Jim Jacobs was a young engineer who had been working at the Shitshow for eight years. During this time, he had worked on all sorts of projects, got two Masters degrees in the process, and went on a rotation assignment. Yet despite all this, he never really moved up in the company. No matter what he did, he always seemed to end up back where he started. To add to the irony, he changed cubicle locations five times over the years, only to end up back in the original location. (Just goes to show you how useless these periodic "synergy moves" are)
Jim Jacobs also had the same flunktional manager since day one, who he affectionately nicknamed Billbert. Billbert was a stereotypical functional manager – he was broad-shouldered, stocky and tried hard to act like he was your buddy whenever you ran into him. The problem was he did absolutely nothing to help your career. But he was a great bullshitter and giver of false hope. Each year, he would tell Jim that he was "one of our top young guys" and would make an "excellent candidate for a leadership position someday." Of course, that day always seemed to be another year away.
As time went by, Jim began to notice that Billbert not only had no career plan for him, but at times didn't seem to remember who he even was. On a few occasions, Billbert passed him in the halls and called him "Jacob." But the icing on the cake came on hi birthday about a year ago. What happened on this day would forever prove whether Jim's career was on Billbert's radar at all.
That morning, Jim Jacobs came in with coffee in hand, sat down, and opened up his email. The first unopened message was a happy birthday email from Billbert. (Apparently, Billbert had read in some book that managers should remember their employees' birthdays.) Not being the most technologically savvy, Billbert had set up an Outlook Reminder and then just forwarded it to Jim. So the happy birthday email Jim received was actually a forwarded Outlook Reminder with an attachment in it titled "Jim Jacob's Birthday". But the absolutely best part of this story was that Billbert actually took the time to edit the message just before sending it – adding a short, personalized message: "Happy Birthday, Jacob!"
Jim quit shortly afterward and is currently working at a different company.
Because this story is absolutely true (only the names have been changed), I throw rocks.
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