the job from heck: the humor

Back before I had Kiddo#1, I worked for a magazine publisher and advertising agency that created websites for local businesses. It was a total mess. By the time I left after six months in the job, I had seniority over everyone who wasn’t a manager (bar two or three.)  I had three supervisors who micromanaged, backstabbed, and told me everything was top priority.

I’m going to run three of the sarcastic documents I created during my time there. I needed to relieve stress. I found these when packing to move, and I’m glad I decided to write something funny rather than killing a manager or three.

The post below this will be the first piece I created. It arose because of an actual incident (they were watering down the soft soap instead of buying new soap) and when I’d had enough, I “snapped” in a literary fashion. I showed this to a couple of people in the office, and then disaster struck: one of the employees photocopied it. And left the original in the copy machine.

One of my managers found it, and she read it saying, “This is… Oh, it’s a joke!” I don’t know if she realized I’d written it. They always considered me either too stupid to breathe (“this is how you circle the item number”) or else a master of perfidy (“we want you to spy on the other employees and tell us what they’re thinking”) so it’s difficult to know. They already treated me so horribly that it wasn’t possible to tell if their mood toward me cooled after this surfaced.

Tomorrow we’ll have another one, based on their managerial style. Enjoy!

The full list:

Top Priority

Morale Problems

Soft Soap

0 Comments

  1. CricketB

    Well, you did take six months to leave.

    I think teaching tiny details along with a job is a sign of not wanting to give up control of the job. They’re stressed about delegating, so take comfort in doing the little things one more time, with an audience.

    Glad you got something good from it!

  2. philangelus

    And I’d have agreed with you if they’d only done the teensie little things ONE more time. But they never quit breathing down my back long enough to do their own jobs and let me do my own.

    It was quite a dysfunctional company. Six months after I left, they were purchased by another company that walked in, immediately gave everyone a 50% raise (we were hideously underpaid) and then instituted a policy of everyone doing his own job. Happiness improved, and the magazine is still going strong.