Читать книгу Cubicle Envy - Geoff Jarok - Страница 5

-Let’s consider our core competencies-

Friday, April 10, 2009

Friday had come in some kind of fog weighed down by unfinished early week tasks. It was funny to see some of the new British managers trying to dress down. It looked painful to the Americans who had invented casual Fridays.

“Hello Nigel,” said Lisa in her almost legitimate British accent.

“Hello Veronica,” Chris replied with a bit of a laugh. They had jokingly given themselves fake British names in case there were spies among them or something like that.

“What’s Tra-La-La going to come up with today?” exclaimed Lisa.

Tra-La-La, Christian name Terence Lardner, was the manager of local HR. Terry was a nice guy, like the others, had been around for a number of years in Sound Tech, but obviously was trying desperately to keep his job despite the joke it was slowly turning him into.

“Ohp – here we go.” Chris was reading from the latest email “Due to certain circumstances such as the impacts of first quarter geographical revenue inconsistencies as compared to budget, blah, blah, blah…we are requiring that all staff utilizes all of their accrued vacation time before the end of December. Anything unused will not be available as of January 1.”

“Hey Flo?” Lisa called out into the forest of file cabinets. “Can I take an eight week vacation starting like next week?”

“Yeah, as long as it lasts two weeks,” Flo said. Flo was the accounting manager. She had been with Sound Tech for about six years and before that, like Chris, had been with Ernst and Young, but in Ohio where she was from. She basically knew each person in Finance’s job backwards and forwards. Flo was only a year older than Chris, but yet was married with child and obviously fairly accomplished in career as well. She was a good boss and managed to keep Lisa in line, for the most part. The CFO and other management would sometimes ask Flo about Lisa’s productivity, but Flo always vouched for Chris and Lisa.

In the old days of Sound Tech it used to take the accounting team two weeks to close the books each month. PW wanted it done in five days and under Flo’s guidance the improvement was accomplished consistently. PW was insistent on a lot of changes and projects to align Sound Tech’s accounting with their own and somehow Flo was able to concentrate all of these demands into something almost palatable to Chris and Lisa. There was a lot of work, but they had become a really strong team. Chris was afraid that when he did leave that he may have been pulling the legs out from the whole operation. He had to continuously remind himself that he had to look out for his and Donna’s best wishes. He didn’t want to burn bridges, but he didn’t want to be over-fortifying them either.

The vacation announcement was not entirely surprising. Salary and bonus freeze is an easy way to save money. Then those changes slowly develop into a travel freeze. Finally vacation is the third major employee expense. It’s not even so much the expense, but actually the liability of having to accrue all of the employees’ vacation. By cleaning up the balance sheet it’s easier to meet loan covenants and bring in more investors.

Coming off a down year the previous year (as everyone had with the economy hurting), Product Wave was doing testing for version 5.2 of their VoiceScan software. VoiceScan was a voice recognition software that had applicability in a number of products from cell phones to heavy production machinery. While version 5.1 was at the end of the line in 2008, the company had hoped to make some inroads into Latin America in Quarter 4 only to find their patent had been ripped off by a Brazilian company. Lawyers were involved and it wasn’t looking good. Unfortunately, all of the facts of the pending cases could not be disclosed in the financial statements. When investors saw a marginal increase in overall sales from Q4 they were not impressed.

PW realized upon the purchase of Sound Tech eventually (probably sooner than later) a corporate simplification would have to be made to allow them to keep control and make consolidation of the reporting numbers streamlined for their accounting staff at headquarters. It was going to save a lot of costs when the transition was completed, but there were many headaches in trying to deal with these obstinate Americans. Unfortunately Lisa and the Team were not aware of how hard the management was fighting for their benefit because they were only hearing about the concessions being made and not some of the critical items being kept status quo.

“They always get us with this stuff on Fridays,” started Tim, as the dissonant squeak of chair legs grinding the linoleum kitchen floor hugged his words. He glanced quickly at his brown Doc Martens. Tim wore them every day not because he was excessively fond of the fading color. He just didn’t have any other fashion plan of attack like he used to. “I know Office Space was just a movie, but there’s a lot of truth in that. They do fire more people on Fridays. And this one? They’re telling us they didn’t know about this previously? Kelly, did you know about this?”

Kelly was reticent to say because she was told not to disclose it though she had known for over a month that it was a supreme possibility. Her eyes were blue and quiet as she flashed “Well, yeah.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lisa splashed in. “It doesn’t freakin’ matter who knows what. It’s all coming down, man. I’m sure there’s an internet block on its way. My girlfriend, Robin, works for Converse, they have to go to IT just for approval to use the internet. Eventually they’ll have us wearing hairnets and preparing toast and jam. And it’ll still be wrong. I don’t know.”

There was a collective moment of silence for the benefits that were soon to be gone.

“Philip! Who made you pizza today? Marie Callender or Mama Celeste?” Lisa was on target again.

“Uh, well we know it wasn’t you. The only thing you do in the kitchen is complain.”

“Mmm…touché. You know Philip, seriously, you should add on your online dating profile that you have impeccable cooking skills. I’m sure there’s a lot of women out there that would be smitten with a guy who likes clothes shopping and makes them a good microwave pizza.”

“You’d be surprised, Lisa. Your cats don’t mix you up a nice mojito when you get home?”

“Nah, they just poop on my couch and pretend they don’t see it.” Philip snorted a bit as he walked out and everyone else fell back in their chairs laughing. Lisa had the room again.

“You have an interview today, Dennis?”

“What do you mean?” Dennis was intrigued.

“Dress shirt, nice shoes – something’s up.”

“I don’t think I could get a job at McDonalds right now with the way things are going.”

“Good point,” Lisa replied. None of them really liked Dennis. He was just one of those guys who is a coworker today and tomorrow he’s a former coworker whose funny stories get ripped off. Their little finance clique felt bad for him having to be subjected to whatever marketing was actually doing each day. Dennis was kind of entertaining though his LinkedIn requests kept getting ‘lost.’

“One of the bigwigs from Britain is here today. I’m surprised I haven’t been assigned to show him around Boston this weekend,” Dennis explained.

“Or jolly old Waltham,” Tim chimed in.

Lisa caught up, “Here’s a Chinese restaurant you shouldn’t go to. Here’s a Greek restaurant you probably shouldn’t go to. Oh, here’s an ugly office building and everybody stuck on 128 watching us in our ugly office building.”

Dennis picked up his lunch tray and held his pose for a second. “There’s just nothing out there.”

Chris could hear the sound of the crowd getting up from the kitchen table with chair legs moaning to call on a long afternoon. He hated eating lunch at his desk, but there was a bi-weekly managers meeting and Flo needed a particular report done. Plus he had a ‘doctor’s appointment’ in the late afternoon. Chris had gone right from work to the wake for Donna’s aunt a few months before where everybody in the office gave him the interview wink so he knew better than to dress ‘inappropriately.’

# # #

With the Friday afternoon traffic stifled on 495, Chris was cutting it a bit close to get to the interview. In fact when he got to the parking lot of Vivitech, another software company, he was only five minutes early and the rushing made him a bit sweaty as it was a warm day. This was a second interview where he was to meet with the CFO and Controller. The company, located in Lowell, was much smaller than Product Wave. Chris had met with the accounting manager and a senior accountant who both seemed professional and like good coworkers. The company was nice in that it was close to home and their products, software that was being integrated in household goods like refrigerators or toasters, seemed pretty cool to Chris.

The lobby of Vivitech was Spartan, with a black leather couch and a coffee table. Sitting on the table was a 2007 Annual Report. 2008 had apparently been selectively misplaced. Before Chris could analyze the table any further the controller came in.

“Hi Chris? Phil Nardone, how are you?

“Chris Mackey, I’m doing well, thanks.”

“You didn’t have any trouble getting here I hope – oh that’s right you’ve already met with Linda and David.”

“No, yeah, the traffic was a little thick, but it always is on Fridays.”

“Sure, sure. So you’re coming from Product Wave, huh? That’s interesting. They were a client of mine when I worked for Deloitte. They have offices in Houston, Nashville and uh…”

“Sacramento,” Chris exclaimed.

“Yes, right.”

Chris interrupted the thought, “But um they’ve closed those offices now to consolidate in Waltham.”

“Oh really? Well, it has been about ten years since I worked with them. They had some interesting accounting issues surrounding their software. Anyway, you’ve been there for four years?

‘Well, I started with Sound Tech and then while I was there PW purchased us and eventually started on this corporate simplification. My role hasn’t really changed, just the logo on my paycheck, I guess.” The controller didn’t really find the paycheck comment all that funny.

“Well, let me tell you about our company a little bit. I’m not sure what Linda and David told you so I’ll just give you my take. We are coming up on our ninth year in business. I’m sure you’re familiar with the product so I won’t get too far into that. We’ve been in Lowell for about a year and a half. You live nearby?

“I live in Lowell.”

“Oh that’s great. I see that you worked at E&Y so I know you understand the value of hard work and being part of a team. I’m sure it’s a similar atmosphere to Product Wave in that regard. We have one subsidiary in Mexico so in this senior role you or David would be responsible for reconciliations and consolidation.”

There was no sense in continuing to listen. Chris knew the controller really didn’t know what was going on with his team and trying to divvy out a small amount of work to two people was never going to work. He was frankly surprised a new position was created. It seemed everybody else, including PW, was giving two or more jobs to each employee. Chris battled through the rest of the interview just for the practice, but he was dulled.

“How’d it go, babe?” Donna was chipper for a Friday evening.

“Nothin’ doin’ on that one.”

“They already called you back?”

“No, but I met with the controller and the CFO today and I just realized how the company is…I don’t know what the word is…I’m just not feelin’ it.”

She hugged him in her soft sweater and her hair mischievously leapt from her shoulders into his face.

“The next one is Wednesday, right?” She was just so hard to frustrate though he had thought about her reaction to the damp interview all the way home. Donna held a key role at the Paws Animal Clinic, but her pay lagged behind her value. Chris felt like he owned the couples’ financial success, whether that vision was old-fashioned or not. Perhaps the Easter weekend together would present a chance to enjoy each other for the first time in a while. Although Chris could usually find a way to multitask some worry about a variety of concerns into what should have been a relaxed day off.