Job Update

Last night, a few minutes before quitting time, I asked my manager if the November 30th date was firm. I told him that I’m looking for other jobs and need to give them a starting date. He told me that he really didn’t know.

Apparently, the situation is this: My manager isn’t the one trying to hire on the cheap. The company has decided on budget cuts company-wide and is looking very carefully at all new hires. They don’t know if they’re going to keep my current job as a contractor-only basis, hire someone for it, change the job description yet again and try for something different, or, well, whatever.

Meantime, my manager says, his supervisor and very few others really get the web, so the big guns don’t think that my job is all that critical or necessary, and, in fact, don’t understand how valuable my manager is, or what he is trying to do. In a nutshell, he is trying to bring the entire company intranet into one look-and-feel, one style, and one set way of doing things. It’s what you need to have on an intranet. One of my jobs was to survey individual intranet sites. I went through 174 sites and saw for myself what lack of standards and practices has done. Just because you can get someone in your department to learn Microsoft Front Page and put up internet pages doesn’t mean you should be doing it. There’s one site that would have been a great candidate for the old “Worst Site of the Day” internet site. I have signed confidentiality agreements, so I can’t really say much about it, but suffice to say that it has scrolling messages, horrid wallpaper, and an animated email gif.

If the higher-ups can’t grasp that uniformity is necessary in a company intranet, someone ought to slap them upside the head. An intranet is a marvelous tool. When I first started contracting, I studied the company history and benefits while keeping an eye on the job postings site. My favorite hit off the home page: The cafeteria menu. It lets me know whether or not to bring my lunch on certain days.

Something as minor as a week’s cafeteria menu is incredibly useful. A well-run company intranet can make it so that members of a department could work from anywhere in the world. I can’t believe that the higher-ups don’t get that.

In any case. The good news is, I don’t think I’m going to lose my contracting job any time soon, after all. And since it’s a really tough thing to get hired at the end of the fiscal year, it will be nice to keep getting my paycheck while job hunting. After I explained to my manager that the reason I was coming in so late these days was because I’m doing job-related work at home in the morning, he said he didn’t mind if I also searched from work. He’s a good guy, but I wish he’d been a little more communicative with me a month ago. It would have saved me a lot of anguish.

In the meantime, yes, I’m still looking for work. Here are my bonafides. Email is meryl – at – yourish dot com.