Idiot manager who listens to her husband rather than her employees...

I’m a media technician. I have more than 20 years experience in the field, and I’m damn good at it.

My boss Liz asked me to spec out a portable public address system for $2,000 or less. I asked my questions, I recommended a small system for $800 that would do everything we needed. Throwing in some equipment cases, cables, and a roll-aound cart brought the cost up to about $1500. Liz sent a purchase order up the line, with exactly what I wanted.

Liz’s boss paid absolutely no attention. What did she do? She asked her husband, who’s a “telecommunications manager” at the university. She ordered the equipment he specified.

I have a small Shure mixer. He had us order another mixing board, without a power amplifier, basically duplicating the Shure with no real new capability. Did he order a power amplifier? No, he ordered 4 powered speakers, each with its own amplifier, and each of them must be individually plugged into separate power sources (oh yeah, and we don’t have any space where we would use more than 2 speakers at a time). Because this is a hospital and there are odd rules about portable equipment, I’m not even allowed to buy extension cords. He ordered a $200 microphone, when we have plenty of those, but no mike clip, and it doesn’t fit into the mike clips we have.

And it cost $3000! 50% over budget, after she’s been screaming at us all year long about making our department financially independent.

While the gear is nice, it is completely inappropriate for our needs. Neither Liz nor I had the slightest idea that her boss had swapped the POs til the gear arrived. We learned what happened when Liz taked her boss what happened to the PO. What’s worse, the gear came first through our “biomedical” department for safety testing, where hospital property labels were permanently attached to it all, so we can’t return it.

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!!

Oh yeah, in the past she has paid substantial “consulting” fees to her husband for this kind of “expertise”, and for coming in to do technical work for special events. Since I’ve been hired, she has insisted several times that he be brought in for high-profile special events, where he sits and does nothing, because he knows, and has told me, that I’m perfectly capable of doing the work. For the past six months, I’ve simply ignored her demands to bring in her hubby. I was even told, today, to bring him in so he could “show me” how to operate this gear. I had already set up the whole system and was testing it within a half-hour of getting it, so that too seems unnecessary.

I have the trust and faith of my boss. Apparently, niether of us has the trust and faith of my boss’s boss.

Yeah, but did he insist that you not have alcohol at your holiday party?

Hmmm. Is there anybody higher up you can report her too? Sounds like she’s just lining her husband’s (and by extension her own) pockets.

“Mmmmm, what’s for dinner?” “Smells like embezzlement!”

Welcome to Corporate America! Would you like your meadow muffins with or without whipped cream?

The reality is you’re one of the smart worker bees that keep the hive running and producing honey.

Your boss, and the other drones are doing the usual nothing that they do so well, daily reproving the Peter Principle.

Suck up as long as you can, and in the interim, build a cadre of other smart bees so you all can start a new hive of your own. The economy favors startups now. Good luck.

I was bitching to a friend of mine who’s in facilities management, who told me this nepotism issue had gone up to the VP level before I was ever hired. The woman jumped through whatever hoops she had to with the upper echelons to legitimize hiring her husband on an event-to-event basis. There was no one outside of our “medical imaging” department who had the skills to set up AV equipment any more complex than a slide projector, and the imaging people were too busy working on patient-care business to do less critical work.

The reason for using the guy disappeared with my appearance, but the authorization did not. I really like my job, and I don’t see that accusing her of incompetence, let alone embezzlement, will do me any good.

All I can do at this point is explain why this was a bad purchase. Also, I looked at the gear again, and while the mike and mixer are marked with property tags, the speakers aren’t. We could return the four speakers and two of the stands, get a separate power amplifier and two unpowered speakers, and still get money back from the distributor. I’m going to send an email to that effect to my boss, and her boss, and get some more advice from others in-house before deciding who else to copy the email to.

Sounds likes a shitty situation, all I can say is hang in there, and be ready to point fingers when the other shoe falls off.

Keep the records of what you originally ordered. Don’t trust the computer, either, print copies.

Why do you care? It’s not like the money comes out of your pocket.

msmith-it’s attitudes like yours that made me curse the fates that landed me in the previous company I worked for. Which filed for bankruptcy last year, BTW. Asshole.

Um, yeah, indirectly it does. It’s money that was spent needlessly which could have been used to a better purpose, such as buying more equipment or giving yojimboguy and obviously much-deserved raise. Since this is a hospital, it also comes out of his pocket in the form of more costly health care, consuming the scarce resource of health care dollars and driving up the costs of treatment for everyone else. Does $1000 make that much of a difference? In the short term no, in the long term it’s potentially devastating.

Me, I think I’d write up a little report including copies of all of the relevant POs and send it over the nepotistic bitch’s head, up to and including the hospital’s board of directors. And I’d include the invoices for all the “consulting fees” she’s paid out to her husband too.

Yup, Otto has it right.

Come review time, you can already hear the words “We don’t have any money in the budget”, “Things are tight”

This is a hospital we’re talking about, right?

Hospitals HEMMORHAGE money. Hospitals bleed money right and left. Hospitals are insanely difficult to run for a profit, unless you’re one of those super-private institutions that caters only to the rich and well-insured, or you’re a super-specialized institution of some sort.

Consequently, going over budget on ANYTHING is the sort of thing that makes the Directors get soggy and hard to light… and therefore less likely to want to play ball later when you’re trying to get something you NEED…

Yeah…It’s pretty much bullshit though. Companies all try to pay their employees as little as possible. Saving $1000 in the equipment budget does not translate to a $1000 increase in the salary budget. The only way you get more money is if the company thinks its worth more to keep you than to hire someone else (or hire nobody).

SCSimmons
msmith-it’s attitudes like yours that made me curse the fates that landed me in the previous company I worked for. Which filed for bankruptcy last year, BTW. Asshole.

Hey, it’s not my fault you worked for a shitty company so fuck off. I bet you waited around until the very end too. Hoping that some miracle would turn the company around.

A job is just sourse of $$$ to me. If someone at work is making a little extra money on the side, why should I care (except that I’d be pissed for not thinking of it first)?

The only thing I care about at work is getting paid and not having to cover for some imbecile that makes more work for me. There’s no point in placing any loyalty in the company or getting involved in all the petty turf battles. It’s just not worth it.

It seems it is always the clueless ones who are in positions of power. And it wouldn’t surprise me if you said something about it and none of the upper ranks cared.

Sad but true, good luck and hang in there . Oh, and document everything.

Sounds like she had this planned all along. She probably asked you to research the equipment just to cover her own ass. She’ll get what she deserves soon enough.

What I would do is put in a call to the Fraud and Abuse hotline that most hospitals now have. Keep all pertinent records, including all receipts for equipment, her husband’s fees, and the original designs and those costs.

It really does sound like Liz is using this job to really feather her own nest. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were kickbacks or other special considerations for the equipment actually purchased.

Robin

What’s the old saying, *Rise to your level of incompetance *

Perhaps not, but spending an extra $1000 in the equipment budget sure might lead to a decrease in the salary budget.

Attitudes like this is how companies like Enron got into deep financial trouble - “hey, let’s cook the books this way, make shadow companies take any losses, and we have a license to print money!”

It’s also the sort of thing that gets people fired, since thinking like that is how people start falsifying expense reports, skimming from the till, and so on. Do a search in the Pit on some guy from Microsoft who was making millions by making employees purchase discounted software in-house on the company budget, then taking it and fencing it in parking lots. He got canned when it was discovered.

I work in a hospital too. I don’t see my employer as some soulless entity that exists to give me money and for me to try to skim more cash from whenever possible. They pay me to do my job, which involves doing research and providing good quality health care to patients. Wasted money eventually hurts patient care, in one way or another. I’m sorry you work for an employer that doesn’t do anything you care about.

Actually, it’s still in business-they came out of Chapter 11 last summer. My old department is gone, though-which event was announced in December 2001, and happened in May 2002, about six weeks after I landed a much better job. And in between, there were no issues with job hunting on company time. (Automatic approval of time off for interviews, surfing employment web sites at our desks, etc.) Although cash was always a problem, the company always tried to treat its employees fairly, which is why it always pissed me off when employees showed no concern whether or not they were helping the company or dragging it under.