Send the What?

When I returned from lunch there was a man from the Company waiting to see me. He ushered me into an empty office normally used by visiting attorneys.

He introduced himself. Ray Hole, the new area manager.

Shake hands. Hole handed me his card, shut the door and took a seat behind the desk.

"Did Tom (my boss) talk to you on his way out?", asked Mr. Hole.

"No. Why?"

Well, explained Hole, the Company has been 'put on notice' by the Firm. If we didn't address certain 'problem areas' our contract would not be renewed.
The first thing they were doing was firing my boss. Immediately.

This didn't make any sense. Tom did a good job. There haven't been any blunders or missteps that I'm aware of.

" Why did you fire him?"

"Well, we need to put a new face on the Company."

"I don't know what that means."
I actually had a pretty good idea where this was heading, but I wanted to hear it from Hole's mouth.

"Um, well, Tom is a great guy but we need someone who can better sell the Company."

"I don't understand. We charge a flat rate and we already serve all the Firm's offices. What is there to sell?"

He gives a long-winded sales pitch about document management.

"But we already do all that. What is the problem?"

"Perception. We need emphasis on perception. It's important to send the right perception. Perception is everything."
He stands up and paces past me to illustrate his point.
"Imagine that I'm the client and I walk by and see Tom playing a video game. What kind of perception is that sending? "

I wanted to tell him that it's not a video game, it's the Warcraft forum, but I really don't want to admit that I know my boss spends his spare time on Warcraft sites.

"Oh. I see."
Tom has pissed someone off and they have complained to the boss and now he is getting fired. It's a personal vendetta. Seen it plenty of times.

"Look, you can trust me," intoned Hole, " ask anyone who knows me. I'm straight-up. I won't lie to you."

Suddenly I feel like I'm in a cheap TV movie or a bad comic book. Did he just say "ask anyone...I'm straight up?" As a rule I distrust persons who tell me I can trust them. Ask anyone? What did he want me to do? Call his friends for a character reference? What a weird thing to say.

" I heard you and the temp...what is her name?...talking when I came in earlier. You were laughing."

I am flummoxed. Yeah, maybe we were- we sit two feet apart and do speak to each other. Duh.

"Yes."

"Now, you aren't in trouble ( really? thank god I'm not in trouble for laughing) and I want you to stay with the Company team, but if I can hear you laughing, then other people can too, and what kind of perception does that send?"

"That we like our jobs?" It's a chatty office- it's not at all unusual to hear someone laugh.

"Well, we need to put on a more positive face around here. Let's curtail the laughing."

"That shouldn't be a problem. In fact, I doubt if I'll ever laugh again."

This is the wrong answer. Hole glowers at me. He has pegged me as hostile.
After a moment he says he has to make a call. Dismissed.

Later I am introduced to my new manager and her stooge. Her stooge is transferring in to replace the temp and I strongly suspect she's a corporate narc.They set about inspecting my work area, looking for ways to optimize the processing to maximize the productivity- basically they were looking for ways to make us look busier than we actually are by turning simple tasks into logistical nightmares.

New plans:

- Remove all the furniture except our desks and use the space to store boxes. The boxes will send the perception that are really, really cramped and barely have room to maneuver.
"With luck", said an enthusiastic Hole, "we can have two hundred or more boxes in here. Look at all this wasted space, he says, indicating the blank wall above my desk.
We can put up a pair of heavy-duty shelves and put two rows of boxes there."

Those twin shelves will send the perception that I am having a constant low-level attack of claustrophobic anxiety.

The workroom is already far too small for two people and we have a storeroom down the hall. A lot of the boxes we retrieve are 10 or 15 years old and musty as fuck-all. Sharing a room with two hundred of the fuckers is going to send the perception that I am having severe asthma attacks.

- Move the two workstations to a side-by- side position with both screens visible from the hall. Currently, my monitor is angled just right but now it'll be wide open- and the Stooge will be sitting next to me- I am much more comfortable with someone working across from me, not next to me. I don't like people sitting next to me when I work. It fucks with my personal space.
Plus I can't blog at work anymore.

- Make a "non-compliance" list of all the typos that we catch( transposed number, mis-matched client # etc) and who made them and submit a monthly report to the Firm. We process thousands of documents a day- when a number doesn't match it only takes a second to figure out why- it's almost always a typo. I just fix them and move on- I'd feel like an asshole if I told a paralegal that matter # 17262.001 is really 17262.0010 every time I saw something like that.
Filling out a detailed report on exactly who made what simple error and then turning them into the Firm is a not a job I want. I don't think pointing out the typos of the legal assistants is going to maximize our productivity. I think it's going send the perception that I am a rat and make me into the most-hated man in the office.

I bet they fire me as soon as I train the Stooge.

Tomorrow is gonna be a long day.