There was this moment of deja vu last week.... I had flashbacks to the time my father looked at my report card and said, "Not bad. Do better next time."* And you know what? I'm bloody well sick and tired of dealing with other peoples' elevated expectations.
And I'm pissed off by the constant refusal to see anything as systemic and blame everything on individuals.
If the job I've been doing for two years was so easy to do that no-one else flinched about putting in so much time and effort without cracking and burning out, why exactly did half of the team doing it leave for other positions as soon as they could? Both of those other two, even, were about to take positions outside the company before the Corporate Beast decided they were important enough to offer them internal positions.
At the risk of sounding like Drew Barrymore's Cinderella, For if you suffer your people to be over-worked, and their manners to be worn down by distrust and vigilance, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.
Three more people are getting laid off at the end of this week from my site, although from a different department and therefore a different budget. It's a damn shame - they're all quite good at what they do, and there's more experience in those three people alone than they have cumulatively in our other two support offices. In addition to being money-focused to a fault, the Corporate Beast is also in a distrustful phase, where the base assumption is that anyone not sitting where their manager can see them is clearly goofing off, not working, and charging the company for time spent sitting at the computer thinking. Because of course, thinking isn't measurable work.
In other cynical news, we got a memo from The Bossman a little while ago that had eyes a-rolling. In this memo, he debriefs us on a recent trip to our India support center, and actually calls us impatient and intolerant of the agents there.
It's as if he's forgotten momentarily what they keep reminding us of: this is a call center, and impatience is the Way Things Are in a call center. Call centers are measured by the number of calls taken; we are trained and pushed to control our calls to prevent delay. Why, yes, we are impatient with internal 'customers' who call and spend 2 full minutes explaining the life story of the person they are speaking with, and then after we make recommendations, spend more time explaining why their customer isn't going to like that answer and is there please another option.
Just think about that for a second. Let it sink in. Why in the name of all of the gods would I give someone an unpleasant answer to a question if there were a better answer available? If there was a history of people withholding information like that, the distrust would be understandable. But we have no such history here; whether these particular agents have supported other products where such a history exists, I couldn't even guess.
*I had just worked my butt off in Biology for 3 weeks to pull my grade from a C to a B.