OXLAEYWorking for the Man
How about I start with the first few minutes of day one. I arrive as planned at 9:30. My boss, Mr. CTO is in a meeting so his secretary shows me to my new office. Imagine my surprise when she takes me up one floor and says “Mr. CTO thought you could share the office with your predecessor, Hans”.
WTF? Hans was the guy I was hired to replace. He had been told only two weeks before that I was replacing him. He was mad as hell about the whole thing and threatened to sue the company if demoted. He was three years away from retirement and a “lifer”, meaning he had spent his entire life working at this one single company. Now I was asked on my first day to share an office with him. Things could only get better, right?
Turns out Hans himself had a predecessor in the company, “Willem”. Five years before when Hans took over the Vice President job, Willem had also made a huge ruckus. So in typical corporate fashion, both Hans and Willem kept their “Vice President” titles. They worked in separate buildings, used the same people but never directly coordinated together because of their rivalry.
Wait, wait… There’s more!
One week after I started, Mr. CTO was demoted. That is called, in corporate speak, being “restructured”. Until then Mr. CTO had reported directly to the CEO. Now, Mr. CTO had been kicked out of the inner circle. Anything he now suggested or requested to be done would be treated in the same corporate manner as other non-inner circle executives. It would be stuck in the freezer to die a long, cold death. Because I reported to Mr. CTO, this now meant that anything I wanted to change in the department would also be stuck in this deep freeze pipeline.
Did I mention the creative accounting? After weeks of collecting data from sources other than my own team, because they wouldn’t or couldn’t give out the figures, I discovered some “irregularities”. My department was in an even much worse financial position than management had feared.
Just a few days in, I realized I was in a big fu<king mess.
