Some things that, if one were a nervous type, might appear to be Signs of Impending Doom:
[ul]
[li]Someone retired today and there’s no word of replacement or who will be filling that role Monday morning[/li]
[li]A recurring weekly meeting was canceled this morning “until further notice”[/li]
[li]This afternoon, a scheduled weekend carpet cleaning was just canceled “until further notice”[/li][/ul]
Taken together, these unrelated events are mildly ominous.
Manager announces that the in-house employee transfer system is not to be used to attempt to find a job anywhere else in the company, as the team cannot afford to lose any more people. All senior members of team leave within 3 months. No-one is promoted to fill their positions.
As seen on “Arrested Development”: Staff directed to load all their office equipment into a moving van by the company president one fine Friday afternoon.
One time I found out when a senior staffer (but not my boss) walked up to me in the hall and said, “I don’t know if anyone has told you this, but I’ve seen next month’s budget and you’re not in it.” My boss never did tell me. Fortunately I found another, better job almost immediately, but geez Louise.
One day my employee ID badge no longer opened any of the doors. I checked with security, and they said they had me down as “terminated”. “First I’ve heard of it,” says I.
Turned out to be a mistake, and I wasn’t terminated.
I still wonder how that happened, but no harm done.
Kittenblue, those points don’t make sense together. If they were closing the store at that location, why did they have an opening for a job at that location?
Roddy
We’ve been seeing a few signs of impending doom out here on the boat. Company getting sued over corrupted data, email from CFO talking about how times have been tough but the company barely managed to remain profitable, no official word on any new projects after the one we are on from our client who has been giving us work for years now… I’m a bit nervous, I won’t lie.
It’s not quite the same thing, but hopefully it will be of interest.
Long ago I used to work for a huge company with many branches - in the days of giant mainframe computers that needed constant attention from many operators.
Management decided to move our entire computer programming department to a remote location, making room for a relaxation room for the operators (TV, comfy chairs, snack bar etc.)
The first we knew about it was when a couple of blokes in overalls started measuring in the office of our boss.
When he demanded to know what they were doing, they told him this was the site of the pool table. :eek::smack:
I was working at CompUSA when the longtime CEO and President of them company resigned to “spend more time with his family”.
He was replaced by a former tobacco company executive.
The Christmas party was changed from a sit down dinner with a 100-prize raffle to a dessert only buffet and one prize raffled off.
Sure enough, within six months, I came in to find that more than a third of the employees at the headquarters had been immediately laid off. I was on the three-month list. Oh, and they closed half the stores.
Company lasted not quite a year longer as the owner hacked it apart and sold it piece by piece.
Last Summer, our president retired after 45 years with the company. Changes are always disconcerting. The New Guy doesn’t talk to anyone in our department, so I don’t know much about him. Seems conservative, though. For example, he warned us that insurance prices were going to rise with the Affordable Health Act.
Since the beginning of the year, our vacation and sick time have been screwed up. It started with ADP reporting negative hours. We eventually got a new payroll processor. Back in the trenches, we now show no hours. My coworker took some vacation time, and now she has negative hours.
My boss said that there is a company that claims it will process our data and send it to the credit agencies free. Now, we don’t do Metro 2 data; we get data in every sort of format you can imagine. Each one is a ‘custom job’. I doubt that an outside company can process it as we do, and I know that they can’t maintain the quality (a point of pride, personally).
Our Customer Service representative gloomily said that the company only needs four people: The president, the administrative assistant, and two sales people. Hyperbolic, but possibly the line of thinking the new president has.
My boss says the board members won’t stand for getting rid of the data department. I hope she’s right, but I’m worried.
This happened to my husband, whose position was eliminated last November.
He operated a very complex space-planning program for an entire large hospital. His boss was no computer genius, and was glad to have my accurate, efficient husband effectively run this wing of facilities for him.
One day the boss said that he wanted to learn the space-planning program too. My husband showed him a few basic things, but said to me that it was obvious that the boss would never be able to learn much of it.
Then a week later he got the news of the job elimination. We should have seen it coming, I suppose. We hear from a friend of my husband still working there that the department is a mess, as they’re trying to operate on far less staff than they need.
Now it has made me paranoid to show any of my own bosses any tricks and shortcuts I know in Word and Outlook.
