Waste of air

Things have been tense here lately and my department is feeling the heat. New hires and contractors haven't worked out as well as we wanted and now we're receiving alot of criticism from the engineering department. One engineer in particular regularly refers to one of our contractors as a "waste of air." Harsh!

$80 for a beer

Last night we had a ship party to celebrate the completion of a project that I worked on. Brenda, the vice president of the company, ordered a beer that cost $80 during dinner! Altogether the bill for the whole night was over $600. This project must have made the company alot of money and we must really be rolling in it now. I'll bet that we'll soon have raises and the bonuses this year will be awesome.

Long lunch?

Today my manager called me and a co-worker into one of our conference rooms and proceeded to yell at us for taking too long of a lunch the day before. According to him, we had been out of the office for "over 90 minutes" and that his manager had found the lab completely empty at 2:00 P.M. and had raised a stink with him. He made it clear that we weren't to take "long" lunches and that we were to be back in the lab every day at 2:00 P.M. There was no discussion of how many hours each of us put in every day during this busy period.

Company meeting sparsely attended

The owner skipped this morning's "required" company meeting but gave advance notice of his absence. I guess everybody thought that there would be nothing exciting announced because there was hardly anybody there this morning. Don't these people realize that this is an important tool for coordinating all of the projects?

Busted!

The owner of the company's favorite actress is Marry Anne from Gilligan's Island. Everybody is laughing today because she got busted for posession of pot. From what I hear, the owner will probably be even more attracted to her now.

Long vacation

One of my bosses got back from vacation today. He was gone for two weeks! Man, I can't wait until I have that kind of seniority and can take that much vacation no questions asked. As it is now, I have to request vacation time with my manager and it cannot interfere with any of my current projects. Otherwise, the vacation policy is very liberal and they don't officially track how much vacation you take and there isn't a limit. I do have to enter my vacation hours in our time tracking system but I'm sure that management only uses that for scheduling and such.

Farewell to a co-worker

Today is the last day for one of my co-workers. He says that he's got a better job but how can that be possible? Will he have foosball and XBox and PS3? Will he have his own office? Will he get paid more?

Stolen idea goes nowhere

So I gave up on automating some of our testing tasks because my co-worker said he had a better way to do it with Python. Well, here it is weeks later and he still hasn't produced anything that we can use. When I asked him how he was coming along with it he brushed me off and said he has better things to do.

Goodbye Nick

Nick, a programmer that has been here for much longer than I have, got fired today. It's weird to think that they kept someone so incompetent on for so long, but this company can be very charitable towards its employees. As I understand it, Nick received a very healthy severance package to honor his many years of service.

Raking it in

I was talking to one of the developers the other day about how his Christmas vacation went. Soon we were talking about various vacation destinations and he told me that the owner of the company had taken his entire family on a vacation to Jamaica a few years ago that cost $100 dollars per day for each person. He took about 10 people on that vacation and was gone for 10 days. That's over $10,000 for a vacation! That same summer the VP of our department went to China for two weeks. Sounds like it was a good year for the company and I'll bet everyone got great bonuses that Christmas!

Peggle

All of the developers have become obsessed with a game called Peggle and have been playing it non-stop for days now. It seems like its a huge drain on productivity but nobody seems to care. I suppose its just an indication that most of management is gone at trade shows this week.