and more moaning

I'm guessing it's not been fun to read for anyone that does, but it's felt quite cathartic to get all this stuff out in the air.

Hopefully today will be the last about work (well, for a while), but I'm certainly a long way from finishing with the moaning!

And this one's only a bit about work.

Around a month ago one of the Directors got married.  Congratulations to him, but it also acted as a stark statement of my standing.

Basically, I've known him longer than all but two other members of staff, and one of those was a friendship from way before he started working here.  However, most of the rest of the staff were invited to the wedding proper, whereas I was just invited to the evening reception.

Well, that's me told where I stand.

Anyway, when I arrived at the reception a bombshell was dropped on me. I would have to attend the redundancy meeting for a member of staff they're making redundant as their witness.  Or shit-canning them as I like to call it.  The reason I would have to do this was because the member of staff who was going to do it has had a tragedy (which has also really helped to improve the atmosphere in the office!)

They've actually made a complete mess of things with this employee, to be honest.

Now I will hold my hands up - I never really got on with this employee.  They're not my sort of person, and I found them a bit annoying.  I also found them quite unprofessional and borderline incompetent.

I honestly couldn't see why they'd been given a job, or, failing that, why they'd been kept on following the initial trial period.

But setting that aside, the reason for making them redundant was entirely about getting rid of them, and not about change in the business making that position redundant, which is what redundancy is supposed to be about.

And don't get me wrong, they did something that essentially made them useless to my company.  Basically the company is (currently) about selling out people as consultants to work for our Customers.  And this person initially was happy to do this, but then suddenly flipped and refused to do it.

Now instead of this being dealt with calmly and rationally, the MD flipped out.  The redundancy was how they decided to get rid of them.  But it's a poor decision, and I think the employee may take it all the way to a tribunal.

Anyway, the thing I was going to say is that the other element of why I had to attend this meeting was because there were fuck all other staff in the office.  The MD who got married took three weeks honeymoon straight after.  The other MD also had that week off and, in fact, there were only two members of staff in for the normal office for that first week and then it was hardly any better in the second week.

And to further underline my status: even though I was the only vaguely senior member of staff in the office, both of the MD's out of office messages said to contact other members of staff who were in the office for about 2 days during the whole period, but not me.