Trouble in The Office

Terminos*

*With apologies to Dean.

And so it happened that a neatly printed piece of paper was handed to B that Friday morning, B given a few minutes to read it, then having understood what it meant, got up from his workstation, and was escorted out of the building.

The Office fired him because he tampered with his timesheet (log ins, log outs), declaring OT pay as much as 20 thousand pesos a month (even greater than his salary). Of course I asked AD , who was his group manager, "But didn't his manager approve of those OT hours before they got to the payroll?" Answered me back that, yeah, he knew. I was sure that W, who was B's direct superior, was going to get a whippin' from AD in Filipino, English, and the four Chinese dialects that AD was fluent in, later in the afternoon for having been so negligent.

And then at the end of that Friday afternoon, Ant rapped on my invisible door (we worked in cubes of blue felt and steel) to say good bye. He was the demand planner for the other market in our region; an expat, and he was imported all the way from KL to MLA to work six months ago. He too, was terminated, but this time for his incompetence, and worse, his propensity to cover up his foibles badly (he got caught with every cover-up, because he was too dumb to explain his stupidity). His manager was a close friend of mine, and she was stressed with Ant, whom she just inherited from the last manager who got him. They gave him a grace period of three weeks to shape up, or else he gets the boot. He got the boot, and Friday became his last day. We weren't really close, but what the heck, I hugged the poor puppy back (you know, with the kind of hug that you pat the person's back but you're still two feet away from him as if there's a stick blocking his chest from getting to yours... it's the don't-get-so-close-to-me hug). Then I said "All the best," and I wanted to mean it, because a small evil voice in my head was saying "Good riddance."


And then I heard that some ex-officemates of mine who had claimed that life after the Office working for some other company was a whole LOT better than what they left, were rumored to be calling it quits with their present employers. Unfortunately this dispels my illusions of greener pastures with other offices... C'est la vie.

Labels: employees

posted by Elyss @ 9:54 PM