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Corporate BS
I knew today was going to be "one of those days". There was a meeting called for the afternoon to "discuss" the amalgamation of two pagers (and the responsibilities of each) into one. I carry one of those pagers for 2 weeks of every month. I get paid pretty well to do so. We get paid just to carry it and then if we are called for support, depending on the length of the call will get additional overtime pay. The payout is dependent on your hourly wage. The more you make the more pager money you get. The disciplines that each pager supports are related but by no means the same. Cost to the company is about 20 dollars a month, or so I'm told. We do not get called very often, but when we do, it is of a critical nature most times. The system is about to die or some application is so slow there is no point in using it. You know, like Windows sometimes.
Anyway, the bright lights above me have been told to cut costs by reducing pagers. Great! On paper that's a big savings.
However, consider a few things: 1. We are a multinational company making double digit BILLION dollar profits.
2. One level above my manager is fully equipped with pager, blackberry, laptop, and cell phone at company cost.
3. Our reputation is top notch with respect to mean time to recovery (MTR) in failure situations because we know our shizzle!
4. The likelihood of having the correct person on call that will know the subject matter well enough to fix the problem has now been reduced from better than 50% to about 20% (based on a 1 in 5 chance of having the correct person on call for the subject matter.
5. The very first time we are called and the actions required to fix the problem take too long, or the person just doesn't know what they "should" know, there will be damage to us as a department and company.
6. Our specialized discipline has been demeaned by management believing that it can be done by "anyone" with a little background.
7. On a personal level, the one week a month missed of oncall money is about a $150
hit in the pocketbook per month.($1800 a year after taxes!)
Of course, I am looked at as being stubborn and a non-team player because I can't support the decision. If we are supposed to be about the customer, why would we take away something the customer deems as one of our biggest assets; specialized knowledge? My team lead wants us to "support" and "be on board" with the decision. I can't. But I will cooperate because it is being mandated. Someone will get a "gold star" for cutting costs but just wait how loud the gold star kids will be yelling when the customer is reaming them up and down for poor MTR and we face a financial penalty for having a longer outage than we otherwise would have if they had just left what already works alone. Management (at all levels) have no spines!!!!
It's been about 6 hours since this meeting and I'm still ticked, but not nearly as much as I was before. During my drive home I played things back in my head many times over. I got more pissed. Then I got in the door and my girls greet me with a hearty "DADDY!!" and hug. Suddenly, it all matters just a little less. Why do we do all this? For the ones we love the most.
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