Only in a large corporation

[Pictoric]

I was inspired to write this after reading some of the other posts in here. This will be about my last few months at the last large corporation that employed me(work for a small one now). Large in my book is over 1000 employees. Not really sure how long this will be but I promise it will be interesting.

This large corporation mentioned in the introduction is a large Canadian Telecom company whose competitors are Lucent and Cisco. I actually started working there in 1998 as a project lead for one of their business units. Reported to the CIO. The raise I received from moving to this large Canadian Telecom company was $20,000. I asked for another $20,000 raise a year later. Do you remember the Dot Bomb boom? I sure do. So at the time of my second raise I was still contracting for the CIO basically and making very good money. I was 22 when I started there and almost making 6 figures after one year. For all of you "kids", ok not really kids, but people just graduating, that must suck to be entering the job market now.

Ok, I started this email with the intent of writing about the last few months of my employement but decided to relive the good old days, so bear with me here. Sorry.

Anyways, the entire team was pretty much contractors and this Canadian Telecom company informed my boss that he had to either hire some of us or let us go. It is really hard to get rid of all of your key employees. Not touting myself it was just a fact. We were a small team that did a lot of work. Long story short at 23/24 they had to hire me on and offered me a 6 figure income. Different story now, normal income, normal company, but no complaints. Ok, on to the really interesting big corporation stuff with a decent story to boot.

A year and a half goes by and all of a sudden the dot bomb drops and this Canadian Telecom company starts to lay off its employees. This was actually after they struck a deal to outsource the entire IT departmant(~4000) employees to an outside vendor. Real smart, a huh. Neither here nor there and a topic for an entire other post. This company laid off about 65000 employees in 3 years.

Ok, my boss gets laid off, and our IT department got sucked into the mammoth corporate IT department(we were in a business unit before) all about the same time. My new boss, who is a woman(it matters you will see) was one of the best people managers I have ever worked for. At one time she had a team of about 400 people and was smart as hell. Anyways, I worked in a different state so I only saw her one time in person while I was in her group. I got married while I was working for her and took a 3 week vacation for my honeymoon. The honeymoon took place the end of November(I try to forget specific dates and years in regards to this), and I came back to work the 2nd week of December(I think 2001).

So my first day back, I've got a conference call at 8 am CST. I was managing a program with 3 projects and couldn't wait to find out what kind of crap was going on. I get on the conference call to be informed that my boss was in an accident over the weekend. Something was announced on the news but nobody could provide any specifics. Well, as it turns out and we all found out, my boss was killed over the weekend. Actually you have probably heard about this trial in the news which took place in North Carolina. Just to provide a hint, it is NOT the California Peterson trial.............

Anyways, look up the trial details if you want. I am not insensitive, but this is not the point of my email.

So, here I am, the person I was working for died, and I have no boss. I attended the funeral in NC whenever it was(1.5 weeks later or whenever) and with no boss. This Canadian company is STILL laying people off and I am told by a corporate VP that I am workign for him. I ask him for a meeting so we discuss priorities, projects, etc and it takes me about a month to get him on the phone(he was out of state too) which lasted about 10 minutes of him promising me he is workign out all the priorities of the group and what not. Another month goes by and I try to contact him and he won't return my calls. Anothe few weeks go by and I get another call from a different director telling me i was transferring into his department. Scheduled another meeting with him to go over languishing projects and priorities which was another month later. He kept cancelling our appointments(conference calls) and all of a sudden I am getting emails from another director in a different group. I ignored this guy because he was and idiot. Another month goes by and I get a call from HR telling me that the directory I was ignoring was trying to schedule my layoff meeting. I told the HR guy that I didn't work for him, and I had no idea why he was calling. The HR guy called me to lay me off which was fine and expected. He told me that he was sending my paperwork and my severence started on the day I received it. Well, he didn't send it. Another month goes by and he calls me and asks why I hadn't returned the signed paper work. Idiot. They had to add another month to my severence b/c of him.

Only in a large corporation can you go 4 or so months without a boss, get laid off, have an extra month added to severence, and make a very large exit bonus b/c nobody can track your vacation time they have to pay!

[Silverbug]

now why cant i get a job like that

[Pictoric]

Back in the day you could actually get a job on it.