Blog 4.0

Work has been getting me down a lot lately. Earlier in the year we got two new websites dumped in our laps, after the entire local staff that used to manage them until then was laid off. Our department manager, who'd been with the company for twenty years or so and was the heart and soul at the core of everything we did, also decided to leave the business. (Incidentally, that's the same guy whose departure I really dreaded in this post from over a year ago. And then it really did happen.) Since then our routine has seemingly turned into a constant stream of alternately being chided for not having enough sales on the three websites we're managing simultaneously (when a year ago we were a bigger team and only had one to look after) and being told that no, we cannot have any more resources or do more discounts or basically anything else that might actually help us achieve the growth they keep asking for. In-between I get emails from complete strangers working in other countri...

I haven't written about work since September . The short of it is that our new website went live and was... surprisingly functional, considering the tight deadline for its creation. That said, in the back-end things were less great: there were write-offs due to messed up orders, and our customer ratings started to plummet. We all figured that it would be the business's number one priority to get our house back in order, but no... Instead they immediately dumped another project on us, to help with the migration of another website that we weren't at all familiar with, for another country and in a language most of us don't even speak. Can't say that particularly enthused anyone - but okay, we figured they thought we'd done such a good job with our own website and wanted us to help these other guys now that we knew how to do it. Except - we never got to talk to said other guys aside from one or two people. We repeatedly asked about this, because how can we help whe...

While talking about World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary , I've been finding myself thinking back to my university years (since I was in my early twenties when I first started playing WoW), which is a time period I generally avoid thinking about. In many ways those years were good times - I made friends online who actually shared my nerdy interests for the first time, and I got to visit different countries across Europe because of that. I was also still living with my mother and generally pretty carefree in terms of everyday things I had to worry about. However, over all of that loomed the shadow of causing parental disappointment and being filled with existential dread. You see, I was the Austrian equivalent of a straight A student, always succeeding at everything in school without having to put too much effort in. Then I graduated from high school and life suddenly got complicated, because I was supposed to pursue a career, and one that required a university degree please, as...

Overheard our social media person at work trying to explain Gen Alpha slang to our brand person today. The latter, who is the older one, was entertainingly confused ("But what does Ohio mean?"), but what was really amusing to me was that I had heard pretty much all of the terms she was explaining before - which was weird in so far as I'm an elder Millenial and among the oldest people there (most team members are younger Millennials or older Gen Z). I guess it's something about my degree of online-ness? I'm not really sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like understanding what people are saying, even if they are using terms I wouldn't necessarily want to adopt myself, but on the other hand it kind of makes me feel like that "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids" meme .

Tomorrow is the big day, when the new website is supposed to go live. You'd think with the event being mere hours away, I'd be able to speak with more confidence, but well... Last I checked, payments were still not working correctly. Just a minor thing for an e-commerce business. At one point during the testing, literally only one guy could get his payments to go through. At least my colleagues still had a sense of humour about it. "All future sales will just have to go through him then." "You'd like to pay? Please hold while we connect you to George." I wonder what I'll wake up to tomorrow.

The big project is still targeting the 1st of October for launch. With less than a week to go and everybody scrambling like crazy, somebody up top decided that this was the perfect time to announce an internal reorganisation including a bunch of job cuts. I can only guess that this was driven by a desire to have all the redundant people gone by the end of the year (as I think most of them probably had a three-month notice period). I get to stay employed, but my little team of four will basically cease to exist, with two people's roles being made redundant and me and one other guy getting shunted off to somewhere else in the org chart. The talking points were about what great growth plans the company has for the coming years, what agile innovators we are, and what amazing new opportunities this will bring for all of us. I guess I should be grateful that I get to keep my job, but I just feel bad. I'm simply not good at this capitalism thing. All I want is to earn enough to get b...

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go. However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable. What was less und...

Processing my feelings about my co-worker Al's death has turned out to be somewhat strange. He started work at the company about two months before I did, so we worked together for the better part of ten years. However, we didn't work in the same department, and I never got to know him beyond work either. In fact, whenever we interacted it often struck me that we were polar opposites in many ways. He was outgoing, stylish, and apparently an absolute riot at parties, while I'm a mousy introvert who's not great at socialising. While our interactions were always friendly, I never really felt that we "vibed" - which is totally fine, by the way. When we got the news of his passing though, I cried. It was just an awful situation all around, plus my waterworks get going quite easily - you bet they were going to do their thing when something of this magnitude happens! I was sitting next to another co-worker who was pretty much best friends with Al and was naturally hit...

I had only been in the office for about ten minutes today when our manager asked me and everyone else who was already in to join him in the nearest meeting room. When a member of HR I came in, I remember thinking "wow, this must be important to actually have a member of HR physically present" - what I didn't expect, what none of us expected, was to be told that the head of another department we work with had passed away over the weekend. He was only 42 years old and perfectly healthy for all anyone knew; his wife just suddenly found him dead in his bed. They have a little daughter as well. It was shocking and upsetting to all of us. The colleague sitting next to me exclaimed "What? We just messaged each other on Friday about how we were going to see each other today!" before bursting into tears. I didn't know him that well personally, but he'd been in the company for as long as I have, so we'd effectively been working together for almost ten years. H...

A new meeting appears on my work calendar, called "short business announcement", hosted by the CEO and with everybody invited. These always make me uneasy, because while the CEO is a nice guy, big business announcements are rarely good news for the little people. They almost always bring change, and change often means redundancies. Then again, it really is a short meeting, only fifteen minutes. If it was something that big, it would be longer. I try to think of what else it could be. There's a certain contradiction in it being short (and therefore seemingly not that important) and yet it also requiring the CEO to speak to the whole business. Maybe someone important is leaving or changing roles and there'll be a little speech about it? Seems unlikely that it would be the CEO himself, announcing his own impending departure. My mind wanders to the next most important and senior person I can think of, our department manager, and I briefly recoil in horror at the thought o...

I work for a medium-sized company that is in turn owned by a global mega-corp that you're unlikely to have ever heard of. I joined them almost a decade ago when said medium-sized company was still a start-up still in the process of establishing itself, and my original role was as a customer service representative and German translator in an small office near me.  At some point they closed that office in favour of a London-based one, which introduced a lengthy commute to my day, which I absolutely loathed. In hindsight I'm not sure how I put up with it for as long as I did... though then the pandemic came and normalised working from home (luckily for me?!), meaning that I now only have to go to London twice a week at most. A couple of months ago we found out that our existing London office was once again closing down. With all the changes and acquisitions over the years, the business was now sitting on three different London offices, none of which were actually used to full capa...