Every time I look at this thread, I think about the untold thousands of things at work that were just so absurd. It was like literally working in a Dilbert cartoon.
Not "Haha, like, I'm literally working in a Dilbert cartoon." no, go get a standard Dilbert cartoon (well, okay, not counting ones involving Ratbert and satanic magic). That probably happened at my work.
I always wanted to come here and type endless stories about it, but the SHEER VOLUME of shit that would happen was so ridiculous that I couldn't be arsed to type it. That would literally have been a second job.
Work was a long struggle against management. At one point we were actually committing gross forgery of official company documentation to meet our requirements with our corporate partners. Why? Because of a one-line-of-code error that we warned management about the minute it was implemented. The probelem was only fixed after nine months of them simply... ignoring a completely corrupted database. There was literally no reason for this not to be fixed and when it was finally done, it took an hour and a half.
The company has the worst communication I've ever seen - it's not helped by the fact that our division - customer service - was in on constant open warfare with other divisions. In fact the IT director once made our director cry because he yelled at her so rudely and loudly - and she deserved it! Our Director and VP's style can basically be described as: 1 - Nobody needs to know anything to do their job. No matter how complex. Information should never be shared. 2 - Anybody who disagrees with us is wrong. Not in the traditional "management is always right" cliche, but to the point of actually blatantly making random stuff up right on the spot to 'win' arguments. 3 - Everything can be done by the seat of our pants. Major technical release affecting the entire customer base? Outsource a random internal operation with no infrastructure to do so? Spend tens of thousands of dollars on a program you can get for free? Abandon said program because it's not sexy enough (<- actual management complaint)? Fuck! WE'LL JUST MAKE IT ALL UP AS WE GO ALONG. 4 - (corollary of #3) Nobody - including other divisions or companies - needs any notice to do anything. We almost crashed Bell's (a major national carrier) entire cellular network on no less than three occasions that I know of. That merely the most egregious example among thousands. 5 - (further corollary of #3) 5 - Everything your employees do can be reduced to a single productivity number. If they don't match the metric, they are lazy troublemakers. If someone has responsibilities that can't be immediately quantified, those responsibilities must either be frivolous, irrelvant, or wholly imaginary. 6 - If another division doesn't give you an answer you want to hear, go over their heads and whine, even to completely separate companies.
I mean, we lived in an environment of complete, never ending chaos. We only had about one day in a given month without Random Drama. No word of a lie. I once ticked off thirty-seven consecutive work days of crises.
Our VP and director... well, I think in the end I hate them most for what they do for stereotypes of women in the the workplace (no really!). Imagine the worst, most useless, spin-pitching, control-freakish, irrational women you have ever known. Possibly someone in an institution. The director, sleeps about 3 hours a night, works for 20 and acts like this is normal. On unnumbered occasions she has emailed other department's directors to harangue them at 11:45 pm. When she called IT late at night, to ask for favours she had no business asking for, you could hear her kids yelling "mommy mommy mommy!" in the background while she told them "Not now, mommy is working" in her usual condescending patois - only problem was that this usually also happened at a quarter to midnight. Her husband actually called us on Christmas Day to desperately beg her to come home for the afternoon. But hey, the CEO's an oblivious little milquetoast salaryman with an alcohol problem, so big surprise there. I never heard so many people say "see what happens when you get a woman manager?" in my life. The whole thing was disgusting. Sarah Palin? Yeah. That. Only worse. At least Sarah wasn't directly observed throwing her own children under the fucking bus.
As for my department, well, our entire operating method became to lie, cheat, and go around management for everything. We frequently made them look terrible by admitting to other departments that we had received no training or support AT ALL on a new release or major update. We were a small department, one with no influence at all. Yet we survived and prospered longer than any other department by simply usurping all of our own management powers.
Survivived for two-and-a-half years, and made it from base peon to (effectively) Warranty Manager in that time (no raise for that though, LOL). In the end, I just ran out of patience and began publicly insulting and talking down to the Director (currently the acting VP for few months, until the regular idiot comes back). When they fired me, I assured them I would be reserved... and then came out on the floor and shouted to my colleagues "HEY GUYS, I JUST GOT FIRED!". There were probably a thousand better ways to have handled the whole thing. But honestly? I just didn't give a shit anymore.
I think the best thing was getting to assign myself my own title (another responsibility I blatantly usurped). I called myself "The Warranty Wizard".
