Laid Off Anniversary

I was laid off from a shitty job one year ago to this day.

I'm chilling out at home and my eyes are quitting out, so I don't quite have the concentration to go over all the great things I remember about my job in trendy Yaletown. Tune in tomorrow and I'll have some bon mots to share. Maybe.

UPDATE:
I am miserably tired today even after copping out of writing a full post last night by saying I was far too tired. In rather predictable Clinton fashion, I stayed up for another hour dithering around with things.

Anyway, my work shift has zoomed by as a result of behing half-conscious for much of the day. Which brings me to our original topic: my old job. I worked for a young web development firm based in Yaletown last year for about four and a half months. I actually ran away from a decent job that was saddled with a lousy 45-minute commute in order to take on this new job. It would enable me to take on a new role, better career prospects, shiny new office digs, no need to drive my car and just a badly needed change of scenery.

Little did I know this job would turn out to be my most frustrating, stressful job ever. It didn't faze me that I was filling in for a longtime, much beloved employee. What eventually pushed me to the brink was filling in the massive void left by the absent worker and taking on an entirely new realm of ressponsibilities. Sound exciting? Well, I won't lie, I was pretty stoked in the beginning. The pace in the office was fast and I was given a few opportunities to expand myself beyond what I thought I was capable of. It wasn't long, however, before I was saddled in responsibilities that amounted to covering 3 full-time positions.

I should also add that, barely out of my probation period, I finally left the family nest and moved into an apartment with an old highschool/university pal. So this job, which would soon go from sketchy to pretty crappy, was quite important to my survival. When my boss e-mailed me on Saturday afternoon to single-handedly code a mission critical project, something I had not even been asked to start, by Tuesday, I complied. When they sneakily did not adjust my probation pay to the proper wage, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and handled it nicely.

Although the job turned me into a lifeless zombie for the better part of 4 months, there were some perks to enjoy. I'll outline them here and mix in some random observations made while on the job:

• The new office, ready to go by the time I started working for the company, really was very swank and impressive. It did end up feeling very bare and clinical, but still miles ahead of their old office and where I was coming from.
• One of the owners frequently brought in his adorable lab retriever to work. It was probably one of the gentlest, most well-trained dogs I had ever met.
• Subsidized group workouts with professional trainers... which I took advantage of exactly once, until they switched the schedule to an early morning workout. (I was already trudging into work at 8:30am each day, so no thanks)
• Catered lunches. This was a bit misleading. According to many longtime employees, the company used to have a chef on staff who would prepare a lunch for the office every day. How sweet was that? Well, they had fired him well before I came on board, due to his supposedly questionable food handling practices and his inability to cater to the irritatingly picky eating habits of a handful of workers. What ended up happening was a rotating schedule was made up so that everyone took turns preparing lunches. The head honchos would bring in loads of food from Costco each week and would stock up our snazzy, but cramped kitchen (complete with patio!). The patio meant that when summer rolled around, our lunches would often involve burgers and charred pieces of chicken breast. Eventually, a recently demoted sales peon was assigned the unenviable task of preparing lunch every day! Poor guy. He ended up doing an amazingly consistent job, although he did try to pawn off his lunch duties onto me a few times which really pissed me off. He never seemed to bother anyone else to make lunch in his stead...
• Private gym! Yes, this is true and it's a shame I used it only about a dozen times while I was there. Our gym was actually a forgotten section of the fitness club located on the floor below us. This meant that sometimes a gym staff bearing an impossibly perfect-sphere ass would come in with a client and share the space with us web development freeloaders. Actually not many people from my company took advantage of the free gym. It wasn't the best-equipped place in the world, but it had all the basics, plus plenty of dumbbells and a couple of TVs and channel-changing privileges to boot.
• My desk was right beside one of our expansive windows, which afforded me a pretty clear view into the back room of a famous sensual massage parlour down the block. I wish this part was more exciting. The most I ever saw was an OK-looking chick in a bra. Most of the time it was just a backroom staffer packing linens and dumping laundry. Being the bored, overworked boy's club that we were, that still didn't stop us from bringing in a high-powered pair of binoculars for that rare chance that we might, one day, see the cash & prizes.
• The babes. This is Yaletown after all, so there was never a want for scoping out decked out, yuppy gym babes. It became a daily ritual to walk past this one fake-looking babe after disembarking the bus and walking the 2 blocks to the office. She was pretty phat and dressed very well. In the gym, she would probably be a cross between a LMB and a GI Jane. Yum. I never did witness that whole cliche of the bleach blonde Lululemon bimbo who carried their teeny toy dogs in their teensy little handbags. I must have been busy gawking at their hineys.
• My "uber" Macintosh G4 and my impressive 30-inch widescreen LCD. I have to say my desk setup made me look important. While everyone else sufficed with a single LCD or dual monitors side-by-side, I was rocking the pinnacle of visual stimulation. I was also using an Apple computer, which made me want to convulse in fits of rage two or three times each day. It's a wonder I didn't throw it out the window before left the job.
• My peers were generally pretty cool, although almost everyone got on my nerves at some point. There was a short period of time where we had at least 4 DJs, including myself, working in the office. Anyway, only 1 survived into August and it wasn't me. The sales guys were all generally nice, but a few of them infuriated me with their practice of promising ridiculous shit to clients without consulting... ooh, I don't know, a designer like myself or the devs first to see if it was actually POSSIBLE. Yes, one particular salesman had a knack for consistently writing cheques with his mouth that his ass could not cash. Unfortunately, it was I who ultimately bore the brunt for his breaking his flamboyant promises, wasting time placating clients and finding ways to keep them from leaving us because he had essentially lied to them to their faces.
• More on my peers: my fellow developers were a shade better than the sales team. One of the DJ dudes trained me in my job and I ended up working very closely with him for the first 2 months. Although he was a young, smart kid who taught himself little bits of PHP programming, he seemed incapable of picking up even the most rudimentary CSS coding. This became a problem when he would botch up simple edits and I would need to spend valuable time setting things back in order. There was a Korean kid who I reallly liked, mainly because he was so nice and he saved my ass many times with his programming skillz. The resident all-round computer whiz was your stereotypical, nerdy-looking bespectacled guy who would act distrubingly condescending to you, even towards other programmers and the team lead. Ah, the team lead. We'll call him A.. He was a seemingly very intelligent and nice guy who I later determined was the most subtlely effective bootlicker I have ever encountered. I started off liking A., but it soon became clear he had become too buddy-buddy with one of the owners, to the point where you'd always see them leave work together and A. would even help him walk his dog, run personal errands and generally became far too integrated into the boss' life. Coupled with the fact that he was a sharp pencil and it was no surprise when A. eventually became the manager of development. As he dug his heels into his managerial role, A. soon met the fate of many a low-to-mid level manager... he got eerily, freakin' robotic. His over-articulate manner of speech and his practiced mannerisms reached insane heights, to the point where I could no longer relate to him as a real person.
  
• I think business does that to people... If you look at the two owners of that company, I would say they were a prime example of the yuppy, every-man-for-himself ideology. Both of them were still in their 20's... but there was never a whiff of any youthful idealism about them. They had accomplished quite in bit with their company in just 5 years, that I will not dispute. Yet... it was always uncomfortable for me to be around them. I once overheard the younger of the two espouse the greatness of the Liberal party during the provincial elections and I got sick to the stomach. Such a short-sighted, self-serving attitude... And the other owner, well he was slick and I remember having a single non-work related conversation with, about dating of all things. Well, it was no surprise to discover he was dating like mad and having trouble finding a girlfriend. He had the money, he had the trappings of success, but wow, the guy had the interpersonal warmth of a polar ice cap. Come to think of it, maybe that's why he and A. got along so well.
  

Well, I've blabbered about my old job during my current job shift long enough. It's in the past. Bring on the present.