It's for a Good Cause

Every now and then, the Shitshow has to take on some charitable cause to maintain its image. Sure, it’s a phony attempt to make the community think the faceless Shitshow has a heart but at least something good comes out of it. But the Shitshow likes to take a little more credit than they should. You see, while the Shitshow makes some tax deductible grants, they also like to pressure employees to donate their own hard earned money – so that the Shitshow can take credit for those contributions too.

Last month, there was a drive to raise money for Breast Cancer Awareness. It was essentially a T-shirt campaign, with all proceeds going to charity. Participation is usually pretty low because employees don’t like the fact that the Shitshow takes all the credit. So this year, Program Management decided to give the IPT Leads an incentive: whichever IPT Lead’s team bought the most shirts, that IPT Lead would be exempt from having to do his “monthly metrics report.” Now apparently the “monthly metrics report” is such a grueling task that each IPT got very motivated to get their team to buy as many of these shirts as they could. One IPT Lead was so desperate to win, that he decided to take drastic measures.

One morning, he sent a sneaky meeting notice to his entire team with the description “staffing” to be held at lunchtime. Now anyone that has worked in aerospace knows that if the word “staffing” ever comes up, it means there will be an announcement about an upcoming layoff. Needless to say, everyone was in full attendance at the meeting, eager to learn about the layoff.

When they got there, they were given the “good news” that there was no upcoming layoff. It was all a trick to ensure everyone showed up at the meeting – so the IPT Lead could encourage them to all buy T-shirts for charity. As you can imagine, people were pissed. The IPT Lead defended himself with the cliché phrase: “Oh c’mon. It’s all for a good cause”. But many engineers on the team really thought there was going to be a layoff. In fact, many of them sent out resumes the second they heard about the “staffing” meeting. They were at it all morning.

There were so many complaints to management about it that the IPT Lead was forced to send out an apology. He even decided to buy everyone in his team a T-shirt out of his own pocket. It probably saved him his job.

But he won the contest! I hope it was worth it.

Because management does dumb things like this, I throw rocks.