The Internal Job Application

Oh, you really hate working for a big fascist corporation.

Here's the thing: a few days ago, you applied for a different position internally at Castcom. It's a low-level administrative position that involves marketing research and creating promotion materials using desktop publishing and presentation software, and "additional duties as assigned." You are perfect for the position, and the position is in Minnetonka instead of St. Paul, so the daily commute would be so much better. Plus, the hours are the same as Sweetie's hours, so you could actually see her for more than a few hours a week.

You have every qualification the position requires. In fact, you are probably overqualified, but then you're waaaaaaay overqualified for your current position in technical support.

So, what's the problem?

Well, like every giant fascist corporation, Castcom has many policies regarding applying for a different position within the company. One of these policies is that your current supervisor must approve of the transfer to the new position, and this has to be done BEFORE they'll accept your application.

So, today, you tactfully approached your supervisor--let's call him David Douchebag--with your completed internal transfer form, and he hemmed and hawed for awhile. Then he asked why you thought you were qualified for the position. You explained your qualifications to him, and then explained why you thought you'd be a good fit for the new position and why you would enjoy the position. Then David Douchebag hemmed and hawed some more before asking you for a copy of the job description, which you immediately handed him along with a copy of your resume, because you just had a feeling he'd ask for it.

Then...get this...David Douchebag says, "I need to do more research on this. I'll get back to you about it." So, you politely point out to David Douchebag that the window for applying for this position ends tomorrow (open positions are only open to internal apps for 7 days, and you found out about the position 3 days ago, and David Douchebag has been out of the office until today). David Douchebag says, "Yeah, I'll get back to you tomorrow."

Now, understand that you start work at 2 PM, and you still need approval from the HR department (another policy) before your internal application can officially be accepted, and HR closes it's office door at five sharp every day (actually, they close the door at five 'til five, because they are buddyfuckers). So, you now only have a three-hour window to get all this taken care of. However, David Douchebag certainly isn't going to give you time off the tech-support phone to get HR's approval, so you'll have to do it during your break at 4:00, which actually leaves only a 15-minute window to get the transfer approved. But you'll have to take a piss as well, so that leaves a ten-minute window.

What a crock of shit.

What would David Douchebag need to research other than a reason to not approve your transfer? Because, at the moment, he hasn't got one. It's a pretty cut and dried thing. Just sign the goddamn form.

The real purpose behind the "transfer approval by the current supervisor" policy is not literally about "approval." If it were, no one at a corporation would actually get to transfer except incompetent employees that supervisors WANT to get rid of. The "approval of transfer" is meant to be a way of keeping your current supervisor apprised of your plan to transfer, and his signature on this form proves that you kept him up to date with your internal job search.

However, like a typical corporate middle manager, David Douchebag loves to let his surfs know that he is in control, and now he's going to let your internal transfer form set on his desk until he's good and ready to give it back to you. Just signing the damn form and letting you get on with the rest of your corporate-red-tape-life would have just been too fucking easy for the both of you.

Why all the flack? Seriously, why?

All you're asking for is a chance to interview for the position. If you're not qualified (and YOU ARE qualified), or if someone else is better qualified, shouldn't that be the HIRING supervisor's say, and not the say of someone biased who has a reason NOT to let you apply for a different position?

With all this red tape, it's actually easier for you to search for a position OUTSIDE of Castcom, which is exactly what's going to happen if David Douchebag doesn't approve your transfer.

Also, if he doesn't approve your transfer, he better have conjured up a very, very good bullshit reason not to. Otherwise shit is going to hit the fan at work. You're not afraid to call bullshit on this douchebag and take the issue to HIS supervisor. As if that will do any good [eyes rolling], but you will do it, and you will be noisy about the whole business of questioning David Douchebag's competence in front of your peers.

The Fuck the Customer Equation

You worked for eight hours tonight, and, really, you helped no one. You took over 30 calls today, and you helped no one.

For some reason, people seem to think that tech support is where one calls to get technical help. Well, that couldn't be further from the truth.

You work for a ridiculously large communications company. Let's call that company Castcom. Castcom is the largest provider of cable television, and the second-largest provider of internet access in the United States, and they didn't become a large fascist douchebag corporation by HELPING people.

Please. Get real.

Castcom cares about one thing, and one thing only: $$$$$$$

Are you surprised?

Well, you shouldn't be. Anyone who believes that any corporation really gives a rat's ass about customer satisfaction is naive and/or stupid. No one cares about a customer's satisfaction except the customer, and there's a constant equation going through all those middle management brains that goes something like this:

profit - (time+wages+overhead) = fuck the customer

The first question out of your lead's mouth before he takes a "supe call" is: "What services do they have?" In other words, if you ain't buyin' shit, you ain't gettin' his ear. If a customer only has "basic cable" and/or "economy" internet service...forget it. Seriously. They'll wait on hold...for...a...while. They may as well not even ask for a supe. They're lucky they got YOU.

(Notice how when a customer asks for a "supervisor" that they don't actually get a supervisor. That's hilarious. There will be more on that in a later blog.)

Despite the fact that you are very good at technical support (that isn't saying much, but still), and CastCom maxed out their salary grade to pull you from the company you worked for previously, they don't really want you doing technical support. What they really want you to do is sell stuff to the people calling in for technical support. In fact, CastCom could care less whether you help anyone or not with their technical issues. But you'd better sell some shit to them regardless.

It's completely ass-backwards. Uhg! And, boy, do the customers resent it.

Actually, here's the real sad fact: many of the morons who call technical support WILL BUY SOMETHING even if the other services they already have aren't working. It's ridiculous and horrifying. You always thought people were stupid, but this proves it.

You had a guy screaming at you the other day because his father had just come home from the hospital and the CastCom phone service wasn't working in his father's house. Let's call that guy Dusty Douchebag.

Dusty Douchebag had already called in twice, and some other unlucky rep had already scheduled a tech visit to fix the phone service within the federally-mandated 24-hour window, but Dusty Douchebag wasn't done screaming yet, and you were the lucky recipient.

Dusty Douchebag screams, "What the fuck is he supposed to do if he needs to call the hospital or 911?"

You said, "I'm sorry, sir, but the best we can do is a service call tomorrow afternoon."

Dusty Douchebag then went into a flurry of nasty expletives directed at you in a personal manner, and then demanded a technician be sent out immediately to fix his father's phone. So, to get Dusty Douchebag off the phone, you used a tactic you like to call "hard sell to the asshole."

"Hard selling to the asshole" is basically aggressively offering to sell them services in response to anything they say until they get annoyed enough to hang up the phone. This kills two birds with one stone: it gets the asshole off the phone, and if the call gets QA'ed, you actually don't get docked for being a prick to the customer...YOU GET A BETTER SCORE for attempting to upsell them.

Yeah, wow. Cool, huh? Feel free to use that at your own tech support and/or customer service job.

So, to Dusty Douchebag you said, "I can't get a technician out there until tomorrow, but you wouldn't believe the deal I can get your father on digital television. Just $39.99 for 6 months!"

What does Dusty Douchebag do? He actually paused...AND CONSIDERED THE OFFER. He suddenly stopped yelling...there was a long silence...and then he said, "Well, I'd like that, but I can't decide right now. I have too much other stuff to think about." Seriously. No exaggeration.

The Take A Fucking Class

You are sick of talking to idiots day after day after day, but it's what you get paid for, so you have to keep doing it, because you have bills to pay.

Uhg.

Some of the douchebags you're forced to deal with on a daily basis make you really wonder how the human race has survived. There are actually people out there who don't know that a computer can be used for more than surfing the internet. You hear this statement at least once a day: "My internet is broken." After a few questions, you soon discover that the douchebag's COMPUTER IS BROKEN.

If you are an ignorant douchebag who doesn't have basic computer skills and/or knows zilch about the internet...then TAKE A FUCKING CLASS, for fucks sake! Don't call tech support to bitch and whine about how this or that isn't working when you clearly have no clue what you're doing.

And don't expect tech support to train you over the phone, because people with real issues are waiting in queue. Or, worse yet, don't fuck something up by dicking around with it and then call tech support afterwords and pretend that "it just stopped working." Yeah, I guess evil gremlins fucked up your machine's networking while you were sleeping. Guess what, douchebag...we know you're lying, so just admit you were dicking with it and it'll get fixed much faster, because otherwise troubleshooting the issue is just shooting in the dark. Also, while we're at it, we know you got that virus while you were surfing for porn.

Here is a conversation that you have with douchebags almost daily at work:

Tech Support Guy: Please open a browser and pull up google.com.

Customer: Open a what?

Tech Support Guy: A browser. Please open a browser.

Customer: What's a browser?

Tech Support Guy: It's software you use to surf the internet like Internet Explorer, or Firefox, or Safari.

Customer: Do you mean open the internet?

Tech Support Guy: Sigh. Yes, please open "the internet."

Customer: The internet won't open.

Tech Support Guy: Do you mean the browser won't open, or that google won't pull up IN the browser?

Customer: When I open the internet...nothing happens.

Tech Support Guy: So, you're saying that when you click on the icon that opens your browser...absolutely nothing happens.

Customer: Yeah, nothing happens when I open the internet.

Tech Support Guy: So, tell me what you see on the monitor right now.

Customer: Nothing.

Tech Support Guy: Surely you must see SOMETHING.

Customer: It says, "search page cannot be found."

The Road Rage

There was an incident yesterday, so today you've decided to take 35W to Diamond Lake Road in order to get to the gym. It's faster that way, so you should probably go that way anyway.

You usually take Lyndale. It's usually scenic and relaxing. You like to look at the houses that line the street, especially down toward Tangletown where they become beautiful two-story structures with ornate windows and brick chimneys and balconies and peaked roofs and carriage houses and etc.

However, Lyndale Avenue has an issue. Most of the time it's a two-way thoroughfare that has one lane going in each direction with plenty of room for parking on each side. Seems simple, right?

Well, here's the complication: Twice a day, during the morning and evening rush hours, Lyndale Ave becomes a no-parking zone, and the parking lanes are then used for the overflowing traffic.

Ordinarily, the fact that any street in Minneapolis becoming a four-lane rush-hour raceway for douchebags is not an issue for you, because you do not drive during rush hour. You've scheduled your entire existence in the Twin Cities around that premise.

But here's where the complication gets even hairier: During the non-rush-hour times, douchebags seem to think that they can use the parking lane as a passing lane. This turns your nice, relaxing drive to the gym each day into a Mad Max movie.

The street is always peppered with parked vehicles, so douchebags are constantly weaving in and out and cutting other drivers off, which is stupid, because the douchebags who do the most weaving and speeding are always caught at the next stoplight just like the drivers who choose not to speed and weave.

So, being the douchebag you are...yesterday, you got caught up in the douchebaggery of it all:

A douchebag in a green Ford Taurus careened up behind you and then attempted to pass. In response, you stepped on the gas. You thought this was pretty funny until you got to the next red stoplight where you had to sidle up next to a gargantuan purple Chevy Suburban (why do so many douchebags in Minnesota drive purple vehicles? Is it a Viking thing?) in order to keep the green Taurus from doing the same. We'll the douchebag in the purple Suburban took that as a challenge and gunned it when the light turned green.

Now, here's the thing: You have a fast car: Nissan SE-R Spec-V. It doesn't look like a sports car, and that's part of the reason you love it, because it's so unassuming, but it has a 175-horse-power 2.5-liter engine, with a six-speed manual transmission, which goes 0 to 60 in 7 seconds.

Anyway, you passed the Suburban like it was sitting still. This, I guess, emasculated the driver of the heavy-ass, gas-guzzling, Detroit-steel monstrosity, so at the next stoplight, he proceeded to not only pull out in front of you at the next intersection to block you in, but then he jumped out of the Suburban and started yelling profanities and flipping you off at the same time.

This would have been extremely hilarious except that he was standing in the middle of a busy intersection blocking traffic and putting himself in a serious mortal-idiot-squashed-by-automobile predicament, and you really don't like seeing people die right in front of you.

Also, although you doubt he recognized you, you know this particular douchebag. He works at the NAPA store down the street, and you occasionally buy auto parts there.

So, the outlook on your karma portfolio is way the fuck down this quarter, and you're certain the cosmos will cash it in any time now. Uhg.

And now you take the interstate, where drivers expect to be passed, and cut off, and raced, and etc. And it's not scenic AT ALL.

The Douchebag Who Shovels At the Butt-Crack of Dawn

You're awake at 5:30 AM, because the idiot across the street is shoveling his front walk.

"SCRAPE! SCRAPE! SCRAPE-SCRAPE! scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!"

What a fucking asshole.

Is their no fucking common courtesy any longer? He must really be one bored son-of-a-bitch if he's up before the ass-crack of dawn scraping cement. Or maybe he's just that fucking anal. Or maybe he's one of those righteous, flag-waving, my-way-or-the-highway douchebag fucks who thinks everyone should wake up at 5:30 AM and do manual labour.

Sheesh! Douchebags everywhere!

He's lucky this is probably the last snowfall of the year, or they'd be removing that shovel from his colon.

The After-Work Routine

You come home and you open a beer. You eat the leftover pizza in the fridge. You eat it cold, because nuking it would take effort. Then you open another beer.

You watch syndicated episodes of old sitcoms. King of Queens, Just Shoot Me, That 70's Show, King of the Hill, etc.

Your girlfriend's cat rubs against your leg and yowls. You tell the cat to shutup because your girlfriend is downstairs asleep, and the cat's yowling tends to wake her up, and she has to get up in a few hours to go to her job.

You should be looking for a new job. A job that gets you home before midnight. A job that doesn't involve driving in the Twin Cities' shitty traffic twice a day.

Minnesota nice? Whatever. These people drive like serious fucking douchebags.

You're tired. The sitcoms shut down your brain. And, soon, the beer will knock you out

Time to brush your teeth and then pass out.