Stupid Decisions Part I...

Last week, I came to work and performed my regular morning routine as I have done for the six years we've been in this building. Listen to v-mail, fire up PC and Log on, go make coffee, read e-mail, read blogs, read news, start work. Takes about 20 minutes.

Unfortunately, I also discovered for the third time that the brain trust of our newly merged company has made a command decision that directly effects my life. The first, the decision to close my center by the end of the year. The second, to charge us more for our benefits and reduce our coverage, and third, to now prohibit the running of streaming video on company computers. The first two I can understand as critical to many things financial and have fully accepted, but this last one I gotta ask:

What the fuck? We own HUGE fiber networks with shit tons of spare capacity, and you don't want us watching fat cat video's on CNN?

Don't get me wrong, our pre-merger company was slowly becoming a bloated behemoth of bureaucracy before the merge, but I have been with them from the very beginning when we were four months from bankruptcy, when there were less than a thousand employees on the payroll. It's been a great ride. One of the many things that has kept me here for so long is that our former company defied the industry experts by consciously NOT becoming one of THEM. THEM are the historical wireline companies in which all you need to know about your job is available to you in a big binder when you come to work on your first day. Forget about doing things differently or trying to make improvements, you’re to do exactly what the binder instructs. All hail the great binder!!! Our former CEO, having made a name as chairman of one of THEM prior to coming to us, drilled it into our heads: “Do NOT become one of them”.

Well, one of THEM bought us. Our former CEO has stayed on, and we’d hoped that the spin given to us following the merge announcement, that THEM were interested in how we defied the odds and became a real competitor and Wall Street darling in less than ten years, had some truth in it. We tenured legacy employees had been optimistic up until January or so, but with this kind of shit happening to us more and more frequently, the writing seems to be on the wall and it is becoming a THEM company slowly but surely. That, my friends, sucks.

UPDATE: Just got back from lunch with a supplier and one of my employees commented that they've restricted access to Ebay. Just tried to access my account and she was right. Incredible...