Book of Jamez

55 y/o malcontent, something of a writer

Category: House Of Lies

  • Let's Be Perfectly Clear

    I was fired, you sent a kill command to my blackberry, my computer and told me to vacate the premises.

    So when you have employees call up or email and ask where files might be, I am under no obligation to answer. I was willing to stay with the firm for 30 days, and remain reachable beyond that for questions and support, your ego wouldn’t allow that to happen.

    As a result: Do I have any idea where such and such file might be? Yes. Am I required to help you find it? No.

    You created and implemented a new filing system for all the files on your network that was going to “streamline” your business…. try using that road map to find your files.

  • Where there is smoke…

    I had started to decide in November, during the company retreat to Cancun that I needed to move on. The amount of animosity between my two bosses kept growing and growing. Both of them were talking to me about what was going on, but neither would talk to the other.

    I expressed to John, while in line to go back to the US that if I quit, he and Jim would be forced to reconcile for the business to continue on. John said that if I quit the company would fail… seriously, he said this.

    So, in December, at a low point in the company when I returned from a vacation – I decided to leave the company. My resume was being worked on each day as I came to work.

    John’s behavior continued on as if nothing were wrong. He submitted a strategic plan for the coming 3 years that had no financial plan at all – when a staff member pointed this out, he appeared at least a little embarrassed – but still believed in his 3 year plan to sell the newsletter, the website, and a massive data base of information people would pay to see. I realized it would be like this regardless of who was working for him, his pipe dreams to make millions instantly are the core of his company.

    So I let Jim know in Mid December that I would be giving notice by February 1. He tried to talk me out of it, but at the time he still had hope he and John could work things out.

    The day before John fired Jim, I again pleaded with him to reconsider. To give it two weeks where everyone could think about it. But he plowed on and said it had to happen that day, December 31st. Which again leads me to believe his entire motivation for firing Jim was financial – he has to help pay for the Commune in MN.

    People who know the company were shocked that day, shocked… not one of them saw this coming at all, not one of them took me seriously when I told them, not one of them thinks the company has a future now that the one person to counter John’s lunacy is no longer there.

  • When did it start? and why?

    I don’t know the why of it… I can speculate that he was having troubles making payments on his credit cards and to investments groups that he belongs to (he has a habit of discussing his financial issues in the open office for all to hear).

    In the summer he first started to talk about changes, and made me start to wonder what was going on. He mentioned selling staff and consultants shares of Company stock to get them more invested in how the company was doing. I was skeptical, and made it clear that the employees seemed pretty dedicated to their jobs already.

    In July or August he decided that we should honor Jim for one of his drawings and show the company’s appreciation, during our Fall trip to Cancun, for all the hard work he had done over the years… now this might not come as a shock to anyone reading, good companies do that… but at this company I was told over and over and over again that they don’t do that… they recognize employees all year long in salary and bonuses. (my hinting at Administrative Professionals day got me a talking to). So, I started to create a plan to do a slide show with photos of those who know and have worked with Jim over the years… John stepped in and said: Jim isn’t dying and he isn’t going anywhere. He didn’t want it to seem funeral like (Jim’s mother in law had passed away and her grand daughter made a slide show – it was a good slide show). So the idea was scraped.

    It wasn’t even a month after that that John approached me about changing the structure of the firm and hinted at getting rid of Jim. I approached him about checks and balances and asked if Jim weren’t there to stop him or advise him, what was to keep him from doing crazy things. He said “you Jamez”.

    The only things that I know happened between then was he and his siblings are trying to buy property in MN, (I edited the document for him) and if he was struggling to pay his credit card bills and his investment group, how was he going to afford this?

    Perhaps that’s the motivation, I don’t know.

    When I said in early fall that getting rid of Jim was a mistake and he needed to rethink it, he agreed. Then it came back in October, and I again said it was a bad idea. In December, when he was about to fire Jim, the night before I said: Don’t fire him, give it some time… He said he couldn’t wait any longer. These are fine examples of him listening to someone.

  • Hypothetical Math

    So the two Principals of the firm both billed out (each) $350,000 annually
    The top architect, under the Principals billed out about $250,000 annually
    Then approximately (by the rest of the staff) about $142,000 annually
    and add in consultants billings are about $101,000 annually
    Bringing a grand total of billed amounts to clients at $1,200,000 roughly

    You have annual payroll of about: $965,000

    The President of the company decides to hire someone to be the “marketing manager” to sell the website and the newsletter, which have already been proven to be a huge success (note sarcasm). And wants to pay that person $50,000 plus 3% of all advertising and lets assume bonuses. This person does not have billable work, really… just to sell the newsletter, and given how popular and how many years its been making money this is a lot of work (again with the sarcasm). And you budget $40,000 towards a revamped website ($10,000 every other month until July).

    So how do you afford to pay this person and this huge project? You fire your top earner… that’s right, you fire one of the people bringing in $350,000 worth of income annually. Not only that, but you also raise salaries and billable rates of all employee’s by 5%. This not only pays for the new person, but it also means there is a significant pay increase for the owner.

    The employees may not get bonuses this year. The Profit Sharing plan, can be rewritten now that the Board of Directors is only one person, he can make up the rules as he goes along. The profit sharing is due to go in very soon, so its likely he’s already changed the rules to make this not happen. Lets say he hires his new office manager at $62,000, this is a $10,000 increase in the amount of salary he was paying his last office manager.

    I wouldn’t let this guy near my checkbook, he doesn’t seem to understand simple math.

  • Little Differences and Priorities

    In January of 07, the entire staff were invited to go to an all inclusive resort in NY, on the company’s dime for the weekend. I made reservations at the hotel, and told everyone that I would be sending out a note about travel arrangement options. Before I had the chance everyone, including John, sent me their plans for getting there. A week before we were to go, John was concerned that he never got a list of travel options. We all departed on Friday at varying times of the day, and most of us had reservations through Sunday night.

    I had been sick for days, but as a dedicated worker bee I kept going to work (company policy was that you were not allowed to take any time off for the first 6 months of employment) and almost decided not to go to the resort.
    I took my friend Suzanne with me, we drove up and stopped in NYC to have dinner before proceeding to the resort. When we arrived and settled in we went downstairs to look around and see if we could find other staff members. We ran into John and his wife, I whispered to Suzanne that this was one of my bosses. Before anyone could say “Hi” or greet one another John had to get what truly mattered to him off his chest:

    No one is checking the mail for the office, He said. We really need to make arrangements in the future if we wont be in there to check the mail.

    I just stared at him, and introduced my friend to his wife and then to him. My friend Suzanne told me as we walked away: I could never work for him, he’s crazy.

    When Suzanne and I ran into Jim and his wife it was much more pleasant. Jim and his wife both got up, crossed a room and introduced themselves to Suzanne before I could even open my mouth. They then asked me how our drive was and finally how I was feeling.

    Every person on the trip asked how I was feeling when the first ran into us, except John.

  • He's reading …

    So now that we know he’s reading it, one last piece of advice:

    Your staff knows your the President of the company, they’ve known since they were hired. You don’t need to remind them two and sometimes three times a week… they know. Its the joke of the company.

  • Micromanagement – The Finer Details

    Micromanagement was evident when I was just the office AA, but both the Office Manager and I were brand new so I assumed it would go away. I was wrong.

    One particular event that comes to mind was in January of 2007. I was preparing to send out the newsletters to 300 or so people. Monica and I had printed off the newsletters, stamped them and I was preparing labels. He, he architect and owner of the company, came over to inquire about what size labels I was using. At first I thought he was kidding, but soon realized he really wanted to know. When I brought this up at a later date, he assured me that he was just trying to be helpful, not trying to micromanage.

    —

    When I took on the roll of Office Manager, one of the tasks he wanted me to do was give Monica her employee evaluation. This was in the beginning of December, I had been Office Manager for less than two weeks. I didn’t think it was a good idea for me to evaluate someone that had been there 12+ years, and thought that perhaps John or Jim should do the evaluating. John persisted. I hoped it would go away, it did not.

    In January, he again insisted I give Monica her evaluation, I again protested that this was not a good idea. We all (John, Jim and I) agreed to ask Monica what she wanted and do that. I approached Monica, her answer surprised me – she did want me to evaluate her performance over the last two months. I informed John and Jim, who were both in agreement that this could happen.

    Monica and I scheduled a time to do her evaluation. I gave her a blank copy of the evaluation form (which was stolen outright from Children’s National Medical Center, I might add) and told her to fill hers out and I would fill one out as is procedure. As the date approached, I sent an email to John and Jim reminding them that the next day Monica and I would not be in the office for a few hours as we reviewed her evaluation.

    That evening, I received an email from John telling me that it was inappropriate for me to give Monica her evaluation, that I didn’t know how very important this was and couldn’t possibly document it properly. He really thought I should have discussed this with him before proceeding.

    I lost it, I knew at that point that I was purposefully being driven insane. I sent a scathing email back to John and cc’d Jim saying that this was ridiculous, I couldn’t possibly understand what my job was if they kept giving me false information, or changing the rules and reality as we went along. I went in to work anyway, was so pissed off that it didn’t really matter. Jim wanted to know what he could do to make things better, and I really wasn’t sure at this point.

    I think, but have no proof, that he pulled John aside and insisted that he apologize and correct the situation. Cause John was very forthcoming with an apology, but couldn’t really bring himself to believe that he had done anything wrong. He did take me out to lunch and I assumed things would get better. This was not to be the case.

  • The Newsletter

    The newsletter is what John really wants to sell. This is the project that for over a decade he’s been hoping would become a money maker. This is where I kept remembering AA definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

    When I came on board, the newsletters price for domestic subscribers was $75 for 4 issues, that’s 4 pages of black and white paper. It was a tad more for International subscribers. There was a “database” of people that were subscribers at one time or another, but it had never been maintained well enough to know who was paying and who got a complimentary issue. They paid the editor $1,100 dollars a month to help write the quarterly newsletter. The cost to produce the newsletter, by administrative staff and company resources (copy machine toner, electricity, paper, use of the copier/printer for this purpose only for over 3 hours, and postage) yes… the cost of all that in addition to the time John and Denise spent writing it, it’s well over $75 in costs. So there is not a profit here at all.

    I had started at around the same time that the University of MD had done a study for the company in regards to the newsletter. Their advice was that we needed to give up on the notion of making money on the thing until we had up subscribers. They even went so far as to suggest groups that we should target.

    So, two weeks after those results, John called a meeting to figure out who we should target, and how much money we should charge for the newsletter. He again talked about how this was going to make us money, as soon as distribution was high enough. That advertisers would be interested in listing in our newsletter and website as soon as they saw how many people read it. The group brainstormed, we came up with a whole list of targeted audiences.

    Three months later, he called a meeting to brainstorm about who we should target to send the newsletter to. At this point, several of us had already been in the previous meeting and heard what UMD had said, but we nodded and smiled and attended the meeting. We did get a free meal after all.

    In January of 2008, Denise again suggested that we have a meeting to figure out who to target. At this point, I was on my way out anyway, and said that this had been done at least three times, and perhaps we should look at the data from those previous meetings. They rolled their eyes at me and agreed to do that before calling another meeting.

    They looked at the list and decided to bring it to the staff meeting to see what the staff wanted to do in regards to the priority of soliciting people to read the newsletter. I did not attend said meeting.

    I will point out to you that I finally figured out in the summer of 2007, that there were approximately 55 people that actually paid for the newsletter. About 200 that we spammed with it, and maybe 100 that asked for an electronic version.

  • How I became an office manager… and other horrors

    In May or June of 2006 I had originally interviewed for the position of Office Manager at my last job (that I was recently fired from). Two of the three people that interviewed me didn’t think I could do the job, so they hired someone from an agency to do the job. I was then hired as her “assistant” in August.

    Right away I knew it was a quirky place to work. Relaxed work environment, but everyone was on edge, concerned about projects, deadlines and new people in the office. I warm up to people slowly, so wasn’t sure what to make of the people or the office environment at that time.

    One of the tasks John, the boss, had assigned to the Office Manager at the time, was a File Numbering Renaming. He wanted all the client folders to be be renamed to start with a number to make it easier to locate things. Not just hard copy folders, but electronic ones also. Needless to say, she didn’t think much of this plan at all, but he pushed it and she “presented” it as an idea at a staff meeting. Part of the reason she was fired, was that she didn’t know enough about that project to submit it as an idea in the meeting.

    He also wanted her to use the Tasks in Microsoft Outlook, and institute a system for the entire staff to use them. Not having sufficient Outlook training, she wasn’t sure how to do this; and to be honest, none of the staff will ever use MS Outlook Tasks, which really gets on his nerves.

    Well, anyway, she couldn’t deflect enough of his Micromanagement to remain sane, and she didn’t want to do anything he wanted to do. So they fired her. I guess there are probably other reasons, I don’t personally think she was qualified to be an office manager, she didn’t seem to know how to do it.

    I took over the last two weeks in November, and if you ask John and Jim, probably took over a month or so before that too.

  • Fired

    I’ve been fired. Yesterday. They sent a “kill” command to my Blackberry deleting all the information on there.

    So, here on my blog I’m going to document what’s been going on for the last year or so.

    Then, I’ll welcome your opinions on the matter.