B
biglou
Sometimes I can be a brutally honest, flaming dumbass.
Aparently, telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth may not be the smartest thing to do in all situations. Here's the short version:
Been getting pulled from my regularly scheduled engineering duties lately about every other day to work production because one of the companies in our building is, quite simply, shorthanded (even though they saw fit to lay off one of their six production workers a few weeks back. So why not replace an $8/hour guy with an engineer?). So I had to go and tack on one of those "Oh, by the way..." things on an Email to my boss asking what the deal was with working all this production lately and explaining that this is not why I took the job in the engineering dept., and that I wanted to be challenged more on a much more regular basis (Those were pretty much my exact words, BTW).
That was yesterday. This morning I got a royal ass-chewing the likes of which I hadn't received since bootcamp. The funny about some people is, they can't be disagreeable without being disrespectful and using foul language. Not that I am above any of that, but let's just say that the tirade coming from my boss wasn't the most intelligent of conversations. I felt that I had a pretty valid point, not wanting to do grunt work 50% of the time. So I stood there and tried to squeeze in a coherent thought where I thought possible, but Mr. Cranky wasn't having any of it. So I let him yell until he was finished, get it off his chest while I tried desperateely not to chuckle and say, "You can't seriously be upset with me not wanting to do minimum wage labor, can you?" Funny thing was, after he was through yelling, he says, "OK, lets talk about these 'widgets' you've been testing." Funny how a guy with 'no credibility' (explained later) is suddenly important enough to discuss part of one of our products that has been suffering a high number of failures in the field.
So now I find myself in the situation of defending my job (via Email, for some reason my boss likes to Email everything even though we are about 50 ft. apart in the same building). According to him, I have zero credibility and will have a long road ahead to gain back even a little of that. I'm thinking, "Whatever, you wanker". He wants to know why I belong in his engineering group with such a poor attitude. In actuallity, he inherited that group when our former boss left to work for a competitor. As per company policy, rather than replace the old boss, they just hand his responsibilities to someone who is already employed within the company (The current boss is a Vice Pres in charge of new product development for all four of the companies owned by our mother company). More work, less people. Makes economic sense. :silly:
So, again, I find myself tasked with defending my position, and I'm not so sure that I want to. Don't get me wrong, I like my job, and I make some very critical decisions every single day that (hopefully) prevent the company from any liabilities due to failures of our products (I'm the test engineer, and I also approve all new materials, do materials testing and structure and give the final okee-dokee to all custom requests).
I saw my initial Email kinda like this: "What's up with working all this production? How about some more challenging and intelligent work for me to tackle?"
Apparently, bossman saw it like this: "I'm above working production and I don't like your little company. Furthermore, I hate coming to work everyday, I hate the people I work with, and I have a poor attitude towards my job and my coworkers."
In hindsite, I probably should have kept quiet. Nothing like whacking the hornet's nest with the short stick, eh? I suppose my keeping my job relies on my stating that I really don't mind doing scrub work. I tend to get a little philisophical on issues like this, however. In my mind, I'm thinking, "I definitely won't bitch about it if telling you the truth angers you so much that you feel you have to threaten me with my job, I guess, but you can never truly force me to like doing it." Again, probably best to keep quiet on that.
So my Email reply was something to the effect of "I apologize for making you so angry, I was just asking for more challenging and rewarding work asignments. I had no right to second-guess your utilization of my resource. I enjoy my work, I enjoy coming to work each day and I have a vast amount of product knowledge that I feel is an asset to the company's day-to-day operations." Or something like that. And for the record, I am one of those employees who virtually never misses work for any reason other than vacation. I think I've missed a total of three days in the almost four years that I've worked here.
Fallout should begin again fresh tomorrow. I told him that I had sent a reply to his Email but he was on his way to a meeting and hadn't read it yet. Tomorrow should prove interesting, to say the least.
Stay tuned...
Aparently, telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth may not be the smartest thing to do in all situations. Here's the short version:
Been getting pulled from my regularly scheduled engineering duties lately about every other day to work production because one of the companies in our building is, quite simply, shorthanded (even though they saw fit to lay off one of their six production workers a few weeks back. So why not replace an $8/hour guy with an engineer?). So I had to go and tack on one of those "Oh, by the way..." things on an Email to my boss asking what the deal was with working all this production lately and explaining that this is not why I took the job in the engineering dept., and that I wanted to be challenged more on a much more regular basis (Those were pretty much my exact words, BTW).
That was yesterday. This morning I got a royal ass-chewing the likes of which I hadn't received since bootcamp. The funny about some people is, they can't be disagreeable without being disrespectful and using foul language. Not that I am above any of that, but let's just say that the tirade coming from my boss wasn't the most intelligent of conversations. I felt that I had a pretty valid point, not wanting to do grunt work 50% of the time. So I stood there and tried to squeeze in a coherent thought where I thought possible, but Mr. Cranky wasn't having any of it. So I let him yell until he was finished, get it off his chest while I tried desperateely not to chuckle and say, "You can't seriously be upset with me not wanting to do minimum wage labor, can you?" Funny thing was, after he was through yelling, he says, "OK, lets talk about these 'widgets' you've been testing." Funny how a guy with 'no credibility' (explained later) is suddenly important enough to discuss part of one of our products that has been suffering a high number of failures in the field.
So now I find myself in the situation of defending my job (via Email, for some reason my boss likes to Email everything even though we are about 50 ft. apart in the same building). According to him, I have zero credibility and will have a long road ahead to gain back even a little of that. I'm thinking, "Whatever, you wanker". He wants to know why I belong in his engineering group with such a poor attitude. In actuallity, he inherited that group when our former boss left to work for a competitor. As per company policy, rather than replace the old boss, they just hand his responsibilities to someone who is already employed within the company (The current boss is a Vice Pres in charge of new product development for all four of the companies owned by our mother company). More work, less people. Makes economic sense. :silly:
So, again, I find myself tasked with defending my position, and I'm not so sure that I want to. Don't get me wrong, I like my job, and I make some very critical decisions every single day that (hopefully) prevent the company from any liabilities due to failures of our products (I'm the test engineer, and I also approve all new materials, do materials testing and structure and give the final okee-dokee to all custom requests).
I saw my initial Email kinda like this: "What's up with working all this production? How about some more challenging and intelligent work for me to tackle?"
Apparently, bossman saw it like this: "I'm above working production and I don't like your little company. Furthermore, I hate coming to work everyday, I hate the people I work with, and I have a poor attitude towards my job and my coworkers."
In hindsite, I probably should have kept quiet. Nothing like whacking the hornet's nest with the short stick, eh? I suppose my keeping my job relies on my stating that I really don't mind doing scrub work. I tend to get a little philisophical on issues like this, however. In my mind, I'm thinking, "I definitely won't bitch about it if telling you the truth angers you so much that you feel you have to threaten me with my job, I guess, but you can never truly force me to like doing it." Again, probably best to keep quiet on that.
So my Email reply was something to the effect of "I apologize for making you so angry, I was just asking for more challenging and rewarding work asignments. I had no right to second-guess your utilization of my resource. I enjoy my work, I enjoy coming to work each day and I have a vast amount of product knowledge that I feel is an asset to the company's day-to-day operations." Or something like that. And for the record, I am one of those employees who virtually never misses work for any reason other than vacation. I think I've missed a total of three days in the almost four years that I've worked here.
Fallout should begin again fresh tomorrow. I told him that I had sent a reply to his Email but he was on his way to a meeting and hadn't read it yet. Tomorrow should prove interesting, to say the least.
Stay tuned...
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