Thursday, January 10, 2008

presenteeism run amok

Subject: GB at home
From: MyCo office mgr
Date: 11:29am
To: everyone@MyCo.com


All,

Please keep GB in your thoughts and prayers while he recovers from pneumonia and a collapsed lung. His wife called me this morning and said the results from his tests yesterday came back with the collapsed lung. He is on a strict, heavy duty medication regimen and will not return to work until Monday.

If you need to reach him for any reason, you can call or email him. I know he is checking emails between naps.



FUCKTHAT.
there is absolutely no excuse for that kind of presentee-ist behavior, which makes people like me look abysmally inadequate. and loucypher agreed: i get a fucking hangnail and i'm out of reach.

EmCeeCarv just got an iphone, was showing it off to me and the Mick in the conference room yesterday.
- don't you just love it - i gushed. i don't gush for much, mind, but my phone falls into the Gush category.
- i... do - agreed MCC, not quite as gushily. my man already has DSL at home, so his phone isn't the umbilical cord mine is. i've got both of you on my Contacts Favorites - which is a double-click of the menu button away, reason #103 to love mac - so you're a double-click and touch away.

- not so fast, my good man - i interruptust - for my phone has the iFlyFirewall. it blocks all work-related intrusions - MCC looked crestfallen - and it works with GoogleMaps and DelDOT traffic control to get me home as quickly as possible. in fact, yesterday when there was that 18-wheeler overturned on 95S it turned into a helicopter and flew me home.

- i think i saw that on the news! - he gamely tried to play along.
- no you didn't - i snapped - we were invisible.

i think i will email GB to ask whether he can put together a 50pg proposal for me by monday. with his strict, heavy-duty medication diet he could come up with some mint stuff.

6 comments:

addon said...

gb is a wanker. go for the 50 pg proposal.

addon said...

PS MyCo office mgr is worse - castrate him.

FINN said...

don't you miss all this adam?
don't you?

addon said...

not one bit finn, not one bit. i know i worked too hard and wonder why i could not, at the time, see i was crazy.

FINN said...

peer pressure, perhaps, and the queer notion that productivity and loyalty is proportional to # of hours worked.

to which i say again:
fuckthat.

addon said...

the reason i worked hard was that i cared about what i did. as a manager of complex construction and engineering projects, i had a great deal of autonomy and took great care in delivering what the client wanted when and how it was wanted. over the 30 years or so i had this role, i never had a project that was not on time, to budget and to the clients' requirements. I was the best project manager in queensland for 12 years or so. did i then work too hard to achieve this? when I cared about what the clients wanted, how could i not work hard?

i should add that i was a bit of a specialist in hospital design and construction and worked on many hospital redevelopment projects. it was these that gave me the greatest motivation and on which i worked with the greatest clients.

so looking back, what was "too hard"? it gave me chronic fatigue syndrome, thus the work i did was too much for me. problem is it takes years for the chronic fatigue to build up and become a real chronic disease with you.

i could say a lot more about this you will not be surprised to hear. why, for example, did i not seek help more often?

but i will leave it there in the meantime.