Lisa took a conflict and negotiation seminar once. While the tricks she learned never seemed to work on her cats at home, she figured her coworkers might be more malleable. She continued, “Why do I say that? If they don’t catch it, Ogre gets a pinch in his wallet. If they somehow do catch it we just handed all of the employees a little bonus check. If management demands that money back because of a ‘mistake’…wow they look like dicks.”
As she continued she could feel their hesitation softening as if the anesthesia of reason was starting to take hold. Lisa was a game-player and a politician, yet she was awkwardly stuck in her place as a staff accountant in a massive company. “I remember the day SoundTech made the announcement that we were going to be sold to an overseas company. I was in the kitchen eating Cheeze-its and worrying about a cash rec. I knew this was how it was going to be. I knew it! I decided that I wanted to get the experience and I liked you guys. Not to get all sentimental, but I’ve worked with a lot of jerk-offs in the past. When you find the right coworkers it’s like finding the right husband. I haven’t been real good at that, lord knows, so I might as well be satisfied to get one out of two. I figure you guys would’ve ditched this place a long time ago if you didn’t feel similar feelings.”
The moment was snapped as a batter in the Sox game got a fastball directly in the helmet, causing the room to gasp.
Chris escaped to the bathroom and found himself standing slightly dumfounded at the urinal, the ear of the Earth that any man can tell his secrets to. “Why did I come tonight?” he wondered in the silence. “If I just left the company they could play whatever games they wanted and I’d hear about the silliness over email somewhere down the line. It wouldn’t matter. I’d have a new job, with new friends. But now I freakin’ know stuff I don’t want to know…Jesus.” The door opened and Chris battled the sound with his own flush.
“She’s a nut, huh?” Tim said grinning. “I don’t know where she comes up with this stuff.” While standing at the urinal he had his head turned about three quarters of the way to make eye contact with Chris.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” said Chris in a resigned voice as he stuck his hands under the weak hand dryer.
Tim continued the conversation. “Do you think it could work?”
“Oh man, why did you ask me that?” thought Chris. “Maybe. I’ll catch you tomorrow, Tim” Chris stormed out of the bathroom and waved quickly to the crew remaining. The car is an even better listener than the urinal and there was a lot of talking being done on that ride home.
Chapter 3
-Let’s consider our core competencies-
Friday, April 10, 2009
Friday had come in some kind of fog weighed down by unfinished early week tasks. It was funny to see some of the new British managers trying to dress down. It looked painful to the Americans who had invented casual Fridays.
“Hello Nigel,” said Lisa in her almost legitimate British accent.
“Hello Veronica,” Chris replied with a bit of a laugh. They had jokingly given themselves fake British names in case there were spies among them or something like that.
“What’s Tra-La-La going to come up with today?” exclaimed Lisa.
Tra-La-La, Christian name Terence Lardner, was the manager of local HR. Terry was a nice guy, like the others, had been around for a number of years in Sound Tech, but obviously was trying desperately to keep his job despite the joke it was slowly turning him into.
“Ohp – here we go.” Chris was reading from the latest email “Due to certain circumstances such as the impacts of first quarter geographical revenue inconsistencies as compared to budget, blah, blah, blah…we are requiring that all staff utilizes all of their accrued vacation time before the end of December. Anything unused will not be available as of January 1.”
“Hey Flo?” Lisa called out into the forest of file cabinets. “Can I take an eight week vacation starting like next week?”
“Yeah, as long as it lasts two weeks,” Flo said. Flo was the accounting manager. She had been with Sound Tech for about six years and before that, like Chris, had been with Ernst and Young, but in Ohio where she was from. She basically knew each person in Finance’s job backwards and forwards. Flo was only a year older than Chris, but yet was married with child and obviously fairly accomplished in career as well. She was a good boss and managed to keep Lisa in line, for the most part. The CFO and other management would sometimes ask Flo about Lisa’s productivity, but Flo always vouched for Chris and Lisa.
In the old days of Sound Tech it used to take the accounting team two weeks to close the books each month. PW wanted it done in five days and under Flo’s guidance the improvement was accomplished consistently. PW was insistent on a lot of changes and projects to align Sound Tech’s accounting with their own and somehow Flo was able to concentrate all of these demands into something almost palatable to Chris and Lisa. There was a lot of work, but they had become a really strong team. Chris was afraid that when he did leave that he may have been pulling the legs out from the whole operation. He had to continuously remind himself that he had to look out for his and Donna’s best wishes. He didn’t want to burn bridges, but he didn’t want to be over-fortifying them either.
The vacation announcement was not entirely surprising. Salary and bonus freeze is an easy way to save money. Then those changes slowly develop into a travel freeze. Finally vacation is the third major employee expense. It’s not even so much the expense, but actually the liability of having to accrue all of the employees’ vacation. By cleaning up the balance sheet it’s easier to meet loan covenants and bring in more investors.
Coming off a down year the previous year (as everyone had with the economy hurting), Product Wave was doing testing for version 5.2 of their VoiceScan software. VoiceScan was a voice recognition software that had applicability in a number of products from cell phones to heavy production machinery. While version 5.1 was at the end of the line in 2008, the company had hoped to make some inroads into Latin America in Quarter 4 only to find their patent had been ripped off by a Brazilian company. Lawyers were involved and it wasn’t looking good. Unfortunately, all of the facts of the pending cases could not be disclosed in the financial statements. When investors saw a marginal increase in overall sales from Q4 they were not impressed.
PW realized upon the purchase of Sound Tech eventually (probably sooner than later) a corporate simplification would have to be made to allow them to keep control and make consolidation of the reporting numbers streamlined for their accounting staff at headquarters. It was going to save a lot of costs when the transition was completed, but there were many headaches in trying to deal with these obstinate Americans. Unfortunately Lisa and the Team were not aware of how hard the management was fighting for their benefit because they were only hearing about the concessions being made and not some of the critical items being kept status quo.
“They always get us with this stuff on Fridays,” started Tim, as the dissonant squeak of chair legs grinding the linoleum kitchen floor hugged his words. He glanced quickly at his brown Doc Martens. Tim wore them every day not because he was excessively fond of the fading color. He just didn’t have any other fashion plan of attack like he used to. “I know Office Space was just a movie, but there’s a lot