Matching Tracksuits

An email message I sent to Chhavi yesterday:

I just experienced one of the most disturbing, disgusting experiences of my life—today, heads are literally rolling at DLI. The board of directors had their big meeting Monday, and the rumor circulating since then has been that it didn’t go well. Today, the truth of that rumor sort of hit full force—nine people got fired.

As part of a prime directive from the board of directors, DLI is streamlining and a lot of projects got killed. Including religion. So Steve got the axe, as did Jenn. Kiki got fired, two graphical designers, a project manager, a two product managers (including Jenn), and a content developer or two. Ten percent laid off. So it’s like a funeral around here today. Nobody is going to accomplish anything whatsoever. In fact, Kevin came by and told me that he realized as much and that I could just go home if I wanted to. I think I might in the early afternoon, though I don’t know what the hell I’ll do. He also explained to me that even he had no say in this. He was given a list of two names from his department and told to fire them.

Anyway, we’re all going out to lunch today and mourn, and probably bitch about the situation and how it was handled.

So that’s the big event of the week. We at DLI can’t go too long without some kind of shit hitting the fan, and I guess this was the biggest load yet. The complete list of people who got fired:

1. Steve
2. Jen
3. Lisa
4. Lisa R
5. Kiki
6. Anna
7. Marie (the receptionist)
8. Dave (graphic designer)
9. Chuck (graphic designer)

All this happened around 10:00 yesterday morning. By lunchtime, everyone had cleared out and the depression level was just enormous. Kevin came over as asked me how I was, and told me that if I was not in good working order mentally that I could just go home. I hung around, though, but I took a two-and-a-half hour lunch break with Armando, Ann P, and Marlon. Afterwards I went back to DLI and worked a little on the macros I’m creating for the XML tagging effort, and that was about the end of my day.

How were the decisions made? Apparently, even the lower levels of upper management didn’t even have a say in the issue. Both Kevin and Tom Flynn said that they were given a Post-It note with two names on it.

On first thought it seemed that Kevin was fairly upset about it, but it doesn’t seem to jive with his past actions. Look at how he fired Carl—get your ass out, basically. And the same thing with Alan. Perhaps I’m being too cynical. At the same time, if I buy the story, perhaps I’m being too naïve.

Firing Kiki was a particularly stupid move. We’ve basically dismembered this big mess we call a website, and now we’re in the process of figure out how to put it all back together. And who’s the only person who really had an idea how these things went together? Who could answer the question, “If I make this change in the file structure, how will it affect the links?” Who in our company basically played the biggest role in creating the current website? Kiki—the one who’s now fired. Isn’t that great?

The interesting thing about the firings is the gender break-down: 66% women. Both of the product managers who were fired were women. Who stayed? White men. How many women work at the company now? A handful. How many non-white women? One—Kyoungwa. Lots of eye candy for Layne.¹

Patricia summed it up perfectly: this is our first last gasp. And last gasp it is—we are so fucked. Basically, the religion project is dead—meaning Jacob Neusner once again will be told, “The project has been canceled.” A curmudgeon like Neusner is not someone you want on your bad side; he is not someone you want dismissing your product, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Here’s something, as Adam would say, that is even juicier: there is a large history conference next week where DLI will be presenting. John Monfesanni is planning to repudiate publicly his authorship of the last third of Western Civ I. He is basically going to say, “These people say this textbook is by me. The last third, in fact, was written by someone else.” He might as well say, “These people are liars.” We are so fucked.

1 Two amusing exchanges concerning Layne: Anna Socrates was terribly upset about the whole thing — the only person to show emotion there — and she sort of shrugged it off toward the end by saying, “He’s just a fucking gay porn director.” And at some point earlier, Allan Levitan said something about not being ordered around by that “short porn producer.”

Yesterday I went out for Vietnamese with Marlon, Armando, Mitch¹, Beth, and Niki, and of course we ended up talking about work, specifically management. Niki told us about the advisory board meeting on Saturday that she had to record and relayed her lunchtime experience with us. She was apparently sitting near Kevin, Tom Fynn², and Sam Mayo³ and overheard a significant portion of Kevin’s conversation with them. Apparently he was criticizing the project managers, saying they didn’t know how to manage projects, didn’t know how to use MS Project properly, and so on. This got Mitch quite upset and he said that Kevin was an asshole. It’s amusing—Mitch is so quiet in his speech and mannerisms, but he’s quite ideologically ferocious about certain things.

Armando at one point said that he felt upper management in our company was pathetic. I can’t remember all the words he used, but he provided a long list of adjectives, including arrogant, malicious, and others. He said that most of upper management had no business being in management, especially Bob, who’s an academic by training. He also said that Bob was the source of a lot of this new attitude from upper management.

At one point I mentioned that if Rob Fuller were still with DLI, he would have left by now because of the implementation of MS Project. Armando said, “Oh, and if not he would have left after Monday’s meeting.” He added, “He never put up with any crap, and I admired him for that.” It was strange because all I was getting at was Rob’s techno-phobia. I honestly never thought of Rob as being admirable in that way. I found him to be a bit of a pain in the ass a lot of the time, and helpless-by-choice when it comes to anything computer related.

I worked until 7:30 last night, then stayed another hour eating dinner and messing around on the web. That’s over twelve hours spent in front of a computer. Twelve hours on my ass, in front of a computer. Of course there was an hour-and-a-half lunch break (essentially that long—I hate going out to lunch in a big group because it always takes so damn long), so I guess I only worked nine and a half hours. As if I’m going to admit to that, though. I take long lunches (i.e., more than twenty minutes) so seldom that it’s a moot point as far as I’m concerned. The point is, though, that I spent half a day sitting in front of a computer, doing nothing but writing shit like, “If not rs_something.bof then.” Such nonsense. I hate my job sometimes.

1 I don’t think I’ve mentioned him. He’s the new project manager for religion.

2 A new guy hired as something of a macro-level design consultant for modules

3 From Real Time Enterprises, the company that for a mere $30,000 evaluated our procedures and methods and found them rather lacking — which I would assume is a big motivation behind the Big Dig