ah, i’m pretty calm today actually–
though it’s weird. i was hired for this job in july, and when i got the actual offer letter they sorta lowballed me on the salary. the reasoning was “well, you’ll be in training and getting up to speed for a while, so we figure that we’d sort of pay you training pay and then in 6 months we’ll review your salary”…
ok i wasn’t really working at the time, though i did have another offer pending from another company…but i decided that this offer seemed good. Now, what i should have done, was to get the new salary figure in writing back then in july… what stopped me was my manager saying “so..come 6 months we’ll get you to that figure we discussed, and if things work out like i think they will, we should be able to go higher….”
cha ching…my eyes glazed over with little $$ signs. “should be able to go higher…” on that i let the sleeping dog lie, or lay i guess, cuz carpets and dogs lay, and people lie. but anyway…
so next thing i know it’s jan 1st and i’ve been here 6 months…review time right. So gently remind manager man with artfully dropped hints… “wow i can’t believe it’s been 6 months already….” to which he said “oh already? i guess it’s time for your review….”
a week passes…
“hmm, what happened about that review…”ohh jeez too busy and the ceo was out. it’ll happen by the end of the month, i promise…”
End of month is today….(well in terms if business days). so this morning i says to him i says “i think i know the answer to this, but what’s the status of my review?” he litterally gave a “DOH, oh shit, i forgot”—-
WTF, i mean, ok, it’s not his money so he doesn’t care about giving it to me or me getting it. but still, i mean, come on,– moveover–this should be a no brainer (as they say in certain circles)…did i satisfy the expectations of the training period…yes or no? if yes, then more money, if no, then no more money and jefke will begin looking for a new job…. but he’s getting all complicated, ….”well i need to fill out a form discuss it with the ceo…go over here, do a little dance. hopefullly i can start today….”
so what do i do? i feel like i should not work until i get an answer…i mean 4 weeks of bullshit. should i stage a walk out? should i do a sit in and just look at porn all day? i mean i like this place, but the job is not what they said it would be, and now the pay isn’t even what they said it would be…why play by their rules anymore. grrr.
in other news,
after getting our $250 gas and electric bill for the month of Jan, i decided that it was time to take matters into my own hands and try to seal up our leaky duct work. it just so happens that the home depot started stocking duct mastic in caulking tube form… which apparently is not so easy to find. So last night, after i got a batch of my famous onion soup simmering on the stove. i went down to the blair witch cellar (ed note: i have been informed that since we don’t have access to the underbelly of the building from within the building itself, i should be calling it a cellar not a basement, i dunno) to fix some ductwork….
now for all the hours i have spent down there, it never ceases to amaze me what a shitty job was done on all sorts of different aspects of the rehab of the house….as i examined the ductwork more closely, i discovered all sorts of gaps and holes at the joints and shit. now from what i have researched a lot of HVAC guys will just slap duct tape over such things…which is bad, since the tape doesn’t do well with the hot dry air of a forced air heating system….even better in our case…the losers didn’t even do that-they just left holes that leaked hot air into the cellar, and when the heat wasn’t on…let cold air up into the house.
so i went to work with mastic. spastic bombastic mastic. the shit was pretty cool acutally, it comes out of the tube very loose, almost watery, then after about 15 mins, it hardens almost like clay. so i just went around and smeared this shit all over every thing. will it help? i dunno, i can say this all the cobwebs no longer blow around when the heat is on….yeah, i kick ass.
i did learn that i had previously installed the duct insulation inside out…so i redid that….and i changed our air filter, man on man, was that shocking, er well gross. that alone should save us a crap load of money.
the weather, while not as cold as canada…is supposed to be pretty cold over the weekend..so i am sort of faced with a dilemma….so the cellar is not offically heated, though the furnace (and formerly leaking ducts) sort of heat the place… and we have exposed pipes….so work with me here. i seal up the heating so that it doesn’t heat the cellar so much any more ergo the temp in the cellar goes down, then pipe freeze and explode…
thus i am now insulating all the exposed pipes…hot or cold in hopes of preventing freezing and busting…
9 responses so far ↓
1 Don // Jan 30, 2004 at 10:27 am
Stand up to your boss!
Let homeless people sleep in your cellar with those barrels they use to warm their hands, which should keep things toasty down there.
2 B // Jan 30, 2004 at 11:53 am
Don, you are a wise and ingenious person. They could eat the rats!
jefke, I take back what I said about thewvsr.com. Entries like this one make waiting around here very worth while.
“spastic bombastic mastic.” “i did learn that i had previously installed the duct insulation inside out…” Remarkably hilarious. Great stuff.
As for your boss, you must indeed stand up. But remember: this guy is only a middle man. Confronting him personally won’t get you your money.
Sylvia, who knows about such things, has managed to teach me at least one thing about the corporate jungle: the importance of leverage. I noted the two extreme options that lay before you. (1) Kick up a stink. (2) Quietly pout (wiggling the monkey). Where is your middle option? It lies in something that you do for them which THEY value. Only by making yourself essential - somehow becoming indispensable, even if only in some small way - do you have leverage when negotiating.
“well i need to fill out a form discuss it with the ceo…go over here, do a little dance. hopefullly i can start today….” Oh yeah. I know the office fox trot. This guy is stalling. Find a way to make him sweat a little…
3 rcg // Jan 30, 2004 at 12:01 pm
I don’t know that I’d stage any sort of demonstration or institute a work-to-rule strategy, but I’d ask for a meeting with your boss, a scheduled meeting, then I’d calmly take the time to register the complaint.
Ask him to respond with a firm date by which he’d jump through whatever hoops need jumping through, and from there it’s up to him to stick to it.
Should he not stick to it, escalate the issue directly to the CEO, prolly by e-mail.
In the meantime, maybe look for other jobs. If this is how this review period is being handled, even if you manage to get them to move their asses, I’d expect most everything will be handled in this way, that is to say, not handled at all.
jefke does not deserve to be treated this way.
4 rcg // Jan 30, 2004 at 12:06 pm
Hmmm. Not sure about B’s advice. I wouldn’t try to play the irreplaceable card. Not to say that jefke is replaceable, hell no, far from it.
But the software tester-IT guy-technical writer or whatever the hell you are is.
However, replacing you does represent a pain in the ass to your employers, I should think.
If you try to accomplish something they value, it could take years for them to notice, frankly. Particularly with the way your boos is behaving… I suspect your accomplishing good things would not really get noticed, or at any rate, properly acknowledged.
A little cynical… but there you are.
The squeaky wheel gets the oil, though. So raise the issue somewhat formally — I wouldn’t bother with a paper trail for future legal proceedings — and then escalate.
Eventually someone will say: “Can you just shut that Makowka kid up and give him a raise?”
Sad but true.
5 jefke // Jan 30, 2004 at 1:34 pm
nah, the porn watching/sit in begins in 15 mins.
i joke,
it looks like things should def. be somewhere on monday, the manager should have the proper forms filled out in triplicate, and he has a standing monday status meeting scheduled with ceo man. he himself said that it shoudl be a done deal then, well i guess after his meeting then we have a meeting and then a meetign about meetings or something. If this does not work, then i start getting upitty.
i hear you both and well hear you both. sadily, in my time here, i have not had a good opportunity to demostrate why you gotta have the jefke around. ‘on the ground’ as they say, i’ve been working my evil charms on people of all departments–the operations people like me, i dare say they would even back up a claim like ‘he’s a smart guy and knows what’s going on’-i think in my department, while i’m not driectly making anything i think my value has been established. I can say with all sincerity that i know the projects that i have been involved in have ended up with higher quality outcomes than had i not been involved. I am certain of that.
see the problem really lies in that i have not been on a project that has gone from the idea phase clear to the acutal build and deploy phase…why you ask? the CEO changes his mind about what is important with the wind. don’t get me wrong this is his right (bobby brown has another word for it…what was that again..) so in the end you have 7 projects that are 1/4 completed and then moved out to pasture. and i look like i haven’t done anything. oh well. monday will be game day.
6 B // Jan 30, 2004 at 2:10 pm
I was thinking about getting snapshots of your boss with a hooker or something.
Or blowing him.
No actually, I admit that my advice would only apply in the long term, if then. But I didn’t mean that your value must necessarily come from your professional profile. There are many ways to make yourself indispensible. It is not so much that things have been accomplished thanks to you. It is more that some thing must simply NOT work without you.
Do what rcg says. What the hell do I know anyway, crouched deep in my doomsday central command bunker?
7 Natty // Jan 30, 2004 at 6:55 pm
I say do to manager what beecher did to Vern in the prison gym (Oz). Maybe just do it figuratively- afterall, manager guy is figuratively doing the Vern thing to you with his apathy. Same end result. Man, Don and his DVD loans really have an impact on my underlying thoughts. Jefke, i had the smae advice for you that Quebey had- take it to the warden, er, CEO guy if you get no results (not just “talking about what he’s gonna do,” but actually doing it).
Glad to see that the misspelling program is still in effect (Richard- boos?). I am very, very tired. Soooo much school work (I think this is more than you kids got in Leuven, but then again it was philosophy, so all you needed to do was pull something out of your asses and then talk it to death).
8 rcg // Jan 30, 2004 at 10:54 pm
??
“Boos” is correct, like: “sometimes my boos pisses me off” or “my boos just gave me a raise.”
Maybe that’s just a Canadian spelling…
9 Natty // Jan 31, 2004 at 12:27 pm
Uh oh, now you’re at that pitiful level, where you think you have us all fooled, but you’re really just fooling yourself. Oh so sad, Richardke.