Small companies, Small brains
It’s pretty obvious that you’re going to come up against a fair few morons when working in PR, Marketing etc . However, I can generally handle the PR bitches ok. It’s the people at the top that you’ve got to watch out for. Let me take you back through some highlights of moronery in my professional career.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Wavy Lines~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My first job was in a Family-run online gift retailer. Some highlights of that position included

- Being given an official warning for asking how we were going to get paid over Christmas

Let me elaborate on that a little.

We were all gathered to the customer services area one afternoon and told, with the air of someone giving a great gift, that we were to work longer days and weekends to cope with the increase in customer service calls over Christmas. No matter what your job, you were to do customer services. Not only that, but (if the company can afford it) we’d get Christmas bonuses to pay for it!

The rest of my colleagues seemed a bit too slow to put the pieces of this statement together. They basically wanted us to...

Work longer hours which meant driving in the snow/ice in the dark – each day was a bit of a death-defying adventure – 45 mins journey each way turned into an hour and a half some days.

Give up our weekends – the only Christmas shopping days left.

Give up our normal tasks to take on full time customer service.

All this and they couldn’t promise to pay us for it!

I thought I must have missed something. I asked a couple of colleagues over lunch who generally didn’t know/hadn’t asked and were just going to go with the flow (morons).

Turns out my boss was eavesdropping and when I arrived the next morning, I was pulled into a full disciplinary meeting because I had asked about how I was to be paid for my work.

- When a family member couldn’t be arsed to do his job, I had to do it for him with no extra pay while he still received his pay check.

I was given the excuse “what can I do, it’s family?”

My next job – in a small, yet international, design company run by a handful of exquisitely pretentious morons – was roughly the same.

It took them 8 months from my start date to provide me with suitable equipment to do my job. I had to bring it in from home. This included computer, software, camera etc.

9 months after my start date they let me go. Never mind the fact that I’d made them over 40k over those 9 months (they only paid me 18), dedicated hours of my life out of work hours, used my own equipment came in every day - no sick days - and did my job well.

It’s true I’m still bitter about it, it only happened in January. I’ve learned some valuable lessons about small companies now. Mainly to avoid them like the plague as they’re all run by incapable idiots who think they can get away with anything.
(Katzilla Follow Me! @Kat_Zilla (I don't promise funnehs), Mon 7 Mar 2011, 12:37, Reply)