My first foray in to "big" corporate DRAMA

Yeah, I don't update enough. If you're one of the three people reading this, my bad. My schedule blows right now, most nights I don't get home until after 9pm. After then eating some quickly thrown together dinner, I'm not really interested in writing when I can be watching The Wire or trying not to think about the fact that the first two games of this year's Yankee season have been less than good.

But, here we go with the writing again. I don't want the title to suggest that this was big drama, like a merger or something. I mean big among individuals, like my boss had to go talk to somebody on my behalf big. I still feel like this could make a good script for an episode of The Office. Here's how it all went down.

Not long after I started, a cork board was put up outside my boss's office. I heard a couple of people talking briefly about what it was for, but I didn't pay attention. That's not my deal. I go to work and do work. I'm friendly and I talk to people but I have no concern for office drama/gossip unless I'm forced to (quick bit of minor foreshadowing, I was forced to). Well then randomly a month or so ago I get called into a meeting with 2 other people in my department (for name purposes let's call them Dwight and Pam) and 2 team leads (my direct boss and another guy).

Turns out the purpose of the board is to illustrate our company's five Core Values. And the three of us are going to have to develop something to put on the board once every couple of months for each of said values.

This is the last kind of thing I ever want to do. Do companies really need these? How about one Core Value: do your job and we'll be cool to you, but if you don't you're fired. But I'm ready to suck it up and put a good face on things during the meeting. My boss, however, has no problem openly making fun of this thing and how he finds it completely ridiculous. I was doing my best not to laugh in the face of the other boss who seemed to love this thing, but I was in no way completely successful.

So now we start to have meetings among Dwight, Pam and I to discuss what we should do. I basically say nothing because this is not how my creativity works. I think of funny ways to tell dumb stories, I don't come up with a way to visually represent boundarylessness. We ended up coming up with a pretty good idea, and was all set to get it going, when we got sidetracked. DRAMA

As we were coming up with the idea, I realized we could use another co-worker's help because they were really good with photoshop. It was going to take what could be a decent looking thing and make it really good. Since the Core Value we were showing off was Valuing our People, wouldn't we be exemplifying that by taking advantage of another co-worker's skills to make our project better? Well, just when everything was set to go, the co-worker's boss said she couldn't help us out. For some reason, we couldn't have someone help us out with the execution.

Dwight (now you'll see why i picked that name) FLIPS. Out of nowhere he's ready to curse out his boss and possibly go over everyone's head to the boss of the whole building to raise hell. Really? I say just deal with it and move on, but I have to calm this kid down. If he goes nuts, I get involved and I don't want that to happen. So I calm him down (I think), and the work day continues.

At that point I pretty much checked out, I was starting to get busy and didn't have time to deal with something. A week or so later we find out that it was a big misunderstanding and we can use the co-worker to finish the project. Yay, we finalize everything and we're all set to go.

Then we get an e-mail from the team lead that thought the Core Values board was great. Apparently that person's boss asked about the board so he wanted to know if it could be done by the next day. I get ready to jump into action.

If there's one thing my lawyer days taught me, it's how to deal with semi-annoying requests from superiors to get something done by a deadline out of nowhere. It's simple. If you can get it done, (which we could) just say so, boss is happy. If you can't, you better have a good reason why, and make it clear you'll do everything you can to get it done. I immediately write the other 2 people and tell them I'll take care of it. Before I can finish the e-mail, Dwight writes back "I wasn't aware there was a deadline."

Dude, shut the f*ck up! Who gives a crap if there is, we can do it? Take the easy opportunity to make yourself look good. I then quickly write back as though the deadline e-mail was never sent letting the guy know that we all signed off on the finished product today and there was no reason why it couldn't be done by tomorrow. The boss even writes back "That's great. Thanks for the update."

Now, stupid Dwight loses his shit again and decides to tell off his boss in the middle of the work day. How this guy still has a job I don't know. He basically belittled his boss with tons of people around to hear. I figure, whatever, no skin off my teeth, I did what I needed to do. Next thing I know now Dwight is asking us to help him put stuff on the board. Why? Because the boss's response to his little temper tantrum was "ok, tomorrow is a problem, get something up today douchebag." (Note: I doubt he actually called him a douchebag, but it would have been deserved.)

Now I'm stuck in the middle of putting up something that looks like absolute garbage in my name because someone else is a moron. While all this is happening, Dwight is continuing to bitch, complaining about his boss out loud while several people (including my boss) continue to walk by. I basically stay out of it and just want to get back to my desk asap and get this over with. It gets done and I figure everything is fine until we can make it right tomorrow.

Then a little later my boss comes by. Here's the deal with my boss. For the most part, you'd never know that he's ex-Marine. But everyone once in a while, somebody (luckily so far not me) does or says something he doesn't like, and the Marine comes back out. He looks at me and just says "I'm going to talk to Dwight, he used to work for me and he needs to know he can't talk to my people that way." I tried to say it was no big deal, but there was no point. About an hour or so later, my boss comes back again "You shouldn't have anything to worry about." At this point, if Dwight was found headless in the parking lot, I wouldn't be surprised.

But he is in fact very much alive, even though he not only won't speak to me but pretty much won't look at me at this point. It appears that in a matter of two months I've made my first work based sort of enemy. Which should be fun, especially since I have to work with this guy directly on a every other month or so basis over the next year. Maybe working in an environment where hardly anyone gave a crap about you or any Core Values so long as you were willing to work 100 hour weeks and do whatever was necessary for the almighty client (i.e. a big law firm) had its positives.