Remember what I was saying, just yesterday? How after my new coworker accepted then suddenly unaccepted that job, that things couldn't possibly get more...befuddled and potentially bad? I was so wrong. Silly, naive little me...
Today during the "transition" meeting with my division, where we were busy eviscerating the bloated carcass of my almost five year career downstairs to be parceled out to various support staff and promptly mangled and devoured, the boss got called away very suddenly. An emergency meeting involving the president of the company had been announced earlier in the day, which was strange, because of the very hushed up secretive nature of this particular meeting, which was in direct opposition to the way things normally operated when she'd pay us one of her (blessedly) infrequent visits. They were usually photo-ops, and involved the press. So already I could sense that something out of the ordinary was going down. When the boss returned from his jaunt over to wherever he'd been called to, he called the supervisors out of the meeting, leaving me to go over some details with the staff. Nothing was said when they all came back and the meeting was pretty much over, although there was some whispered conversation that I didn't quite catch on to at that point.
Fast forward to a little later in the morning. A series of official emails get sent out on behalf of the president that say the VP of my branch has been "reassigned", effective the first week of January, AND they've already chosen her replacement - all signs point to this being a permanant placement, not a stop-gap measure of appointing a temporary VP in place until a search could be undertaken. This has been a long time coming, so it shouldn't entirely be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. I've heard rumors to this effect for months now. And, if the word working its way down the grape vine is at all true, this is only the beginning. They let the ax fall at the top of the hill...I have no doubts that this may be in preparation for them to clear-cut all the way to the bottom, if that's what it takes to stop the bad press. I saw a lot of shell shocked faces on the administrative floor this afternoon. I saw a few surreptitious smiles and knowing looks as well, which is to be expected from those who may serve to gain in this changing tide. Now the only question is...who's next?
My husband decided he wanted steak for dinner tonight, so we drove around for a bit looking for a resturant that wasn't too packed with last minute holiday shoppers and ended up at the fancy joint up the street that offers the free steak on your birthday, since they didn't look busy. I should have taken that as a sign. It took our waitress over ten minutes to acknowledge us and take our drink order. We noticed that she had a table that was taking a lot of her attention, so we gave the benefit of the doubt and chalked up her slow service to the other table being needy jerks. We got our appetizer and bread, but our salads took a little longer than I thought bits of lettuce and green olive sitting in an oily pool of cheap dressing should take. Then, we waited for our entrees. And we waited. And waited some more. Eventually, we got a manager to come to our table an explain why, over an hour after we'd stepped foot in the restaurant, we didn't have our steaks in front of us and couldn't find our waitress. He tried to give us some cock-and-bull about how the entrees were put in thirty minutes after drink and appetizer orders, at which point he caught on to the fact that we weren't buying it, and offered to check on the progress of our dinner. Our plates were brought right out less than a minute later (delivered by a different member of the wait staff, so what the hell our waitress was doing I just can't begin to imagine)...with room temperature food sitting on them! I mean, the kids chicken tenders should be so fresh out of the frying oil that you burn your fingers on them. These were soggy and greasy, and barely warm. Our steaks were cooled, and I think the plates had been under warming lamps because the butter for my baked potato was all melty - and not from the heat of the potato, because it was also about room temperature. I was ticked because we'd been sitting there for nearly an hour and a half waiting for steaks that cost upwards of twenty dollars apiece, and our waitress had obviously let them sit there. We expressed our unhappiness to the manager, especially because we'd originally been planning on doing some shopping after dinner and hadn't planned on taking that long, and also because our food was pretty much ruined. The service just sucked. The manager was nice about it and removed the chicken tenders from the bill (which even then came to over fifty dollars) and then came back and gave us vouchers for free steaks for our next visit. When the waitress brought the check it was messed up and she acted really confused, so we had to waste even more time getting the bill fixed, and by the time we walked out the door we'd been there for
two freaking hours!! So, they'll be really lucky if there even *is* a
next time. And probably only because I had vouchers for free steak...
