I got a company newsletter/memo with my paycheck. Here’s the first paragraph:
Problems:
[ul][li]“Millenia” is plural. They meant millennium.[/li][li]“quarter of [a] millenia [sic]” is 250 years.[/li][li]It’s still the “old” millennium, unless they mean the millennium 2000-2999.[/ul][/li]To top this off, this memo was printed in color so as to show two color picture of new directors. And distributed to everyone in our service group (1500 people approx.) They could’ve e-mailed it, saved money, and just as many people would’ve ignored… er… read it.
And we’re a major government contractor. Scary, no?
When I worked for Chase Manhattan, they printed up TRADING CARDS with pictures of special employees on them. Each employee got a whole pack of them through the inter-office mail. What the hell were we suppoosed to do with them? Trade with our friends? (I’ll give you a Walter Shipley for your Kevin Drumgoole!!) I guess I could understand the person whose’s picture was on the card thinking it was cool, but who else would care? Chase was always wasting money on stupid things like that though. Instead of spending a small fortune to reward a dozen employees with custom printed trading cards, and another small fortune to print up and distribute a pack of those cards to each and every employee, why couldn’t they just give a cash bonus? I think I would work a little harder for an extra grand or two, than for a stupid trading card.
I am so glad I quit that job.
Rose
The CEO at one of my day jobs was spearheading a reorganization effort. In order to keep everyone up to date, he wrote an organization document explaining how everything related to everything else, and sent it to all users via email. We all looked at it, and saw that it pretty much described how the company was organized at that moment.
A couple of days later, we all got another message from the CEO. It looked exactly the same. But careful reading showed that in this hugely long organizational document, there was in fact one change: He’d rewritten one paragraph (out of hundreds) as an update to one change that had been made as part of the ongoing reorganization effort.
You can see where this is going. Once or twice a week, a new message came from the CEO, exactly the same as the previous one except for some minor revision reflecting the latest activity of the reorg people. This went on for months, but needless to say, after the first two or three messages, nobody was bothering to read them any more, because it was just too much work to scrutinize the new message side-by-side with the old one to figure out what had changed.
And management was confused about why people didn’t seem to be informed on the ongoing reorg…