|
|
|
Excel spreadsheet fiasco
Friday, August 13 1999
Not far into the workday morning, several of my colleagues were delighted to clue me into a wonderful little whoopsie made this morning by the front desk secretary. Of late this particular secretary, who is fairly new to the job, has been in the habit of sending all sorts of useless email to the "all" company distribution email address. Well, this morning she managed to send something that contained an extremely interesting Excel spreadsheet attachment: the Human Resources information for all the new employees, including their pay rates. I'm lethargic when it comes to checking my company email, so I didn't actually get this particular email (Dan the Man and the other network boys worked feverishly to delete the email from all our inboxes the moment the fiasco became evident). But no matter, the damage had been done. Anyone who was too late to actually receive this email could simply ask their neighbor; we all were in festive delight about the ammunition it represented. Indeed; I even received an unsolicited copy of the Excel spreadsheet from an anonymous Hotmail account!
The Excel spreadsheet had some delicious surprises. I'd been fairly certain that new engineers and other employees were earning considerably more than me, but I had no idea about how much more. For example, one guy who was hired recently to do a job rather similar to Al's is bringing home $100,000/year. After this new guy's series of interviews, I remember overhearing the schoolmarmish VP of IT talking about how delighted she was that he had accepted her proposed compensation package without argument. (I think back to that conversation and I wonder anew what world she hails from. Surely she's making good bank, but it must be awfully good if she thinks offering $100,000/year is lowballing things. Especially when you consider that this guy's supposed equal, Al, is living in a cramped undecorated studio apartment on the south end of Ocean Beach.)
With the shroud of deception pulled away, suddenly we old-timers knew why company policy has been so adamant about not discussing salaries. People are being worked like slaves for trivial cash while the company is launched on an expensive hiring binge. The ones most exploited appear to be precisely the ones working the hardest: the selfless masochists who have somehow stayed with this punishment for years, the people who work until 8:00pm every night and come in on the weekends. Of course, I'm sure the founders and all the people in accounting are all getting fair share; it would be difficult to isolate them from knowledge of the pay rates.
One of my colleagues wordlessly pulled me aside and we went to a conference room to discuss the matter further. According to him, malaise was sweeping the company. Engineering (that is, old time engineers) had all taken a big lunch break to discuss the matter further. Developers were planning not to come in this weekend even though we're still in the midst of a major product development push. "We have to do something!" he said. We had the giddiness of plotting revolutionaries.
I discussed the situation with Kevin the DBA over lunch, and he came back with a pithy bit of wisdom, "You have to be fair with people, because eventually the shit is going to get out." How true.
Eventually I sent an email to all engineers saying I wouldn't be coming in this weekend because I needed to take time to "salvage my personal relationships" and that people could reach me during "normal business hours." Remember, I was still on the rocks with Kim and throughout the day I could feel the frightening and strangely unexpected existential void of loneliness swelling up around me, adding to the apparent malevolence of the objectively-evident unfairness of the company pay scale. Several of the engineers sent me private responses bearing props. Without question, management was on an unprecedentedly weak footing.
My boss eventually came up to my desk and, in a seemingly jovial mood, asked, "You weren't serious with that email were you?" I replied that indeed I was. He paused for a moment and then told me to name my price. Eventually I sent him an email saying my price was $500 for 16 hours of weekend work.
I came home to find Kim had ordered pizza and picked up a 12 pack of Coronas. Eventually Steph came over. We sat around trying to watch a suitably scary foreign film for Friday the 13th, but we were too interested in talking to pay much attention. Steph told the following hilarious story:
Back when she worked at the Deja Vu strip club in Point Loma, Steph went with a work-related female friend to some guy's house to "party." Somehow she ended up being alone with this guy[REDACTED] and feeling rather uncomfortable with the seeming sexual demands of the situation. Complicating matters, she felt the need to take a crap. She kept holding it, hoping she could put it off for later, but finally she could hold out no longer. So she went to the bathroom to reduce her burden.
Wouldn't you know, the toilet refused to flush! I'm sure there is a clinical term such as Dysmechascataphobia: the fear of shitting at someone's house and having the flushing mechanism fail. So she pulled the lid off the tank and tried to make it work from the back end. Still no luck. Desperate, she reached for the plunger. But somehow in her haste she managed to knock the toilet tank lid off the sink and onto the floor, where it smashed instantly into a million pieces. Hearing the crash, her host came flying into the room to see if she was okay. She was standing there with a plunger in her hand, a toilet full of poop, and shards of porcelain everywhere.
"He was super nice about it," she added.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990813 feedback
previous | next |
