My Old Blog

Yesterday one of my favorite people at work got fired. He wasn’t great at his job maybe, but he wasn’t terrible either. Besides the particulars of his work, he was a pleasure to be around and always willing to help out if you needed. I figure that counts for something.

But he got fired anyway, and out of the blue as he tells it. He said my boss cried when she had the meeting, which isn’t surprising since she is a girl/woman, but crying doesn’t make it any more heartless to send a hard worker packing.

Firing affects my morale. It makes me more apprehensive about my job. I’m sure others are thinking the same.

They said things like, “He left to pursue other opportunities,” or “He felt his best talents weren’t being utilitzed.” That is just garbage.

And while we are on topic of corpra-speak, do you know how many times a day someone “touches base” with me? I feel a little violated. I used to try to “touchbase” with girls at bars and it usually got me a slap in the face.

And keeping with the baseball theme, it seems people are always “knocking it out”. “Sure, I’ll knock that issue right out and we’ll touchbase about it in the afternoon.” I never was very good at baseball. It is a silly sport where people stand around most of the time and there is very little action. Actually, I guess it does sort of resemble work…

Yesterday at the weekly status meeting I caught myself saying that the issue was in “in my court”. “Yeah, I think the ball is in my court on that one. I’ll be finishing up my initial analysis today (meaning I haven’t even looked at it yet) and I’ll update the status memo before we touchbase again.” See….I prefer the tennis analogy since I am much better at that than I am at baseball.

Of course I actually like Basketball best, but I never really do an overwhelming job at anything so I haven’t had an opportunity to make a “slamdunk” on a particular issue yet. I might be a bit closer to “dropping the ball.”

Why all the sports analogies anyway? Everyone sits in front of a computer all day. The most excercise we get is walking to the bathroom.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2004 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Stories/Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.