR should know better, these people DO know better. I don't get it.

I spend my morning commute hoping a bag of money falls off an armored truck. Seriously, like so many others, I am just waiting to get out.

Anniversary Banquet

Recently, I had the displeasure of attending an "Anniversary Banquet" to celebrate my astounding ten years of "service" to my company. I haven't dreaded anything more since the pain of childbirth.

To say it was a horrific experience would be an understatement.

I don't know what was worse, having to smile while Mr. Shit4Brains stood next to me for the obligatory picture or watching my fellow employees kiss ass to upper management.

On a side note, do you remember that song by Beck, "Loser?" It has become Mr. Shit4Brains mantra. Well, it's his mantra for me. "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me." Yep, that says it all for him.

So, I listened to my fellow employees drone on about how time flies, how fabulous the food was (it wasn't), and how nice it was to spend time together away from work. Excuse me, this wasn't away from work. In fact, it was worse than work. At least at work, I can WORK. All I could do there was sit and pray for time to miraculously pass... quickly.

Although this banquet was not mandatory, it certainly would have been career suicide inappropriate to miss it. True recognition of my time served service would have been to give me a day off.

Ban the BCC

I have a few issues with emails using the dreaded Blind (or Blank) Carbon (or Courtesy) Copy. First of all, it's not blind to everyone. Only the recipient is in the dark.

If you are bcc'ed, you know it. What am I supposed to think when I get bcc'ed? Was I placed in the bcc to protect my identity? To hide the fact that I got the email? Call me cynical but I believe most bccs are used to hide the fact that I got the email.

Doesn't that seem a little silly at work? I understand bcc for large groups of people who may not know each other. Protecting their privacy is obvious for those times.

Funny thing is I don't usually see this in my personal email accounts. I can get a joke, funny story, or obligatory cute picture of a friend's baby and see my name jumbled in with their family and everyone else they know. I do get annoyed when I get fifty emails resulting from Aunt Helen in Idaho hitting, "reply to all" to comment on the number of teeth the baby was showing in the picture.

Anyway, at work, the bcc is usually used for devious reasons. In my experience, it is used to share the responsibility yet deny credit. Have I mentioned how much I loathe my own gender as coworkers?

If you haven't figured it out already, allowing your insecurities into the workplace won't gain you high marks with me.