Current mood:	amused
Current music:	Groove Armada - Doin it after dark

Send in the clowns....
Well, it's been a while has it not. And the intervening time has passed. Bad things have happened. My gran and grandad dying within 2 weeks of each other for example. You may recall my excitement of starting my new job and the excitement of their professionalism in getting ready for me joining the company. Well, that excitement has been replaced by a sense of awe that these people are actually in business. It was the first and last professional thing they did. It turns out the "we have more work coming in than we can handle" line at the interview was something of an overstatement and so for the last six months I've been on crappy internal projects or left to drift. The manager who I was working with to set up a new practice in the company got sent to Canada on no notice so that stopped. The company website (woo the thrills) got canned and now to cap it all they have no UK business stream so want people to relocate abroad. To this end there was a conference call yesterday morning to tell 12 people that 5 of them are using. It was then I realised I still could learn something from this company after all. And that was that if you are going to make people redundant you shouldn't do the following:

• Tell 12 people that 5 of them won't have a job in a week's time.
  
• Set no schedule for consultations with the 12.
  
• Not be available to discuss the matter with the 12.
  
• Send out the stock options forms to their home addresses on the same day (oh what bitter irony).
  
• Tell them to look at the internal vacancies page where there just happen to be 5 vacancies to relocate to the US (coincidence?).
  
• Leave writing the information pack describing the procedure to after you've made the conference call.
  
• Ring up to ask if someone has any questions and then be unable to answer "will I still have a job?" or "what are my options?". That wouldn't be so bad but what you really shouldn't do is try and tell them you were trying to make the process as quick or painless as possible (painless to who? HR perhaps).
  
• Be late to the conference call.
  
• Be in a noisy place where your phone keeps cutting out.
  
• Leave people of the distribution list for a mail telling them when the managers would be free and then forward it on to them 5 minutes after missing the first window.
  
• Tell two people 1 minute beforehand that the conference call they actually needed to go on was tomorrow rather than today.
  

All in all an absolute tour de force in muppetry (I think I may well have missed out some of it too). Even if I'm not chosen (or in the unlikely event I choose not to start applying for other jobs) I'm not going to be happy staying at a company that I know treats its employees like that. If I wanted to go back to working for a half-assed bodyshop I'd go back to contracting and double my salary.

It is here that you may think I could be about to explode but they're so bad it's funny. The prospect of getting out of this company fills me with hope and puts a big smile on my face. No one should ever be treated this way and I hope that if I'm ever in the position to treat people with as much dignity as possible. And, as I once said, revenge is a much better spectator sport. It's better to sit back and watch what goes around comes around (preferably with some popcorn) than be an active instrument in it ;-)