So I still have a job

Feb 10, 2010 07:23

Although others were not so lucky.

The whole thing was very bizarre. At 9.30am they started calling us in individually to give us the news, good or bad. The first 4 were in and out in about 10 minutes each and not the half hour that had been scheduled. Then it was the turn of the lady I have been working closest with over the past 4 months. She had been with the company for 16 years and is the person that assigns codes to all the full-time undergrad courses. No one else currently does her job, and there is very little documentation on how to do it.

When she had been in for 20 minutes, I knew something was up. Then the guy from HR came down and collected her bag and coat. We all just looked at each other and wondered what the hel was going on. She had said that morning that if they offered her the 1 year contract, she would take it but tell them she'd be looking for something else. It appears they did not give her that option. She didn't come back to her desk and we learned later that she had been told to surrender her ID pass when she left the building.

The next one to go in was the lovely guy that I trained up last year, who then got a job working on another specific part of the web service the company offers. Only 1 other persn in the company knows what he does and again there is very little documentation on it. Thankfull, he did show me on Monday the basics. He at least did come back to his desk, escorted by the HR manager, and then left the building for good. That was a huge shock. He knows all the systems we work on, but seems to have had a personality clash with our manager. Actually, our manager has not managed, and that's the root of this guy's situation: I know he needs clear guidelines and targets and he always worked well for me, but since he has been in his new job there has been very little direction or supervision.

Both of these people's work has absolutely nothing to do with the contract that we had withdrawn from us in December, which now looks like it will be renegotiated anyway. The way they have been treated is shocking, and I seriously doubt that the company could win an industrial tribunal if either wanted to take it that far. The business case for redundancies is now a very shaky one, and the work still exists to be done.

So instead of going in at 1pm, I got a call asking me to go at 11.20am. I asked if they could wait 10 minutes as I was in the middle of something. I could have gone straight away, but having seen 2 folks get the boot, I wasn't in any hurry to learn my own fate at that point. But at 11.35 am I was told that I had got the permenant grade 4 position. I accepted it right away, seeing as I am now on leave for the rest of the week, and I didnt want them to change their minds!

The rest of the afternoon was one of mild flappery on our manager's part, when he realised that not only am I on leave now, minime is on leave all next week, and none of us even have access to the parts of the systems that the 2 now ex-colleagues worked on. These things usually take about a week to get done, but the work cannot sit around waiting apparently. Crumbs, who'd have thought. So while I am away, much basic learning will be done by minime and the temps, and then next Monday I jump straight in and have to start writing user manuals for everything.

I will be extremely busy. Not least in training my manager to manage properly. If he thinks he can sit back and do nothing now that we all have our contracts in place, he is mistaken. I expect my managers to know what is going on with their teams and to deal with higher level queries once I've sorted out the general stuff. And minime's personality transplant seems to be a permenant thing too - I think we will work well together now that she is relieved of her responsibility of staffing issues.

Let the games begin :)
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