Regular readers of my blog must have noticed that I avoid writing about my job and the company that I work for. Besides a close circle of friends I guess not many readers know where I work. My reason is simple: I firmly believe that one should keep their work an private live separate to avoid all kinds of irritating situations.
Well, I guess this blog is going to be the first exception to my own rule, because sometimes work influences ones private life in such a way that keeping things separate becomes pretty damn hard. Or you might call it just what it is: frustration.
So far I think I must have mentioned that I work as a project manager for a pre-media company in Amsterdam. Specifically I work in the department that develops online solutions for graphical environments like online image storage and such. We also develop traditional websites and such.
We are a bit of an odd department because we operate in a different way (project based services) then the rest of the company (more product oriented). Quite frankly: our own bosses do not really understand that well what it is we do and why we do it. They do have a hint of an idea that what we do is important for the future though.
The same applies to our salesmen. They come from a very traditional pre-media environment, and most of them have no affinity whatsoever with what we do. So they are basically incapable of selling our services. Instead they focus on what they know.
Off course over the years tension between them and our directors grew because of the constant struggle we are in to survive. Also we went through 4 restructuring operations in three years. Each time people got laid off and that really had a bad impact on the company. This summer the group that our company was part of, was on the verge of bankruptcy. A very stressful time for everyone. We barely survived and everyone is feeling the impact of this.
To get to the point of this blog: this past week the manager of our department suddenly resigned. When I say ‘suddenly’ I’m not quite honest, because we did see it coming for a while. He became more frustrated as the months passed by, and he also mentioned he actually was unhappy with the way things were going at the office.
Soon thereafter I started to get hearing all kinds of rumors through the proverbial ‘grapevine’ that his days were numbered. Off course I ignored such rumors thinking it would not get that far. Nevertheless: this Thursday he came up to me and told me in fact that he resigned. Immediately.
Now, I must confess that a lot of times I did not agree with the way he was running the show. But the truth is that he was a buffer between us and the rest of the idiots in charge. And now he is gone, God knows what will happen to our department. Especially since we have another company in out group that basically is in the same line of work as us.
I guess it gives new meaning to the saying: ‘Be careful what you wish for’.