9-15-10 Wednesday (Government Cheese)

It’s been another interesting week at unnamed car care place.  An email earlier on in the week stated that “Director of Operations” was no longer employed with our company.  I have no idea if it was a voluntary or involuntary thing.  This was the guy who called me on a Friday night and asked if I could start on a Saturday morning. 

More changes came up later in the week.  Although no email was sent out, my former supervisor James and Tom were now facility managers (what I am).  Voluntary demotion or what – I don’t know.  Oddly I heard about this from one of my techs who heard it from another employee. 

My newest boss, Mike, is over all the stores.  Originally as a group manager, he’s now higher than that and I think he’s called a regional manager.  Dunno, hard to keep up lately.

Angela, the lube pit faller, stopped in with a note yesterday stating she was under a doctor’s care still.  We figured.  No surgery as of yet but her arm is broken in 2 places and they’re using a sling rather than a cast to heal it.  She has to go in often and have the harness contraption tightened up here and there to help align the bones.  She says her hip hurts even though they don’t see anything wrong with it.  She seems miserable and pretty doped up.  I can only assure her that we miss her and can’t wait for her to come back. 

Our company sent her a fruit arrangement from Edible Arrangements:

I worked alone today (Bob was off).  We were slow this morning and then I was go-go-go for the remainder of the day.  It made for a fast day but kinda wiped me out.  It was a challenge eating and even getting to the bathroom from time to time.  Ugh.

So, I get an email from my boss.  It’s addressed to all the care care managers.  Here’s the blurb that matters:

I really really really wanted to reply, “I’d like to see you try that.”  I was so pissed.  I immediately forwarded the email for Deanna to look at.  She offered a lot of solutions and guidance.  Deanna is an HR Goddess.  She offers great advice to employees here.  Oh, and while I’m talking about her, a few entries ago I mentioned that she came over for dinner, we played trivia.  I mentioned that on a previous visit we worked on her new company logo but I couldn’t share it until it was registered and legal.  Well, here it is:

We played with the logo.  She had a vision, I helped her with it and in the end, she made something different than what we made together.  That’s her final logo.  Cool, eh?  I’ll find out and mention her website and Facebook fan page in the future.

Anyway, so I called HR and just ranted about everything I could think of.  She agreed that it’s illegal to dock pay for infractions.  She says she kept it anonymous and let Mike know that someone complained. 

This place is hostile and negative.  A little later I get another email from someone else.

Above: Click to enlarge

So I’m thinking: 1- No names on the cards because of too much turn over?  I wonder why?  2- Another threat. 

It’s possibly legal to charge someone for the cards but shouldn’t it just be enough to tell people not to do it?  Am I your child?  Does everything have to be negative and have consequences?  I forwarded that email to HR stating “our company is a ball of negativity.  Why does everything have a consequence?”   I didn’t get a reply but I wasn’t expecting one.  Oddly enough, our in-house intranet website has a link to order business cards and after clicking on it, prompts come up to personalize it.  I did this about 3 weeks ago.  I have business cards with my name on it.  I ordered some for my advisor about a week ago.  Oh well.

Carl and Tim departed Cape Coral, Florida this afternoon.  Their trailer was being transported by a company.  They made it to our house at about 11:30pm.  Jim was in bed since he had to work Thursday.  I’m off tomorrow!  Yay! 

For their welcome to their new home gift, we got them a cookbook and gift basket.  No trailer is complete without a copy of Ruby Ann’s Down Home Trailer Park Cookbook.  Just look at the recipes.  Mmmmmmm.  Any recipe that has an ingredient of “government cheese” is swell by me:

Above: All the ingredients needed to make a down home trailer park meal.

   Above: The finished product.  Inside a Walmart bag.

The funny thing is that they like 99% of the ingredients in the “basket”.  Yes, that includes the Spam and Vienna Sausage.  I love my friends.