Saturday, December 17, 2011

Gifts galore, Pt. 2

I’ll get around to other seasonal posts, but this topic came my way and I thought I’d pass it on in time for anyone who finds it useful to act upon it.


Now, I’m completely aware that the world doesn’t need any more mean-spiritedness or bloody-mindedness than already exists. In the halls of Congress alone we have sufficient of both, combined with pettiness on an imperial scale, to wrap around the equator 16 times. With enough left over to tie a fancy bow stretching across Africa.

Still, like picturing yourself bitch-slapping a colleague or showing up at your high school reunion claiming to be the inventor of Post-its®, thinking about giving some of these gifts (as appropriate) can be a refreshing interlude in this whole holiday whirl.




Friday, December 16, 2011

Gifts galore

Apologies to one and all—I’m behind my time in sharing Dave Barry’s Gift Guide, without which there cannot be said to be actual, you know, Christmas.

This year—well, I just cannot decide between the Toad Purse and the Martha Stewart Animated Snake Wreath.

What to do, what to do?

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Streets of seals

Cute alert: 

HuffPost reports a New Zealand woman found a baby seal in her house, and has pix of the pinniped to prove it.

What I want to know, however, is what is that blue metal mechanical thing on the sofa with it?







Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Workplace notes

This came to me via a "humor" list at work.


I was pretty sure it didn't originate within the corporation (it didn't), as it bespeaks an attention to detail in the written word as opposed to the transmitted one.

If it had been me, I'd have objected to the surfeit of exclamation points.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Order in the court

As another indicator that the court system is as much about idiocy as justice, here’s the story of a convicted kidnapper suing his hostage victims for breach of contract. Jesse Dimmick is claiming that Jared and Lindsay Rowley broke their promise to hide him as he was fleeing police.

The alleged promise was made while Dimmick was holding a gun, and he’s seeking damages of $235,000.

Plus legal fees, I’m betting.

Dimmick, BTW, is serving an 11-year sentence for that particular incident, so there’s no legal doubt that he was committing a felony at gunpoint at the time of his eliciting the purported oral agreement.

File it under “America, gonif!”

Monday, December 12, 2011

Healthy it ain't

The business unit at the company where I formerly worked, which had been described to me as “like a really well-funded start-up” at my interview, has closed down, and most of the people I worked with have been laid off.

The corporation has essentially decided to get out of the healthcare systems business. They’re in the process of offloading the remainder of their enterprise clinical systems into a joint venture with an established healthcare systems firm (one that has figured out how to make money in this arena); the consumer side had been left to atrophy about 18 months ago.

I don’t have any figures, but it’s my sense that the BU didn’t make any money in the five or so years of its existence. And after a while someone in corporate finance is going to notice that.

The thing that got me about the consumer unit (where I was a very bad fit) was that they’d commit to building applications based not on market research but on vague “strategic” partnerships committed to by the BU senior management (now “retired”) or because someone glib had a flea in his/her ear and convinced someone else it would be cool. The prevailing approach was, “let’s build it and; figure out how to make money later.”

Their foundational consumer product, a personal healthcare record (PHR) platform, has never made money. And when even Google backs out of that market, you know there’s probably not a way to make money out of it.

Anyway, that’s not what I want to consider today. It’s how the BU handled the internal announcement. And by “handled” I mean “bungled”. A colleague and erstwhile office mate told me what happened.

On Wednesday the entire group was called to a meeting. People knew something was up because there’d been a lot of new people in for repeated meetings with closed conference room blinds. So they figured there would be some announcement.

However, at the last minute, a subset of the group got meeting updates directing them to a conference room in a different building. These were the “saved”. My colleague, BW, was in the latter group, but he didn’t get the update, so he showed up at the “damned” meeting, with his coffee and laptop.

An HR rep called him out of the gathering for a word—and would he collect his gear? Outside the room, she asked if he’d not got an update? Because this meeting was being “repurposed”. She sent him back to his office, where he waited, wondering what was going on.

Fifteen minutes later, the “damned” having been informed that Friday would be their last day, she was back to walk him over to the “saved” meeting. But by that time that one, too, was over.

It’s not at all on the same scale, but while BW was describing the events of Wednesday, I was reminded of the selection process at Auschwitz: whether you were directed “rechts” or “links” determined whether you lived (for a while) or died.

I know that it was the BU HR that set this up, because corporate HR runs things like Prussian Uhlans. I also know that both those in the saved and the damned groups were stunned by it all, especially the timing. As one of the latter said on her Facebook page: "Merry fucking Christmas".

As for me, I’m feeling…well, not schadenfreude, but perhaps relief, and a validation of my decision to leave that job when I did. Had I not walked away I’d have had 18 months more of wondering what the hell I was supposed to be doing, and that’s just not for me.

And there I’d be, laid off, in Seattle, having to figure things out in a very bad place.

(BTW: if anyone ever describes a company to you as "like a really well-funded start-up", run.)