So, Greg just can't keep from making sarcastic comments to me at work, despite the fact that he is no longer my boss. I was trying to show him an
up and coming application hacking tool...but as usual he had no appreciation for potential and started right in with quality sarcasm like "that is a
really great tool". I love the tone he uses when he says these things, he might as well say "I think you're a loser" at the end. Then once out of a hundred times he actually perceives the fact that I understand sarcasm and tries to make it up to me later with flattery like "We think you're a very valuable employee" - to which my response is stop giving me lip service and show some respect...but then historically we can't expect that to happen can we? Just the same, I'm at the point now where I don't give a damn about your respect.
I think that he will eventually come to regret his lack of candor in dealing with me as a peer (of course he is not really my
peer on many levels, but on the levels that he should act as a peer he seems to project an air of arrogance towards me). I am a very very very patient man, I have put up with more than my fair share of the
putdowns at this place. No more. I won't have them.
Greg, I hope your reading this. I would just like to say that while I respect your professional opinion on many levels and most of the time you are a nice enough person - I still think that for the most part you are a DICK on the job. Also, while your a great security professional, you made a really crappy manager because you lack any kind of duel perspective what-so-ever. I really resented it when you put me down in front of our clients - and you've done this far too many times. I agree that sometimes your putdowns have been justified but you should have had enough tact to be a "professional" in those situations. Professionals don't put their coworkers or employees down - no matter what - but then maybe you forgot all that lecturing you did on being a professional.... you and the rest of the Network Support group. Talk is cheap, few of you ever really backed up what you said. Sean Mullen was the exception, but you ran him off because of your lack of
RESPECT - think about it. All of you only saw Sean as a former St John employee (i.e. he didn't work at Harris, and there is an obvious double standard at TULMEL for all non-Harris people) and a former Desktop Tech, none of you ever really gave him the benefit of the doubt - you set him up for failure but refusing to fail he left out of frustration.
Although most the time at SJMC your putdowns have not been justified, while I'm ranting, I may as well say that I especially enjoyed it last year during the firewall upgrade when your idea of motivating me was to "give me shit" about not getting the upgrade done... despite the obvious increase in complexity of the process since you where the firewall administrator. For example, the release notes of the typical CP 4.1 update were 12 pages long, the release notes for NG were over one hundred pages long - but did you account for this? No. Instead you made comments to me and others, and the client about my inaptitude. When you undermine your employee or a coworker, you're really not doing yourself a favor in the long run; you're just making the company look bad despite your desire for such putdowns to act as a shield for the company. I guess your line of thinking goes "If I put him down to the customers when he makes a mistake, maybe they won't think the whole company is like him"... yeah, that's a great message to be sending out to your customers. Think about it from the customer's perspective - you're so trustworthy that you're putting down your coworkers and employees. If a
boss doesn't have confidence that their employees are doing good work - how can a customer expect to be confident in us as a company? The sick thing is, it isn't that the work I do is bad, just that you always perceived that it would be bad - or you always thought that it should be better (as if you were doing it). Forgetting, that you have 5 years experience on me, you wanted me to be as
good as you. Yeah, if I was a customer and you started putting down your people, I would get an uneasy feeling about doing business. But I wouldn't expect you to know that given your typical shortsightedness. By the way, you can take your shitty cyber-guard upgrade and roll-back plans, roll them up and shove them up your f@*!k'ng ass. I can't believe that you were able to fill two pages with that dribble that really only said that you were going to replace the firewalls and if you failed at that menial task that you would put the cyberguard back in place... I can't believe that you actually thought that this actually aided in your success.
I would like to add that your management shortcomings don't surprise me, because it seems to my analytical
perceptrons that most of TULMEL's upper management is as narrow minded and shallow as you are and this is probably why you "fit in" so well with them. You're a lifer Greg. TULMEL owns you. You know it, they know it, you're one of them. You'll probably never be anything else. You, like most of them, don't really seem to understand people or appreciate that employees are
helping you/them to make a living... when a company stops appreciating what each and every employee brings to the table and starts treating them only as assets, said company is in for a wake up call. People will put up with this treatment for short periods of time because they need the income, but in the long run most reasonable people will seek to
reconcile their self-image with the world around them and then you're f@4$ked because they have to leave to accomplish this - just like Sean Mullen did. TULMEL is full of bright people. It is high time Charlie starts running the company in a fashion that reflects this - instead of treating employees as unimportant droogs.
I can't believe that you and Nenad had the balls to ask me if I'm happy in my job today at lunch. Especially since you weren't really interested in what I had to say about it ( you couldn't have been given the way that you craftily [or not so craftily afterall] approached the subject)... you just asked to get a feel for my outlook so that you can go on plotting "your" strategies around your employees instead of with them... so let this journal entry help you on your quest, f#2!ker. Your attitude is exactly the cancer that is going to kill TULMEL eventually. You can't treat people the way you do and expect them to enjoy it. You can't treat
me in this fashion and expect
me to want to continue my employment at the company condoning this behavior. You give yourself away too easily. You are more transparent in your thought and subsequent actions than you realize that you are. I realize that you all know that I am "not a people-person", but you extended your judgments of my character too far. You see, I read people very well, better than you would bet on, it just happens to suit me not to let on to this... so I continue to encourage your projected reputation of me as less than average at judging the motives of others. You give yourself away in your disrespect to me - and you do it because you don't think I understand what you mean by your snide comments or your disgusted looks or you just plain don't respect me enough on a personal level to really give a damn. Here is a message for you - I don't react to those signals even when I recognize the meanings. In short, you underestimate me in some areas because I didn't live up to your expectations in other areas, while simultaneously lacking the understanding of why I stopped caring to live up to your expectations... I ceased caring about six months into my internship. When you beat a dog, you ruin it; when you (or the Network Support group in this case) continually and persistently verbally abused me as an intern, you ruined me as an employee. Bad move. So, you're probably wondering why I took the job if that was the case... the answer should be mostly obvious with one twist. One, I needed the money, two I needed the experience. Three (the twist), I wasn't entirely sure where my path in life lay. I've spent a great deal of effort working out this last detail, but we shall see how my plans for
MY life pan out. I can assure you that when you asked me "How long will you stay with TULMEL?" while I was negotiating a job (or shortly thereafter) that my answer was entirely honest and more accurate than you gave credit....then, you probably don't remember how I answered the question, but I do and I'll not repeat it for your benefit here.
Now you know that I'm
jaded. Good, it will make things easier for you in the future. Take a note here: if any of you think that I have forgotten the way that I was treated as an intern, you are wrong. I forget a great many things - in fact I'm typically quite absent minded (especially when it comes to work thank God, that's is while I'm still mostly sane) - but I have not forgot one putdown, one insult, one jeer or one snide comment made by you and any other at TULMEL or St. John. I haven't forget the week before I signed my offer letter when Charlie looked me dead in the eye and lied to me with a straight face.... he probably still thinks that I believed him - I didn't, it merely benefited me to pretend that I did. I knew that he would eventually regret this action of his... though not by my hand.
Next time you get the urge to do some strategic planning and you get that itch to know where I stand in the mix you should suppress asking me directly. You merely insult me further when you ask about my thoughts on such matters with no empathy.
A rant and a half.
