Me: I heard there was a shake-up in management today. What gives?

Willard: Nothing too big. Mickey Holden is no longer with us.

Me: Who was he?

Willard: He’s our former part-time Accounts Cheif.

Me: Tall guy? Buzz-cut?

Willard: Yeah.

Me: I didn’t realize he was part-time.

Willard: He wasn’t supposed to be. That’s why he’s ‘former.’

Reports and Legal Documents is split between two different groups. The first group is OSI. OSI deals with the newer software that allows us to create a better product. It’s immensely less frustrating, it looks better on a resume, it takes less time to get more done, and our product is better in the end. And we get paid more. Our sister group, ANG, has a more frustrating job that isn’t as resume-friendly, takes more time to get less done, and has a goofier looking finished product to no fault of their own. OSI pays also pays more than ANG and has better opportunities for advancement.

In an amazing coincidence, our department (OSI) is completely male. Theirs (ANG) is almost completely female – the two supervisors are men.

When I first got here, it wasn’t so uniformly split. OSI was 90% male and ANG 90% female. My partner Simon’s girlfriend Paige worked in ANG and was the first to suggest that the company had a sexist tilt. She was upset because she hadn’t gotten the transfer (to a different division) she wanted, but once she said that I started looking a little bit closer and it became pretty hard to deny that I have a rather sexist employer.

From a sociological standpoint, it’s very interesting to have two different gender-specific groups doing similar tasks. Things are a lot more… dramatic… in ANG. They have at least one meeting a month to get whichever employees are feuding at any given time to calm down. At OSI, however, we all tend to get along (at least, since Teddy Forbes left). We don’t exactly all like one another, but no reason to rock the boat, y’know? Inversely, they all hang out together in their free time. We generally go our separate ways.

But sociological studies aside, this company is just asking for a lawsuit. I mean, really. But it’s a subject that no one really talks about. A while back I joked that Clem Hartford, who had just been hired to ANG, would be transfered over before Sandy Keller, who was told six months ago she would be transfered over to OSI after a month. Sure enough, it happened. When they were juggling applicants (you don’t apply for OSI or ANG but rather for RLD and are placed in one of the two upon being hired), the guys always got shifted to us and ladies to ANG. Except for a few of us that have noticed, the ladies just shrug and chalk it up to coincidence.

To be clear, I do not believe that FalStaff hates women. I would even venture to say that they do not even believe that men are more capable employees for the better jobs. I do believe that since OSI’s job is more technical they believe it’s better suited for males. But more than that, I think that that they look at men as the probably breadwinner of their household. When they see a female applicant, on the other hand, they see supplimental income. So in their own eyes they’re doing the right thing.

Doesn’t really work out that way, though. Most of the ANG ladies’ husbands work in the fields for less than they make here. Most of the OSI guys are unmarried and certainly have no children to support. To add further to it ANG requires more training and because it’s staffed by ladies, they have higher turnover due to pregnancy. But these sort of prejudices run deep, even when they’re not in the companies best interest.

I keep waiting for some day an ANG employer to just stand up and say “Wait a minute!”

An unfortunate reality is that playing “hard to get” may not be such a bad idea in the realm of relationships. And while there are all kinds of marked similarities between hunting for a significant other and hunting for a job, I don’t think playing ‘hard to get’ translates as well from one to the other.

So with these things in mind, showing up for my interview at the wrong place and effectively standing up my potential employer was not one of my brighter ideas.

FalStaff, for a while, had its own Tamale Lady. The idea of someone taking orders and selling tamales was not new to me. In fact, it reminded me of a couple employers back in Delosa that had similar arrangements. For reasons a bit too complicated to get in to, after an email flap a few months back the relationship with the Tamale Lady was severed and she was no longer allowed to sell to us. I discovered this a few weeks ago when I asked when she might be back around.

I got a call yesterday from the lead receptionist, asking me to come out front. There was the tamale lady, asking if I could covertly go around and collect orders for her. Though she couldn’t sell them via email-and-delivery, she could set up her food bus across the street and sell us our orders. So I spent a good part of yesterday secretly asking people if they wanted tamales and telling them not to tell anybody as if we were dealing with nuclear secrets.

I had such fun doing it that it became clear that they don’t give me enough actual work here to be doing.

Back in Colosse I worked for a contract-based fabrication company called Wildcatter. Contract-based companies are by their very nature chaotic. Mass hirings for a job, mass layoffs when the job is completed. Weeks of nothing to do followed by weeks of 65 hour workweeks. FalStaff is also a contract-based company, though theoretically ought to be more stable since contracts are ongoing rather than project-oriented.

But FalStaff is, by far, the most chaotic company I have ever worked for. A lot of it has to do with growth. the company has roughly doubled in size in the past two years. But part of it is a jarring lack of foresight. Not inconsequential details go unnoted.

The Sales and Marketing Departments are presently boxing up all their stuff and relocating to the company’s “corporate headquarters.” CHQ is also known as “the old building” because that’s where the company used to exist. It used to be a small office building and, as they expanded, they bought trailers from the CEO’s brother and worked out of those. Once they hit 100 employees it became increasingly infeasible to have a 2000 sqft. building and 15 trailers, so they decided to move out.

They found a place in downtown Mocum that they really liked – a bank was relocating to another part of town. For six months they told everyone that they were going to be moving there. They had actually started boxing things up when the deal fell through. Why did the deal fall through? Because the bank had already sold someone else. The missing link here is that it never occured to FalStaff that they ought to contact the bank and declare their interest in buying before the bank had completely moved out. The bank had no idea that FalStaff was interested.

So instead they move in to the second floor of the current building. Despite a 30% growth rate in the first two quarters of 2003, they opted for a place only marginally larger than the trailers. Within six months they’re putting desks in the break room. By nine months they’re trading down cubicle sizes and planning to move out. They decided that they were going to move downstairs. So for four months we hear about how we’re going to be taking over downstairs and the home for the developmentally impaired could relocate to our old building.

Once again, they never thought to ask if the company downstairs wanted to do that. Turns out they don’t. Nor did they contact the building’s manager. If they did, they would have learned that the company downstairs finishing up year one a two-year lease. So now, absent that, they’re moving marketing and sales back to the old building. and despite 100% growth over the past two years, they think that they’ll be able to shuffle us around for the next year or so until the company downstairs is booted out.

We’ll see how that goes.

As part of my new position, I get two of the coolest office supplies known to man:

The less cool of the two is a big stamp that says “PASS” for when a Report crosses my desk that meets requirements (every bit as exciting as it sounds. I’m officially a paper-pusher now). The more cool is one that says “FAIL.” I was hoping to get one with big RED letters for a little projected frustration at all the FAILs that I always got (and we all always got).

Unfortunately, the one that I thought was red was actually a combination of red and blue when one QA person was trying to make a purple stamp. It’s kinda tie-dyed in color.

I likened it to a filter in Photoshop that a geek stumbles upon and thinks is super awesome cool and therefore uses that filter on every graphic they make from that day forward until they find a new filter.

Of the two people I was telling this to, one started laughing and the other looked at me like I was a lunatic. I could tell which one has spend significant time around geeks or was once, like myself, a geekish fellow.