I ♥ consulting companies...

I really do. I wish I had placed bets on how quickly the consultants at Iron Mountain would start making their suggestions for lay offs. If I had though, I would have lost. I had stated a few months ago that I gave it to sometime in January through March that they would lay people off... Well, as of today, there were approximately 20 people let go this morning, all thanks to the 'data' collected by the assholes that are known as DBA (DeWolff Boberg Associates). There's even a blog about the way they handle their own employees in ways of pay and benefits and such. Read about it here.

Basically, as we were told by the VP of Finance, his CEO or whatever the hell his position is, and our HR rep, this was a decision based off the data collection that has been going on over the past few months (i.e. our daily work logs where we track every minute of our day, right down to how often we take pee breaks), and figured out how many man-hours were needed in order to properly operate. This led to management choosing a certain number of employees to be let go. I know there were eight people in receivables and four in payables, and God knows how many between collections, contracts, and accounting. I say it is a crock of shit. They said it was 'not based off economic reasons and was not instituted to get a better bottom line'. I call bullshit on this.

Every quarterly meeting the company holds is all about the bottom line and what we can do to make it better. This was their way of making it better. Instead of looking closer at the EXORBITANT spending some district offices spend on unnecessary things like monthly cookouts for the office, or baseball tickets that may or may not be being used for client meetings, they just give people their walking papers. "Here's your severance, based off your tenure. If the company does well at year-end you'll get your bonus in March. Good luck finding another job! Security will see you out and we'll ship your shit to you later". Oh, and this was my favorite that allegedly offered to my manager: "Well, your team is not making their numbers, so it must be your fault. You have the option now to take a demotion and become a supervisor or leave". Never mind the fact that we don't get enough mail some days to even come CLOSE to hitting our goals. It has truly become a fabulous place to work.

And in my department (payables for those who don't know), we will be taking on all the workload of our Canada office in 30 days. That's work handled now by 3 people in Canada, and we're not getting additional headcount to make up for it - so the rest of us will be absorbing it. Awesome. All so we can reach our magic number every day. Well, I'm done venting now, just had to get that out.

Those who were let go today, in order of firing: Lynda (supervisor), Lorraine (rep), Trish (file clerk) and Laura (rep). I will miss them all...now there are four less people to suffer through DBA being there. I'm beginning to think they're the lucky ones.