Everybody's a critic

We send e-mails out to customers every day. Every afternoon we send out a test of the next day’s e-mail to the higher-ups of the company for the stated and agreed-upon purpose that if someone finds a mistake, we can fix it before it goes out for real.

Mike sent out the test today and had no less than one president and two VPs tell him there were mistakes in the e-mail. They didn’t bother to tell him what the mistakes were, just that they were there. Oh really, Captain Helpful? Do you think the correction process might go A LOT faster if you explained what they were? That’s the kind of BS you pull on someone you consider to not be worth your time [“I can’t be troubled to circle a word in red, you find the problem and make it right.”]. The president even said to Franz, the VP in charge of us that, “there are too many mistakes here to mention.” There were three. THREE – and two of them were words that had accidentally been made plural, so spell check would never have caught them.

Run for the hills! We have offended the gods and asked them to do the job they told us they wanted to do! Oh, curse these mistyping fingers!

The ninja is silent. The ninja is deadly.

Mike does a report for Rod on a regular basis that tracks how well our e-mails sell products. It’s a valuable report, but a huge time drain on a department that is understaffed as it is, so it’s a bit of a sore spot. Rod also has a tendency to demand it at the most inopportune times, which also makes it annoying.

History aside, Mike gave Rod the binder for the report a couple days ago. Rod took whatever he needed from it and then returned it. Not to one of us, not to Mike’s mailbox, he left it propped against the entrance to our cubicle. He silently crept up and left it there for us to find later. It took more effort for him to sneak up to the entrance of the cubicle and leave it there than it would have to merely put it on Mike’s desk. As if he couldn’t condescend to speak to us if the chance arose when he actually approached. What a jackass.

Chromatic Death

Some irate customer sends in an envelope full of powder, obviously intended as an Anthrax scare. We know we deal with a bunch of psychos, but you have to take these things seriously just in case. Did our company seal off the area where the envelope was opened? No. Did they stop more people from coming in the building until it could be checked out? No, they let us walk right in.

Carly, the person in charge of Customer Service, and John, the one sane VP we have here, were talking to the police and HAZMAT team outside when Bill (the company president) sent someone out to get John because he had things to discuss with John that took precedent over the lives of the 50 people in the building.

A couple minutes later, Bill sent someone out to remind Carly that they had a meeting at 11:00 AM that she needed to attend. It was 8:30 AM. It could’ve waited until she came back in. But apparently Bill saw it as much more important to exercise his authority than to worry about dealing with the people in charge of all of our safety in a proper manner. Pompous jackass.