They tried to mitigate the damage by holding the wedding in Niagara Falls in the hopes that no one would come. Then Michael offered everyone a 4 day weekend. :smack:
How’s he going to keep in secret from the accounting staff? 
Angela even pointed this out.
HrHero didn’t come up with a litigation value this week, but said that Dwight, Michael, Jim, Pam and Ryan all committed fireable offenses.
The blog ends with this:
" I shudder to think what would become of The Office and the bobblehead industry if Dwight Schrute was written out of the show. We want this thing to keep going as long as possible ….
That’s what she said."
p.s. Can anyone make sense of the new layout from the Office tour?
Well, he was promoted to the number 2 spot by Jan (before she went crazy) and he was in the running for her old job.
Here is a pretty good sketch of the office. Rescale the desks, move Creed, and voila, Jim’s new office is in the corner.
Jim can’t control what other people know, but he can control what he tells them. People working together may know or suspect all kinds of things about one another that it would be stupid or inappropriate for their manager to publicly announce (as Michael demonstrates on a regular basis). I’m pretty sure managers are normally expected to keep details about the salaries of employees to themselves and not spread it around the whole office.
Seemed to me that after Jim’s dumbass idea backfired, and the camera turned to Michael, that he was thinking, “See, I knew this was a clunker of an idea,” but he was being magnanimous and not saying anything. I hoped that we’d then see Michael & Jim in private discussing the across-the-board raise scheme instead.
Why didn’t they go with the across-the-board raise in the end? I don’t see the downside there. I know a 1% raise is pretty pathetic, but it’s better than nothing.
I think they did, when they realized that the merit-based raises weren’t working. They just didn’t saying.
I thought the episode was funny, but a bit unrealistic. I don’t think anyone would have been as dumb as Jim was in announcing the only salespeople raise (especially with Pam in that division) and then the deciding which people get a raise with beans idea. Then again, they are trying to establish that Jim is completely over his head as a manager somewhat quickly and therefore went with an over the top way to show it.
Dwight was clearly trying to take down Jim and didn’t care about the fairness. If Michael said it, he’d be defending to the rafters.
I also thought that Michael would at the end (when he said he had a gift) would say everyone gets a 1.5% raise and be the hero, but he seems to like that Jim and him share the same uncomfortable position.
And the mug having gin was great. Wonder if that’s what he puts in there all the time :D.
This wasn’t explicit, but it was my impression that the “put the bean on the photo” thing was something Jim came up with to help Michael understand the process. They could have just made (another) list and assigned everyone a score, but what are the odds of Michael being able to stay on task for something like that?
That could explain a lot about Michael’s behavior!
It sounded like the raise was an annual thing that the staff was assuming they would get again this year (I think David Wallace called it a COL increase). So if people were expecting it, he probably did have to make some sort of announcement, since just letting people discover they weren’t getting the money they were expecting when they saw their pay-checks would be pretty dick.
It seemed to me that Michael knew it was a horrible idea, but wanted to see how far Jim would dig his hole with his “thinking”. He did make a good point about the pro/con lists after all.
He may have needed to inform people that they would not be getting their usual cost-of-living increase, but he absolutely did not need to make a public announcement about who would be getting a raise and who wouldn’t. It must be pretty common for there to be work situations where some people get raises and others don’t, but it’s inappropriate for a manager to stand up in front of the whole office and say “These guys here are getting raises, but the rest of you aren’t.” That’s only going to make people angry, at both management and each other.
If Jim were determined to give the available money to certain people rather than distributing it evenly among the entire staff, the better (although probably less funny) thing to do would have been to meet with each person individually to explain that the financial situation was bad and most D-M employees would not be getting their usual annual raise. He should not have told anyone who else was or was not getting a raise, only whether they personally were getting a raise.
It’s pretty straightforward the way Jim explained it… each bean represents .5%. So 3 beans is the average raise and some people would get more or less. By giving each co-manager a set of beans to distribute, it gives them both equal say in a merit-based plan. They could even guarantee nobody gets nothing by giving each person 1 bean to start and distributing the remaining beans equally for Michael and Jim to dole out.
Granted, the numbers wouldn’t work out exactly to .5% per bean since that assume all employes currently have the same salary, but they could make it work with a bit of tweaking.
Yet, this plan was still too complex for Michael to grasp, which was supposed to be the comedy.
COLAs aren’t supposed to be merit based, though.
Maybe, after his milk and sugar. 
How was it too hard for Michael to grasp? I think even Jim understood Michael’s wanting more time to drop a bean… Once you’re all done putting down all the obvious beans, it’s got to get a little tougher to determine who’s worthy of a bean and who’s not. I didn’t think the bean idea was a bad one though.
**Lamia’s **right about speaking with office members individually.
Stupid Pam. You register for gifts then take them all back and return them for cash. Duh.
I didn’t think it was possible to return gifted items unless you had the receipt?
I think it’s becoming SOP to print a “gift receipt” for purchases that are obviously gifts–like one from a registry or around the holiday season.
Yep, but at most stores you can only get store credit with a gift receipt.
