Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Walking Dead- Here Comes the Hatchet Men


This is the first in a series of posts about the soon to be unemployed at the Big World Bank Machine and the process and shenanigans that ensue. This series sponsored by the Kid, one of the finest people i know, who urged me to write about it. And just in case anyone i work with reads this... it's all fiction.

Friday's in the business world are never good when it comes to remaining gainfully employed and this one would be no different, you see the original meeting was scheduled for Tuesday but it was bumped up and when the news got round the Big World Bank Machine what was once a ripple of dread gained both speed and momentum, i mean this place was never much on what the Bad Brains called PMA, positive mental attitude, it was full of Chicken Little's always waiting for the sky to fall but it'd survived longer than most branches of the BWBM, an institution started by one Woodrow Wilson when as he put it, "I've just sold the country to the bankers", and as we all know you can always trust a banker...

Consolidation is a dirty little word that should read, a bunch of you are about to get fucked in the dictionary, a polite business term for fuck off and don't let the door hit you on the ass, now understand that the place i work has people working in it who've never worked anywhere else, some 30 or 40 years, a quasi guvment institution and what most would consider a bastion of stability, i've been there 8 and half, my longest tenure of any job, even the dealing but at least that job i chose to leave unlike this one where i'll have no choice, that said we all piled into the big hall to await the decision, i was standing near a television that showed the branch president in Cleveland and my initial comment was "we're fucked", she wouldn't look up and it looked as if someone had pissed in her coffee, of course when the management group walked in we all could have left, they looked like someone had flat out shit in their coffee so it wasn't much of a surprise when the V.P. from Cleveland told us we had just gotten the fucking shaft, of course what did this stammering tool care, he still had his six figure gig and that was after he ran a private bank into the ground as risk manager, see somehow he ended up at the BWBM in an even cushier gig and in a moment of blissfully stupid eloquence he mumbled, "isn't this a cold bucket of water in your face", i was like what the fuck did that idiot just say, of course as he made this announcement there were tears, i saw two women almost pass out and of course the head idiot in charge stood off on the side of the room blubbering... of course the blubberer was the genius in charge of our banks proposal, a rising star who had pissed off more than her fair share of important people on meteoric rise to the top, but more on her later...

How did we get fucked you ask? aren't people losing their jobs all the time these days? yes. We got the shaft due to the fact that we'd been told the decision was purely economic, based on performance and cost, well the numbers released that very morning showed that between our bank and the bank in the shitty cold upper Midwest, our rival, that we did it significantly cheaper and much more efficient yet somehow they were awarded the gig and the powers that be from HQ in DC decided that they did not need to give any justification for this decision, basically they told us to suck it and as talking dignitary after talking dignitary, all with jobs mind you, got up and praised us for our legacy and hard work i finally said rather loudly, "we don't need to hear this shit, get on with it", which drew some worried looks and alot of smiles from the rank and file, i mean fuck i'm just the light bulb changer and i knew i didn't need to hear these suits blow any sunshine up my ass, i know i do a good job cuz first off a fucking monkey can do it and secondly all the lights in the room were fucking on, it was at this point that me and few others just headed for the door...

Sometime in the near future our Superstar V.P. will get her own post about the ramifications of her actions that helped our downfall but believe me that is a post in itself, what happened next on this fine day was that the BWBM let all non-essential personnel go which created a mass exodus to a bar across the street, of course my dept. wasn't included in that and i myself went on the jack jones to a quiet little place where i slammed Guinness and Jameson's because basically i don't like people very much and damn sure didn't want to drink with the twats i worked with, of course at the chain bar they went to they drank like rock stars and cried on each other's shoulders and our Superstar V.P. got wiped out and walked around the bar screaming "we got fucked, those fucking assholes, we got fucked", a sentiment echoed by many others just not as loud or obnoxiously, and then another manager, a short dough boy with a huge sense of entitlement, got so out of hand he shoved a bartender and proceeded to call the waitresses cunts and whores and all kinds of shit that if had i been standing next to him would have gotten him shipped to the fucking hospital faster than he could blink, see the girl was a waitress for a long time and just so he knew, a few days later i stood within earshot of him and told someone how i heard somebody was hassling the waitresses, i then explained that if i found out who they better never let me catch them on the street cuz if they did i'd fucking throttle them, explained that the girl was once one and that those women put up with an endless amount of shit from the idiotic general public and that anyone who over-stepped that much was due for a righteous ass kicking, this fucking douche bag is all of 5'5 and he's a soft and lumpy piece of shit, another one who runs around trying to bang his sub-ordinates cuz his whole life he was picked last on the playground so now he's trying to make up for it, of course i looked right past the person i was talking to and glared at him the whole time so i'm sure he understood my point...

and that was the day the hatchet came down... more to follow.

7 comments:

Jayne said...

I've been in one of those machines - just a prong in convoluted, often antiquated gears. Loyalty runs one way, kill or be killed mentality. Of course, government or quasi-government adds a whole new dimension to the mechanism. It's good to write about it - good therapy and something most everyone can relate to. My very first blog posts were those I wrote right after I left XYZ. The things corporate higher ups came up with were pretty laughable. It was insane (literally, and the lifers were sadly delusional), one of the biggest in the nation, with a sickening disparity in the compensation between executive and drone. Drones, of course, did a helluva lot more work.
Looking forward to watching this series develop...

Anonymous said...

I wrangle the cogs every day. And wonder if I'll ever have the courage to leave. To walk away. To something closer to the earth. And then they give me more money. And I think...another year. But each year eats just a little bit more.

nursemyra said...

I misread one of your lines. I thought you'd written "the nipple of dread"

sybil law said...

So glad you posted this, and this part - "i mean fuck i'm just the light bulb changer and i knew i didn't need to hear these suits blow any sunshine up my ass, i know i do a good job cuz first off a fucking monkey can do it and secondly all the lights in the room were fucking on" - oooh, awesome. :)
Seriously sucks. I'll bet the short dude nearly pissed himself as you glared at him. Short guys bother me (says the short girl).

Anonymous said...

never been part of a massive 'consolidation', but i did fire someone once. after 3 years of giving her every chance to get it right, she just didn't show up for work much. and there were probably 100 people who would have been happy to have her job. so i pulled the chain. had 30 applicants within a day or two... and i left it to the next boss to hire his pick of the litter.

even when it's earned, telling someone to pack and go is unpleasant.

kid said...

as the duly flattered sponsor of this lambasting par excellence i reckon it an honor to comment to every one of these installments. a sideshow such as the one at the BWBM deserves only the most lucid descriptions of its freaks and their attendant deformities, and this time the piece has picked its master. in other word, brilliant.

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