The rise of the incompetents

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.

The Facebook incident

Hello again, everyone. Okay, Drew pointed something out from my post the other day. He said it was a cheap trick to mention this big Facebook episode and then not explain it. So today I’m going to explain, for the first time, why, exactly, I quit Facebook. And, no, it has nothing to do with them stealing all our data. Though that probably should have been a good enough reason on its own, the more I read about it.

No, the real reason was all about something that happened at work. And I’m going to change names here, and it probably won’t even help, because if one of my fine colleagues somehow finds this blog, they’ll more than likely rehash it all again just because they feed on drama. But, whatever; life’s full of risks, right? I could get shit on by a seagull just walking to the bus stop, but I can't just stay in my apartment all day.

What happened was my boss started this name game thing on the white board in the alcove off the kitchenette. She does these things that are supposed to be motivational team builders, but two-thirds of them devolve into sniping and negativity. She should have learned before now that most of my co-workers just like to bitch about stuff. If you offered everyone there a 10 percent raise with the stipulation they could never complain about anything ever again, they’d rather take the 1.7 percent raise we all got last spring and maintain the right to whinge nonstop. Anyway, the name game thing was just meant to be fun and spark some creative thinking. She kicked it off with Pete Moss and Sandy Beach, and other people added their own. There were a few decent ones, like Rick O’Shea and Noah Fence. Then we worked our way down to the tier C stuff, like Sue Mee and June Bugg.