Remember last week's post about the Facebook incident at work? The woman who caused all that trouble, Helen Figgins-Crabbe (again, I'll reiterate that that's not her real name, because she's the kind of person that would either sue me for libel or for the profits off this blog (zero) just for mentioning her) got promoted today. Yep, we got an email just before lunch announcing that she and another woman (let's call her Sally Sue Smith, even though she doesn't seem all that litigious) got bumped up from Senior Content Specialist to Content Analyst. For perspective, I'm the same job title/level they were, and I have worked circles around both of them since about two days after I started. (This is not meant to be boastful. Everyone else has too. And if you knew how boring my job was, you'd know that's nothing to brag about.)
My company has a policy where they won't promote anyone who hasn't been in their current position for at least 12 months. I got promoted on the one-year anniversary of my hire date. As did about half the people who were hired that summer. Helen and Sally Sue, who are both in their mid-50s, I'll guess, got promoted to Senior Content Specialists after the wave of all of us younger generation, because my boss took pity on them and wanted to reward their loyalty. They are the ones who are always befuddled every time we have to implement a new procedure or install new software, etc. At least Sally Sue isn't annoying about it. She seems to try, it just takes her a while to pick up on certain things. Helen's the one who wanders the cube farm lamenting change and wondering what was wrong with the old system, on and on, ad infinitum. She needs hand-holding and reassurance on everything. Though I should give her some credit, because she wrote a nice email to my boss once after I wrote up some documentation to help her learn how to create a fillable PDF. That helped me get my promotion. So she did serve a purpose at least once.
Without giving too much away (again, apologies for being so secretive; it's not like we work on anything particularly confidential, I just don't want to get fired for blabbing about company business), my company designs and distributes forms and other documents for use in the educational world. For example, if a school district tracks a teacher's progress as they're being assessed/observed, they might use one of our products. (There are two other major suppliers in the U.S., and a handful of niche ones, so I'm not giving a ton away by saying that.) We also supply some types of standardized tests for elementary-age students. It's not exactly what I dreamed of doing when I was younger, but they were hiring English majors and no one else was, so you do the math.
We have main offices here and in Kansas City, and a small one in Atlanta. There were a couple of others, but they've been closed down over the past few years, as the corporation streamlines and optimizes. (If you love corporate lingo bingo, you should see the emails we get from the top brass.) Oh, we also have an office in Mumbai.
Every so often we'll have some "special guests" from the Mumbai office for a few weeks. They come here so we can train them on how to do our jobs. The official spin is, sending work to the Mumbai office frees us up to work on cool new projects. Which would be less laughable if I ever got an interesting project to work on. But you can walk around the office bitching and moaning (like Helen), or you can keep your head down and stay out of it. Usually it seems to pay off better to just get your stuff done and not draw any unnecessary attention, but maybe I'm going about it the wrong way if Helen and Sally Sue's promotions are anything to judge by.
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