The year begins :p
First of all, a very happy New Year to all who read this page – all three of you :p My New Year has really started off nice – NOT! Yesterday being the first day of the New Year, my boss wants to have an executive committee meeting and I am a member of the executive committee (or the EXCO for short). The EXCO is basically a set of people who are supposed to be the top-level administrators in our company and all of us report directly to the managing director – who will be referred to as "the boss" from now onwards.
Of course, here I have to step back a bit and recount something that happened last year for it any of what will follow to make any sense. Last year, around the time I was trying to get to the US, the boss and I had a major row. He has this habit of trying to get people to do their work by intimidating them and while I normally simply ignore his tactics, he got to be be a bit obnoxious in his verbiage in front of others and I simply retorted back. So basically, we ended up screaming at each other back and forth in front of the whole office for a few minutes. I did apologize to him before I left for the US and he seemed to be OK at that time. On my return however, he calls me into his room and I realize that he’s been brooding about the whole thing and that he wasn’t happy with what happened. I was proven right because he tells me that because of what happened, that he’s losing his authority because he feels that anybody will think that they can scream at him now. But actually what it boiled down to was the fact that he was afraid that nobody would be afraid of him now since I showed that I wasn’t really scared of him or of him firing me. So I told him that if he wasn’t happy with what happened, he could fire me and that I would leave. Of course, he didn’t like that either since that would make him look like a petty, vindictive guy. So he basically told me to be careful and it seemed to end at that.
However, it looks as if it hasn’t ended there after all – did anybody think it would? :p He starts talking about performance reviews at the EXCO meeting yesterday and tells me that I have not been doing too well with the newspapers. So I asked him what was wrong. He says that the page that we are doing is not interesting enough. So I tell him that it is about the (now stopped) war and the peace process and it was hardly possible to jazz it up since that would trivialize the issue. To which he responds that he is more aware of the seriousness of the issue than I but that I’m not doing a good enough job. So I asked him what I could do to make it more interesting as he claims. Of course to that there was no answer. He did take away responsibility for the newspapers from me (leaving me with no defined job for the moment) and gave it to somebody else. The meeting ended there but it looks to me as if the writing’s on the wall since he was also talking about letting people go since the company has too many employees :p
I’m waiting for his next move to see what it will be but my friend Robin and I discussed it yesterday after the meeting (Robin is part of the EXCO too incidentally) and he wanted to know if I wanted an educated guess as to how soon I’ll get fired and I said that it would probably be within the week and Robin says maybe sooner :p So that’s where it stands at the moment. I’m not really worried about it except to wonder about the level of professionalism in the company when the boss acts like a little spoilt kid. Oh well … stay tuned for the next episode I guess :p
Sorry to hear that Fahim. I hope it doesn’t end up being as bad as it looks. Not a good way to start out the year 🙁 Hang in there.
Well, you could spice it up with Medical Miracles … the guy in Sri Lanka that was able to breast feed (!!!) his newborn baby is pretty damn spicey 😛