Status update

The all-employee meeting was — as expected — about how the economic downturn will affect operations. The company will be cutting costs by doing things such as not providing office supplies any longer. Also, "inefficiencies" are going to be addressed, and the upper levels of management are not going to be exempt from scrutiny on that front (this is when my ears perked up). Apparently, roles which are "vacated" are not going to be filled in again (although I don't see how that's possible in Studio, which has 3 Studio Artists running at capacity and a single Art Director — oh, and a useless office manager).

Work's been so insanely busy over the past two weeks that I've been putting in overtime on an almost nightly basis. One of my co-workers slept in her car over her lunch break some time the week before last. When she mentioned this in passing to CFB (Control Freak Boss, as deemed by Roy), CFB laughed and said it seemed like a good idea.

On the day that my friend stopped by the office (and I got in shit for it), I was covering for the aforementioned co-worker who had a funeral to go to. It turns out that a giant rush project, which CFB pulled me off of a slightly lower priority project to work on, wasn't really all that giant a rush after all, CFB just got her scheduling wrong. You know, the person in charge of scheduling time for everybody in Studio just got a major deadline wrong — and gave an employee shit while doing it because she was under the mistaken belief that Studio time was too hectic for an employee to take a break. Of course, my real issue with this is that my belief is that when things are stressful, that's exactly the time that you take a break.

So yeah, it's looking like I'm not horribly likely to make a career out of this role.

That said, at least the utter stupidity of the schedule at work has gotten her out of our hair for the past while. I've been remarkably pleasant with her when she does come to bother me, and I'm hoping she learns that keeping out of my way will make things more tolerable for everybody.

Ultimately, I suspect I'm going to have to have a confrontation with her about the difference between problems with my professional conduct (about which she has no complaints) versus my personal conduct (which I think is none of her damn business).

A quick chat with Big Pimp last week proved remarkably supportive of my position.

I have a major project I want to see finished with my name on it, and a bit of morbid curiosity about the type of work environment that imminent layoffs brings (the remainder of the day immediately following the all-employee meeting was like Christmas), but otherwise all bets are off. I have until December 9^th to walk away without obligation.