Working holidays

Last Friday the place where I’m getting post-surgical physical therapy was holding its holiday party. They were actually closing the office at 1300 for the potluck and white elephant exchange, so the therapy sessions were running at quite a good clip as we approached the noon hour.

But it got me thinking, as I was being simultaneously iced and electrocuted (okay, undergoing "electrical stimulation" therapy), about Office Parties I Have Known.

Way, way back, during the Reagan Administration, I worked for one of the major aerospace companies in an office at a satellite site. Meaning, an office building on Century Boulevard; not one of the self-contained highly-secured plants. We had one security guard, Fred, at a beat-up old desk as you came off the elevator.

Well, it was the tradition of the folks in that group to have a holiday party the last day before year-end shutdown, including potluck and white elephant exchange. and for the occasion, my boss got a special dispensation from Fred to bring in a bottle of booze to spike the punch.

(The next year, when we moved to the big plant, this was out of the question. Although at that site I simultaneously realized why we had year-end shutdown and wondered why they’d stick at a bit of rum to go in the punch: from about mid-December on, you waded through six-packs of empty beer bottles in the assembly-line workers parking area, which made you think about how many electronic parts weren’t clearing QC. I reckon that we shut down just to save on the reworks.)

(And yes—line workers had to park in a different area from white-collar types. Farther away. Your car had a windshield sticker—either green square or red triangle—depending on your status. Parking in the wrong area had serious consequences.)

That was a great party; people brought in all kinds of food and some of the white elephants had been in the group longer than many employees. It was all quite jolly, and something I’ve not experienced much of since.

At HBO people were way too cool and hip to engage in such frivolity. The managed healthcare company in DC—well, hard to be jolly when everyone’s sitting on pokers.

The telecoms company just had the corporate extravaganzas, in both Northern Virginia and Wales. In all fairness, I’m not sure that the Brits have full grasp of “potluck”—you may have had to have been exposed to Midwestern Methodist gatherings in some way to get it. But that doesn’t explain the dearth on this side of the Pond.

(We did have department-sponsored “morale” events. Lord knows we needed them, not that they worked. Oh—one year the department paid for a dim sum lunch. Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like fried chicken feet and pork buns, let me tell you.)

However, one year I stumbled into the party held by the training group, and that harkened back to my aerospace experience. There was a bottle of bubbly, Christmas crackers (with everyone wearing the paper hats and sharing the corny jokes) and that general air of family geniality.

I’m not at all surprised that there was nothing on either a corporate or department level at the enterprise software company. I always pictured the CEO of the multi-billion megalith echoing Scrooge, calling Christmas “a poor excuse to pick a man’s pocket every 25^th of December”, and this definitely filtered down through the corporate culture.

At the SaaS company, you’d have thought there’d be quite the holiday gathering, but there wasn’t. I mean—there were only about 80 people on site and everyone pretty much knew everyone else, and mostly got along. And we had company-sponsored things like barbecues at other times. But there didn’t seem to be much interest in the hols. Our “official” event, dinner at the Reston Hyatt, was thrown together by the CEO’s admin in a matter of days (and she did a bang-up job of it); but it just speaks to the lack of enthusiasm.

(There was a cube-decorating contest. That’s as close as we got.)

My employer in Seattle—well, they went through the motions. But I never felt there was any warmth in it.

Now—there is one exception to this litany of holiday humbuggery: the small systems integrator where I worked in RTP. My editor and I threw together an evening event—caterer, flowers, must have been booze although I don’t recall it. The location was the apartment clubhouse of one of our tech support guys. Everyone dressed up, including the warehouse workers. One of them brought in a boom box (it was 1992), and we danced to it. Allison and I put together little gift boxes that people received (which included $25 AmEx gift certificates). It was like…Christmas.

Where I am now, they had a potluck on Friday. By 1000 the aroma of fried chicken permeated the entire floor. But of course, when the time came I was in PT. So I don’t know what the actual event was like.

Handel on the hols, Part 2

A friend brought this to my attention last year: Random Acts of Culture seeded the shoppers at the former Wanamaker’s flagship store with members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia and let loose with the “Hallelujah” chorus.

If I thought a flash mob would show up and break out into “Hallelujah”, I might even venture out into a Macy’s

Crank up the volume and enjoy.

Cat's in the cradle

I don't know that this picture, making the rounds, needs any explanation. Especially not if you're acquainted in any way with a cat:

Handel on the hols, Part 1

I myself never tire of Messiah. It never fails to lift my spirits, & I’m of the opinion that there is no such thing of a surfeit of the oratorio, particularly “Hallelujah” chorus.

So this year I’m sharing various versions with you. First up: a presentation by the Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat 5^th grade class, of Quinhagak, Alaska.

This is how much I love this: I’m not going to quibble about the use of apostrophes in the plurals of kings and lords.

Crank up the volume and enjoy.

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.

It’s a passive-aggressive giving guide.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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!”

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.)