Career clowns

If anyone wants to know what is wrong with corporate America, they could have tailed me yesterday and learned a great deal. First, since moving here I continue to make films as my first source of income and while that is starting to provide serious work, before everything began to click I took a job with a large corporation, doing some field work in the region.

The first thing I realized about working for big corporations, something I had been able to resist my entire career, was that there was never a sense any job needed to get done quickly. I have always worked with a deadline, as a journalist it would be to an hour - a story must be done and edited by 5PM. You get a deadline, you meet it. I also have had self imposed deadlines as a filmmaker, people pay me to finish a film, not talk about it. I have always taken a certain amount of pride in not only always meeting deadlines, but also communicating that my plan was to actually meet the agreed upon deadlines.

So, imagine my surprise when I was offered a serious job with a large corporation that would have some sort of deadlines, but a deadline that could never quite be communicated, not could the actual job be clearly stated. What made me feel more secure was that a West Coast trainer was going to fly in for two weeks for hands on, field training. I figure I could handle almost anything with hands on, field training. Heck, I am confident I could pilot a shuttle with two weeks of serious training.

In early August the "trainer" showed up, disheveled, unshaven, badly dressed and unprepared. When I say unprepared, I mean, no training manual, no field training plans and no serious attempt to train me to do anything of substance. We sat in my living that first day we met, he mumbled through a couple of hours of corporate jargon and he left. The next day I got more of the same and I made up some appointment and asked him to leave after two hours. His communication skills were just a little bit better developed than that of a caveman of adequate intelligence.

After that initial training, we did have a couple of chances of field training. Even though he was staying in a nearby hotel, we did not meet again until there was a field training opportunity. When we met at the job site, his slow movements and lack of any sort of ability to explain what we were doing convinced me that this two weeks of training would be wasted. Lucky for me, there was only one other call in the entire time he was here and that one overlapped with another job I had, so I actually showed up to watch him cleaning up. Fantastic.

He was gone and I began to get calls from corporate, or more honestly, emails from corporate reps. They would send me somewhere, often sending an address and contact number of a local client. At first I would show up expecting the client to know why I was there, but that soon proved to be a dumb move since not a single client has proven to know anything about a call that had sent me to their business. Again, bad communication from the top all the way to the bottom.

Yesterday was the day that finally proved to me that no only was the entire company set up to deal with idiots and meth addicts, but that the concept of showing up, fixing a problem and being done was completely foreign to them. I showed up on the site at 8AM, did some troubleshooting, spoke with a tech in Georgia, we found the problem, fixed it and by 10 I was done except for calling corporate, having them run a test on a computer and leaving. I did not leave until 1:30 in the afternoon. Spending more than 2 hours on hold at one point while some pointy headed corporate idiot ran tests, of maybe did not, because I was on hold and had not a clue as to what was actually going on.

This is the point. Bad communication, bad training, bad corporate practices and a complete disrespect to the concept of deadlines and getting in, getting a job complete and getting out. I was steamed at the waste of time, because in the end, after more than two hours on hold, nothing changed, all was well and I was home.

I have thought a lot about contacting the big corporate office. I wanted to offer to make a film for them for training, because their training now is not training, it is a waste of weeks. I wanted to professionally pitch a concept where a a film actually shows what a job is and how to get things done. While this sounds logical, my latest experience working with a corporation shows how little real communication gets accomplished, how little care is taken for real training and how little an employees time is valued.

Speaking of value, as of this date, I have no clue what I could actually be getting paid. Everytime I have talked to the people who hired me, they come up with the most amazing nonsense on how pay is set. I do not sense that they do this out of any reason to hide, I think they actually are not sure. That's right, I have been working for a company that can not, or will not, in plain english, tell me exactly what I can expect to be paid.

Any guesses on how long I will be working for this company?