Morale Totally Gone

Since 1994 I've had to work in the corporate world, minus one wonderful year when I collected Unemployment for 9 months and freelanced for 3. I have just 2 more years to go now but the closer I get to the top of the mountain, the harder the climb. I'm to the point now where honestly I do the bare minimum not to get fired, show up an hour late, don't turn in my vacation forms, and try to miss as many meetings as I possibly can. A couple of times over the last month I haven't bothered to shower and wore jeans on non-jeans day.

Despite all of this, my performance review last month went "well" with my boss saying my work is "stellar." Perhaps scariest of all was when he said that upon retiring in 3 years, "I see you right here, behind this desk,"--he pounded his fist on the mahogany for emphasis--"managing that team." He pointed toward the dumbasses that are my new coworkers.

Funny, in 3 years I see myself collecting Unemployment, sitting on my front porch writing a new novel and sipping a glass of Chardonnay. But I just nodded in Madonna-like submission and tried not to cringe.

Other than that, the only fly in the soup was when he said that I didn't meet one of my "goals" that my old boss had had on my performance review sheet from last year. This was something about attending a brown bag luncheon on stress or communication or time management. My guess is that my old boss pulled it out of his a$$ simply b/c he had no 3rd goal and they must list 3. I forgot all about it until my new boss brought it up at this review. "We cannot have unmet goals," he said seriously, and gave me a month to meet it.

So I contacted HR who said the training coordinator arranged those. I contacted her; she said HR handled those. I called HR back. They said they aren't offering the brown bag sessions anymore. I asked my boss what to do and he told me to meet for an hour with the HR manager. The HR manager didn't want to be bothered so she sent me to the Employee Assistance Program and had me set up an appointment with a counselor there. In other words, the buck was passed.

Meanwhile, I emailed my old boss and asked him why in Hades he had put that on my review. He said he certainly didn't mean for me to end up at the EAP and just to attend a webinar or something over the next year.

Monday was my appt with the EAP counselor. Here's how it went:

"Can you tell me why you're here today?" she asked after I filled out miles of paperwork.

"Nope. I was hoping you could tell me."

She shuffled through some papers. "I don't have much to go on. Usually people come in here for disciplinary problems at work; can you tell me what those are?"

"None were told to me. I'm just here to meet a goal on my performance review."

Poor woman was confused, rightfully so. "Can you tell me how it came to pass that you are here?" she tried.

"Everyone passed the buck and I'm here so we can check off that box on the sheet," I said frankly.

She asked me to tell her about the structure of the department and I said there is no structure, now that there was a 90% turnover in the last few months and I'm the last employee of our original group. She asked why the turnover and I gave her this synopsis:

"Last January there was a big layoff. My boss's boss was canned and my boss ended up under a woman who never liked him. So my boss fired our TDP coordinator to show he could be a hard ass in order to save his own job. Then our coordinator got another job and got one of our other writers a job where she was working, so he quit. Two weeks later, my boss was fired. Naturally then, our editor bailed. Then the final writer got jittery so he put his resume out there and quit in the spring. That leaves me."

I didn't go into any details beyond that, to our current dept which is a total mess and which I can't stand. Now I am the only senior writer but because of that, none of the guys will speak to me and I work with all men.

Just to show my blog readers that I try to make lemonade when getting a lemon, I scheduled this meeting during the staff meeting. This one was far less boring, believe it or not!