How my day went:
Well, okay. Some background. There are two major IT shops at my company, one here and one in the midwest. For our purposes, I will call their respective heads Jim and Dwight.
Jim is my boss. He's laid-back and until recently he was just one of the guys. He's not afraid to get his hands dirty -- literally; I've seen him take trash out to the Dumpsters when it's gotten full. He's not what I think of when I think "management material", and I mean that as a compliment.
Dwight runs the shop in the midwest. He has a Napoleon complex, and he's exactly what I think of when I think "corporate". He is the kind of guy who will insult you in a monotone with neutral-sounding language.
Dwight's the golden boy. He's by-the-book. His shop's doing better numbers than ours; he maintains that it's because they have a tighter set of procedures in place, and upper management agrees. From where we're sitting, it looks like we've just got so much more shit to do than they do that we can't keep up.
So, okay. Jim's off for two weeks for the holidays. He told us to send our timecards to Dwight last Thursday, and then to take off a few hours early.
This message was not communicated to Dwight -- probably because it has nothing to do with him. We didn't leave him in the lurch, we didn't leave queues full of unanswered tickets, we left at roughly the same time they did (timezone difference and whatnot) on a slow day. But he and his boss went fucking ballistic over it this morning, sending out angry E-Mails about how no one is to leave early without their permission. (Samir said he wanted to respond with "Yes, Massa"; I wanted to respond with the bit where Scrooge rails about how Cratchit is taking advantage of him by taking Christmas off. We both restrained ourselves.)
So, okay. That in and of itself was annoying but something we could shrug off. But THEN Dwight sends the three of us temps an E-Mail saying we need to resubmit our timesheets with the number of hours we actually worked, and THEN he'll send them in.
It was just pure, unadulterated dickishness. Fucker finds a minor infraction like a dog finding a bone, and is willing to threaten our paychecks over what's got to be less than $300 out of the company's pocket. (I should note, at this point, that we routinely receive truckloads of old equipment which we then unwrap, scan, restack, rewrap, and put on another truck for disposal. The company blows probably seven figures a year on freight for shit that just gets sent to the scrap heap. Squabbling over $300 is petty in every sense of the word.)
And, you know, he does it all in his corporate double-talk, addresses us as "Gentlemen", but pretty much suggests we're liars who are trying to scam the company.
And, you know, there's a way he could have been cool about all that. He could have said, "Hey, guys, Jim never said anything about this to me, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to double-check with him before I submit those timesheets -- I trust you, but I have to follow procedure." That would have achieved exactly the same result without the dickwaving and accusations of dishonesty. (On the other hand, as one of the other temps suggested, the fact that Dwight didn't submit our timesheets in right away when we sent them to him last week suggests that this was premeditated, that he anticipated we were going to knock off early and was waiting to catch us at it.)
One of the other temps suggested, politely, that we shouldn't be penalized because our supervisor had told us to go home early. Dwight shot back, "And did he say you should log it as a full day's work?" I almost responded that there is really no other reasonable interpretation of a boss telling his employees to go home early on Christmas Eve, but managed to restrain myself.
Anyway, we eventually got ahold of Jim -- had to interrupt the poor bastard's vacation, and I'm betting he spent a couple hours on the phone with Dwight and upper management. So we got it straightened out and I won't be losing any sleep over it tonight.
But sweet Jesus what an asshole. What a petty little man, willing to make enemies of three people over a few hundred bucks' extra pay on Christmas Eve.
(Also, apparently Dwight told Jim that we left early while the service desk stayed behind and finished up an 8-hour shift. This is completely false; we were the last people out of the building and the last service desk tech -- I'll call him Ryan to continue the Office motif -- left probably an hour before we did. We asked Ryan's boss what Ryan told him, and he responded that he implied we'd kicked him out; didn't say so in so many words but hinted it pretty strongly. I haven't heard Ryan's side of the story but that's pretty damn plausible; he's been throwing our guys under the bus since his first week on the job.)
Came home, drank beer and played Dragon Age instead of looking at job postings. Not very disciplined of me, but damn it I needed to relax. I'll look at job postings tomorrow. Because I seriously do not deserve this shit.
