Octocrook
04-17-2004, 08:52 AM
My company is so fucking chaotic. Well, maybe not the whole company, but certainly our fucking department. Our department used to be composed of Jeannie (my boss), and 5 of us (me, Desirea, Bob, Patrick, and Dave), and Jennifer supervises our department as well as about 7 or 8 others. Up until these last 2 weeks, Jeannie was always riding my ass about stupid shit. She's really good friends with Desirea and Patrick, so she shows favoritism to them, which pisses me off because they don't seem to like me much either. Jeannie had a couple really good weeks though...she was named Employee of the Quarter in early March, got married (to Desirea's brother...like I said, really good friends), and had a nice week long vacation/honeymoon in Hawaii. So I think some of that rolled over into her attitude towards me and she was starting to give me some of my due credit.
So...last Wednesday, Dave quit, getting a property management job that wasn't 40 hours a week on the ocmputer like this job. He was a really funny cool guy and was my favorite employee there (well, besides the babe that moved away a couple weeks ago). That said, on his last day, he went on his lunch break and didn't come back. Surprised all of us, especially me as I admired his work ethic and integrity up until that point. No goodbye or anything...just plain left. Jeannie was somewhat of a bitch to him too while he worked here, so it might have been him just being frustrated enough to just leave for good rather than come back from break. Still...none of us expected it.
The NEXT DAY, they relocate Patrick to a different department. Now, we were a pretty efficient team, and sometimes would finish orders a little too efficiently and me and Bob (the 9-5:30 shifts) would have nothing to do at 4:30. The problem is that we were split into those of us that would place Chase Manhattan Mortgage orders, and those that would place non-Chase, and Dave and Patrick were the only non-Chase placers. So, on the day before (Dave's last day), Dave showed me pretty much what I didn't know about some of the other clients...I had already placed for just about every client since we weren't always split like we were, but I was rusty, having gotten into a groove with Chase orders. So after that, only I was doing non-Chase, with Jeannie being forced to be placing some too since we were getting backed up. I was rusty and such and we're 2 people down, so needless to say, we start getting backed up, despite me working a 10-hour Thursday (and then bowling a 702 series that night, lol)
Monday of this week, we got someone new, Bill. Also on Monday, Jeannie had a scheduled day off, so it was me, Bob, and Desirea, and a new guy that we had to train from scratch. Needless to say, we got swamped with orders pretty quickly, and I'm still not in a groove with non-Chase.
The next day, Desirea had a scheduled day off, and Bill, while having picked up things well, can't do anything but the most basic orders. Being new, it probably takes him 10 minutes apiece to place them, while it would take me 2 minutes. Jeannie and I continue to do non-Chase, and I start hitting my groove, so we get non-Chase down quite a bit, but Chase orders get seriously backed up, as we received a total of 222 orders, and probably 130 were Chase orders. I worked 9 and a half hours that day.
Wednesday, everyone's there, but since we had leftovers from yesterday, it was taking us a while to get started on today's orders. Bill still has been placing only the easiest orders. Protocol changes AGAIN, as it did last week sometime. This has become common, and unfortunately, Jeannie and I are really the only ones that are good enough to flow with the changes. The protocol change was that we track which company we assign the order to in our tracking point for the order placing. Jeannie is avidly against it, as clients can read our tracking points, and they could potentially contact the appraiser, maybe pressuring them to hurry up with orders or whatever, and the appraiser could get confused. So she's tellin Jennifer that we shouldn't be doing this. Jennifer is like "look, this is your new protocol...just do it" and Jeannie again is like "this will create a lot of confusion and could really lead to a huge mess" and Jennifer again... "just do it". I don't particularly give a rat's ass, though it does take a bit to type that shit in, and it's mostly mundane to do it anyways. So...we get 223 orders today, including 12 fucking orders from IndyMac Bank that were 2 days old thanks to some fax problems on our end. IndyMac orders are the devil. They are in the worst fucking places in the country to find good appraisers. West Virginia, Montana, Vermont, New Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, South Dakota, Wisconsin...you name it. None of them were easy orders to place, and they eat up the last 3 hours of my day. My stack of non-Chase orders yet to place is a good 30-40 thick at the end of the day...absolutely horrible, but thanks to IndyMac, that's how that happened.
Thursday...playing catch-up again from yesterday's orders. I blaze through orders like nothing in the morning...probably placed 35 orders before my lunch break, which is fucking insane, but I was on fire, even with what would be hard to place orders. I called all the right appraisers n shit. Unfortunately, it's just me. Everyone else is going sluggish as hell. When I get back from my lunch break, I come to see that the stack of Chase orders is about 60 thick...fucking insane. I mean Desirea and Bob average about 35 orders a day, and Im sure Bill was doing maybe 25 or 30 orders in a day if that, and of course what makes it harder is that new orders are constantly coming in.
Unexpectedly, Dave V (different Dave, is a supervisor on one of the client teams) is telling me and Desirea to finish up with what we're doing and meet with him in the break room, and was tryin to get Bob too but Bob was on his lunch break out of the office. Keep in mind, meetings have always been between us and Jeannie, us and Jennifer, us, Jeannie and Jennifer, or us, Jeannie, Jennifer, and Maggie (one of the Vice Presidents). So me and Desirea were wondering what the hell was up. Dave then drops the bomb. "I just wanted to let you guys know that Jeannie has been terminated." Wow. We were pretty much speechless. It wasn't a "1 week notice" kind of a thing...otherwise, Desirea would have known. It was like she got fired and right then and there, she had to pack her shit and go, which was of course why Dave took us into the break room to tell us. He then tells us Jennifer will be directly overseeing our department for the time being, and then starts talking to us about some new department in the company...he prefaced it by labelling it "to fill the time while Jeannie packs her stuff". I couldn't tell you much of what he said...I mean it was really that shocking and freakish of an occurence. Other people in the company were really shocked too. The statement "I don't understand how an Employee of the Quarter could get fired like that" came up a lot.
My thoughts...I'm not sure if there was an exact issue or not, but I bet that protocol change the day before and Jeannie's defiance towards it triggered it. Jennifer had explained that it was a protocol change that would help other departments figure out all previous placements to appraisers in the case that an appraisal gets reassigned to different appraisers 1 or more times. So naturally, any defiance towards that was probably viewed by Jennifer as something against all the other departments for selfish reasons. I tend to agree a bit with Jeannie's point of view on the matter...I mean we can always track who the appraiser is in a "see comments" tracking point so that the client can't read it and other departments can follow which appraisers an order has been previously assigned to. Jennifer should have accepted that to be fine, but instead she said it has to be this way. Still, Jeannie was too defiant on that issue, as she has been on some others. I think it all stacked up against her and they just decided it wasn't worth it to keep her on.
I wish they had done it a month ago, when we were a strong team of 6 and could have handled it easier. Also, that would have been when she was still being a bitch to me. Now that she had started to change, I feel really bad about it, although not bad more than plain bewildered. Our department is nearly in shambles now. The only good thing that runs in my mind is that I might have a chance to become leader of the team once we hire another placer or 2. Then again, if it was that easy for them to can a 4 year employee that was Employee of the Quarter last quarter, how badly do I really want that job?
And of course tonight, to cap it all off, I top my best night of bowling from last Thursday with a much better night. 279-216-225, for a total of 720. I said a year or 2 ago that I could probably turn pro by the time I turn 25. Make that 24. I'm turning 22 on Monday, and I could probably use another year or 2 to raise my average to 225-230 from the 200 I've been averaging since I got my new ball. It;s crazy!
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So...last Wednesday, Dave quit, getting a property management job that wasn't 40 hours a week on the ocmputer like this job. He was a really funny cool guy and was my favorite employee there (well, besides the babe that moved away a couple weeks ago). That said, on his last day, he went on his lunch break and didn't come back. Surprised all of us, especially me as I admired his work ethic and integrity up until that point. No goodbye or anything...just plain left. Jeannie was somewhat of a bitch to him too while he worked here, so it might have been him just being frustrated enough to just leave for good rather than come back from break. Still...none of us expected it.
The NEXT DAY, they relocate Patrick to a different department. Now, we were a pretty efficient team, and sometimes would finish orders a little too efficiently and me and Bob (the 9-5:30 shifts) would have nothing to do at 4:30. The problem is that we were split into those of us that would place Chase Manhattan Mortgage orders, and those that would place non-Chase, and Dave and Patrick were the only non-Chase placers. So, on the day before (Dave's last day), Dave showed me pretty much what I didn't know about some of the other clients...I had already placed for just about every client since we weren't always split like we were, but I was rusty, having gotten into a groove with Chase orders. So after that, only I was doing non-Chase, with Jeannie being forced to be placing some too since we were getting backed up. I was rusty and such and we're 2 people down, so needless to say, we start getting backed up, despite me working a 10-hour Thursday (and then bowling a 702 series that night, lol)
Monday of this week, we got someone new, Bill. Also on Monday, Jeannie had a scheduled day off, so it was me, Bob, and Desirea, and a new guy that we had to train from scratch. Needless to say, we got swamped with orders pretty quickly, and I'm still not in a groove with non-Chase.
The next day, Desirea had a scheduled day off, and Bill, while having picked up things well, can't do anything but the most basic orders. Being new, it probably takes him 10 minutes apiece to place them, while it would take me 2 minutes. Jeannie and I continue to do non-Chase, and I start hitting my groove, so we get non-Chase down quite a bit, but Chase orders get seriously backed up, as we received a total of 222 orders, and probably 130 were Chase orders. I worked 9 and a half hours that day.
Wednesday, everyone's there, but since we had leftovers from yesterday, it was taking us a while to get started on today's orders. Bill still has been placing only the easiest orders. Protocol changes AGAIN, as it did last week sometime. This has become common, and unfortunately, Jeannie and I are really the only ones that are good enough to flow with the changes. The protocol change was that we track which company we assign the order to in our tracking point for the order placing. Jeannie is avidly against it, as clients can read our tracking points, and they could potentially contact the appraiser, maybe pressuring them to hurry up with orders or whatever, and the appraiser could get confused. So she's tellin Jennifer that we shouldn't be doing this. Jennifer is like "look, this is your new protocol...just do it" and Jeannie again is like "this will create a lot of confusion and could really lead to a huge mess" and Jennifer again... "just do it". I don't particularly give a rat's ass, though it does take a bit to type that shit in, and it's mostly mundane to do it anyways. So...we get 223 orders today, including 12 fucking orders from IndyMac Bank that were 2 days old thanks to some fax problems on our end. IndyMac orders are the devil. They are in the worst fucking places in the country to find good appraisers. West Virginia, Montana, Vermont, New Mexico, Hawaii, Alaska, South Dakota, Wisconsin...you name it. None of them were easy orders to place, and they eat up the last 3 hours of my day. My stack of non-Chase orders yet to place is a good 30-40 thick at the end of the day...absolutely horrible, but thanks to IndyMac, that's how that happened.
Thursday...playing catch-up again from yesterday's orders. I blaze through orders like nothing in the morning...probably placed 35 orders before my lunch break, which is fucking insane, but I was on fire, even with what would be hard to place orders. I called all the right appraisers n shit. Unfortunately, it's just me. Everyone else is going sluggish as hell. When I get back from my lunch break, I come to see that the stack of Chase orders is about 60 thick...fucking insane. I mean Desirea and Bob average about 35 orders a day, and Im sure Bill was doing maybe 25 or 30 orders in a day if that, and of course what makes it harder is that new orders are constantly coming in.
Unexpectedly, Dave V (different Dave, is a supervisor on one of the client teams) is telling me and Desirea to finish up with what we're doing and meet with him in the break room, and was tryin to get Bob too but Bob was on his lunch break out of the office. Keep in mind, meetings have always been between us and Jeannie, us and Jennifer, us, Jeannie and Jennifer, or us, Jeannie, Jennifer, and Maggie (one of the Vice Presidents). So me and Desirea were wondering what the hell was up. Dave then drops the bomb. "I just wanted to let you guys know that Jeannie has been terminated." Wow. We were pretty much speechless. It wasn't a "1 week notice" kind of a thing...otherwise, Desirea would have known. It was like she got fired and right then and there, she had to pack her shit and go, which was of course why Dave took us into the break room to tell us. He then tells us Jennifer will be directly overseeing our department for the time being, and then starts talking to us about some new department in the company...he prefaced it by labelling it "to fill the time while Jeannie packs her stuff". I couldn't tell you much of what he said...I mean it was really that shocking and freakish of an occurence. Other people in the company were really shocked too. The statement "I don't understand how an Employee of the Quarter could get fired like that" came up a lot.
My thoughts...I'm not sure if there was an exact issue or not, but I bet that protocol change the day before and Jeannie's defiance towards it triggered it. Jennifer had explained that it was a protocol change that would help other departments figure out all previous placements to appraisers in the case that an appraisal gets reassigned to different appraisers 1 or more times. So naturally, any defiance towards that was probably viewed by Jennifer as something against all the other departments for selfish reasons. I tend to agree a bit with Jeannie's point of view on the matter...I mean we can always track who the appraiser is in a "see comments" tracking point so that the client can't read it and other departments can follow which appraisers an order has been previously assigned to. Jennifer should have accepted that to be fine, but instead she said it has to be this way. Still, Jeannie was too defiant on that issue, as she has been on some others. I think it all stacked up against her and they just decided it wasn't worth it to keep her on.
I wish they had done it a month ago, when we were a strong team of 6 and could have handled it easier. Also, that would have been when she was still being a bitch to me. Now that she had started to change, I feel really bad about it, although not bad more than plain bewildered. Our department is nearly in shambles now. The only good thing that runs in my mind is that I might have a chance to become leader of the team once we hire another placer or 2. Then again, if it was that easy for them to can a 4 year employee that was Employee of the Quarter last quarter, how badly do I really want that job?
And of course tonight, to cap it all off, I top my best night of bowling from last Thursday with a much better night. 279-216-225, for a total of 720. I said a year or 2 ago that I could probably turn pro by the time I turn 25. Make that 24. I'm turning 22 on Monday, and I could probably use another year or 2 to raise my average to 225-230 from the 200 I've been averaging since I got my new ball. It;s crazy!
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