The Karma Payment Plan

well well well. been awhile huh? TPTB have seen fit to block us from accessing blog sites and we have been unable to post for awhile so please forgive us! ... but for some reason today we can surf the net and goof off without getting the dreaded "Big Red Hand of Death" on our monitors. so i better post this while the getting is good!

so my boss tells us last week that he is driving to Atlanta on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving for a meeting to plan for an upcoming trade show. He then feels the need (can you say guilt?) to inform me that he is driving back to Memphis on Wed and then driving him and his wife to South Carolina for Thanksgiving... really???? i am supposed to believe that he is driving to Atlanta and back and then on the South Carolina the next day???? Memphis to Atlanta round trip is appox... 780 miles!

c'mon, why not be honest and just say that I am driving to South Carolina with my wife??? Is it THAT hard to just tell the truth??? Oh, maybe it's because if you say you are going to a meeting in Atlanta then you don't have to use up your vacation time... hmmmm.... and maybe because you can get reimbursed for 780 miles worth of mileage huh??? Is THAT the reason for the dishonesty???

well, you know us... we placed a call tuesday to the office in Atlanta where our boss was supposedly meeting... you know, just coincidentally and we coincidentally asked if the boss had stopped by yet and guess what? well, i am sure you can guess the answer to that...

well, Karma is a bitch because it seems that my boss had a car accident in good ol' South Carolina and is stuck there until he gets it repaired.... woohoo! and now his employees are "working hard" in his absence!

an apology to my boss

i know that i am guilty of trashing my boss on occasion so i thought that it would be appropriate to take a second and note some of his good traits...

although he does pretty much tune out a lot of the work that needs to be done in our office there is one particular task that he really pours his heart into and does a great job at.

every month he produces a newsletter by himself that involves at least 20-30 hours of solid work on per week. he often stays late and comes in on the weekends to get it done on time. he even takes one to two business trips every month to do support a feature story. this newsletter also recaps meetings and events that have happened in the past thirty days. all in all it is pretty impressive that he pulls it off given his lack of attention to detail in other areas at work.

he prints multiple copies of this newsletter on our new 11x17 color copier, masterfully producing a two-sided full color newsletter complete with insightful stories, quotes from meetings, a calendar of events and professional quality photographs. i even have to give him props for producing a digital PDF version of the newsletter and posting it on the internet... this was unthinkable a few years ago when he could barely hit print much less navigate an Adobe software program without assistance.

indeed, the boss man does have some skills and i think it's time that we give him his due.

oh, did i mention that this newsletter was for his model airplane hobby society?

you actually didn't think it was for WORK did you??

the untouchable one & the liar

here's how it went down as best i can tell...

boss accuses my coworker of "something."
coworker has written documentation of the facts otherwise.
coworker writes boss email stating said facts.
HR gets involved and asks coworker if anyone can collaborate her facts.
I can and volunteer to get interviewed by HR and I collaborate the facts and then some.

HR ponders case.

(time passes, it's a big f'ing company and cannot do anything quickly)

HR writes up my coworker and demands that the person apologize sincerely to boss in person.

I guess that makes me a liar and my boss untouchable huh?

Working 8:20 to Five, what a way to make a living...

Every morning as I pull into the parking lot at work I say my 'Happy, Happy! Joy, Joy!' mantra and prepare for the same routine to start over again.... yes, I am talking about the dreaded 8am phone call that I get almost every morn from my boss. The conversation usually goes something like this...

"Hello?" (pause....... long extended disgusted sigh....) "Well, I am stuck here on Germantown Road, behind a sea of cars." (pause....... long extended sigh begging for me to be empathetic of his valiant efforts to get to work on time....) "I'll be there as soon as traffic allows but I wanted to call and talk about what we will need to deal with today..." and then (if I let him) he'll proceed to talk and drone on for his entire 20 minute commute, hang up in the parking lot, walk in and then have the audacity to call me into his office and repeat the entire stinking conversation all over again! Of course, over the years I've learned to screen this call and then erase his 3 minute plus voice mail that he'll leave me but that's beside the point.

I guess what it amounts to is that he thinks that by leaving his house at 8am sharp and then by getting on the phone with me, then it constitutes "working" and therefore he isn't "really" late for work almost every day huh?! It's ironic that his commute is exactly 20 minutes long and that he gets here at 8:20 almost every morning, guess he thinks that we will never notice that coincidence I suppose!

Hmmm, I get overtime pay so I wonder if I leave work everyday at 5pm, call my boss as I drive home and talk about all the crap we need to do tomorrow, does that mean I get paid for that???

Divine Design

One of the joys of working for a large corporation is spending a good deal of the workday going to annual Ethics training, Diversity Training (8hrs!), taking Global Employee Engagement Surveys, filling out your Career Objectives online, doing One on Ones with your boss, and last but not least - filling out (my personal fave) your CDW, or Career Development Worksheet.

The CDW is a form in which you briefly summarize your skills, willingness to relocate, education, etc... kinda like a baseball card for worker bees. This evil worksheet is, in my humble opinion, just a way for large corporations to save time when laying off massive amounts of employees. See, imagine you have a workforce of 50,000 plus... how easy would these forms make it to sort through all of them like so many cattle going to slaughter?

Well, guess what? We get to put a picture of ourselves on the form so I present to you my 2007 CDW image in all of it's ahem, Glory!

Tis' The Season

OK, this has got to be the all time best excuse for why someone has to leave work early....to cut their holly bushes. Yes, you heard me correctly, I also can't stop laughing about it. Our manager must leave work early one day this week because his holly bushes need to be cut. I could be wrong, but that sounds like something that is usually done on the weekend, that's when the rest of us do our house chores. I've been mulling it over in my head and would like to leave early to do something but I just can't beat that. I give it a 10 for originality. He never ceases to amaze me.

Words that should never be uttered.......

Erect and massage......when said at work they cause me to shudder. How do you massage graphics? It's just creepy.

We were blessed with an extra day away from our high heel shoe, but he's back and while he has his own agenda today and hasn't bothered with us too much, those choice moments that he has; I feel the need to ignore him. It's been a blah week so far, on a high note; the bullseye was almost hit twice during a rousing round of darts (while on our lunch break).

the internet gods are smilin upon us today...

the powers that be here at work have seen fit to keep us from viewing any websites that are fun or even mildly interesting....
if we try to view a prohibited site we get what we affectionately call "The BIG RED Hand" on our monitors and a friendly message telling us that our username has been noted and they will soon be coming for our first born son.

it is funny to note that we CAN view Fox News but cannot view NPR.org - hmmmmmm..... but i digress....

well, today for some unknown reason the powers that be have set us free! free to socialize on MySpace, to shop at Gizmondo, to download music from itunes, to even (dare i try) download a podcast from Ask a Ninja - woohoo!

maybe it's the Labor Day holiday and all of the IT geeks have slacked off, maybe it's that i gave that old lady her purse back but whatever the case... nothing work related will get done today!!!!!!!

welcome to us!

we are two lowly graphic designers struggling & fighting the good fight to muster the will to come to work everyday & sell our souls to the corporate machine (we produce crappy graphics in exchange for crappy benefits)...

let us tell you about the origin of our name... our boss apparently has a thing for spending the workday on three big objectives as follows: 1) perusing the net for images of high heel shoes & lingerie models, 2) perusing the net for images of model airplanes & finally 3) photoshopping boobies onto the lingerie models - yes, you heard that correctly! we haven't caught him photoshopping boobies onto the model airplanes as of yet but we'll keep you posted. we think he manages to squeeze in about one hour of "work" a day if you count looking over our shoulders and making sure that we are not using any fonts besides Times & Univers, as work...

we have to laugh to make it through our days. check back for stories of our hijinks, lunchtime adventures & more!