It surely began as a Good Idea™.
Some executive somewhere near the top of the food chain noticed that our offices are not very busy during the summer months. He noticed that the building was half empty with employees taking vacation and he couldn’t help but think about all the increased energy costs were were incurring cooling the building and paying the electric bill.
So he suggested we do something that our competition does during the summer: cut back on hours when our company is actually open. Closing the offices one day a week in the summertime would save us thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars! No air conditioning, no lights, no computers! It would more than make up the almost negligible loss of productivity. He had the numbers to support it. We could even pay the employees for the time off as a good will gesture and we’d still save truckloads of cash! It was a no-brainer!
Unfortunately, the Good Idea had to face people for whom “no brain” would be a few rungs up on the intellectual ladder. Like every Good Idea, it was doomed from the start.
You see, the Good Idea had to be brought to a Committee of Executives. Committees of Executives earn their six figure paychecks by beating Good Ideas to death with a stick. At first there was resistance to the idea. Some Executives hated it simply because they didn’t come up with it. Some Executives loved it because they needed to practice their backhand.
There were debates. There was cajoling. There was yelling. There were threats. And, finally, after the flurry of flying fur and feathers fluttered to the floor there sat the twisted, bastard child of the original Good Idea. The child was named Compromise.
And Compromise is always ugly in the corporate world.
The beautiful Good Idea of “closing on one day a week in the summer to save money in energy costs” was long dead. In it’s place was something horrific that I hope none of you ever have to face:
Our office is open every single day during the summer. But now half of our company employeess gets one Friday off, while the other half of the company gets the alternating Friday off. This goes on through the end of the summer, flip-flopping Fridays. But a second part of this plan requires that every department must be open every day during the summer, so each department only has half a staff on every Friday.
This also means that each Friday we only have 50% of the employees in the building. And, on almost every Friday, we have about half of those people who are supposed to be working really out on their own vacation days. That leaves our company with 25% of all its employees disbursed throughout the building.
And that leads us to the ugliness of Compromise: we cool and light our entire multifloored building for 25% of the people every single Friday. Productivity is actually right around zero because there’s not a single project that can be accomplished without the assistance of someone who has the Friday off.
The end result, of course, is some darn fine poker tournaments in the lunchroom, plenty of quiet time for reading and napping and three hour lunches… more than usual, I mean.
So I get every other Friday off work and during the Fridays where I do show up I get paid to do nothing for eight hours while my company burns truckloads of money keeping a large building open.
And you know, I think this plan is actually working. I feel like I’m conserving a lot of energy.
Now let me get back to sleep…
3 Responses to “Friday Flip-Flop Fiasco”
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Nat says:
Wow. Can I go work there? The idea of getting paid to do nothing (and actually having a day off once every x amount of weeks) sounds VERY appealing. hahaha
Only management gets paid to do nothing, where I work. And the select few butt-kissing stooges. I don’t fit in either category.
June 24th, 2006 at 1:16 pm -
Clare says:
Yeah, that is so TYPICAL of higher ups. What a disaster.
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thordora says:
You must be ISO 9001 certified! Boy, I loves me committees…