Saturday, July 25, 2009

summer work

Did I mention that I had an intern? the key word being had.

I did mention that they were slashing 20% of my department at work and that some how maths out to one person with that person being my coworker. We had the same job title, worked at the same level and sat in the same large empty room alone in a mostly abandoned building downtown for many years. I always figured that he was my competition and would most likely be promoted before me since he had many years experience over me.. I was wrong(thankfully).

I am not promoted but at least I have a job. It was the decision of my boss' boss and for the first time I could see it in his face and hear it in his voice it was a hard one as he explained how he reached to this decision. It was a bittersweet moment as apparently my efforts had not gone unnoticed by the senior management but he the fallout is that will be jobless now and I will have to pick up his workload. To put things into perspective when I joined the company the job that my boss and I are currently doing was being done by a team of 7 people, a 71% reduction in staff. Now the competition(if any) is between the boss and myself lets hope I can survive.

Anyway back to the subject, shortly after they cut my coworker they gave me an intern. I was a bit confused as to how they were cutting people but still managed to maintain a summer program but I was happy for any assistance I could get. He was a fresh grad from university and was hoping to get a permanent job, this was perfect, exactly what I wanted. I treated him with respect, assigning him weekly objectives, giving him training material and gave him the ultimate goal to finish developing a database webapp I had started in my free time. My boss would have(and wanted) to give him some brainless slave work to do and I should have. He sucked at the work I assigned to him I had to be following behind him and fixing everything he did.

The final slap in the face was when the intern came to me at the end of his second week and resigned ughh!! two weeks gone down the drain. He was offered a [ever so scarce] permanent job at some other company so I let him go, I would never hold it against him in these harsh economic times. My friends and coworkers all think that I drove him away but hey if you cant stand the heat stay out of the kitchen.

6 comments:

Tami said...

Oh wow! I guess he saw it coming. Better to quit than be fired i say.

Unknown said...

70% cut in your department, sounds like mine. I guess he heard about the cuts and decided to cut! lol!

I passed through your floor today to visit some of my relocated coworkers, saw your cubicles, man they are small. That place is like a world of cubicles! Was going to come hail you up, but yute you don't stay at your cubicle at all.

owen said...

surprising people monitoring millions of dollars of equipment, using millions of dollars of electricity and they firing people that get paid a fraction of the cost.

I glad i have no interns, their youthfull glee annoys me.

CoolDestiny said...

I wish I had an intern :( - permanent, temporary, summer, part time, right now it doesn't matter. Work caan done.

IrieDiva said...

meh...im jus here to inform that i (my blog) have moved....again.....nuh badda complain. stop by sometime

Crankyputz said...

sigh tis a sign of the times, glad your still in there....