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Accomplished?

Posted in Crazy Wisdom on Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 12:37 pm by flerly.

Another SSDD update about work…

Apparently yesterday was a bad day all around, as Mary tells me she literally told Mac to shut up complaining, then packed up all her stuff to take home… telling him she was going home to think about if the headache was worth ever coming back.

Of course, since she was in the office when we spoke this morning, she’s on the same page as I as to whether it’s worth it. This gig is practically on cruise control right now, and nobody can match the perks. It’s just the matter of Mac creating these road blocks for us that turn the whole job into drama — which is actually completely unrelated to customer problems.

In essence, the outcome of today’s discussion was this: Either Mac has placed this job as such a low priority in his life that he isn’t taking it serious enough to focus on — and thus causing all these problems with his “forgetfulness” and “brainfarts” or else he is developing a serious mental issue where he is actually no longer able to do this job due to forgetfulness and brainfarts that he doesn’t even acknowledge that he is having. We are both witnesses, though, to his very clear mental breakdown. I’d like to think these are the actions of a distracted person, whose mind is on other priorities, but if — as he insists — it isn’t, then we are truly worried about him.

Today she is going to confront him to literally account for his time spent on the job. What does he do all day, every day. Have him account for how long it takes him to do things, and have him explain how he could not recognize one of our own websites. In essense, she wants to test his capacity.

If she decides this is just “slacker Mac”, then she plans to tell him how he’s lost the credibility we assumed he had from years of selling this product, and put him back in training. Which means, next week, he will give US his spiel to explain the product or else he won’t be doing any traveling to see customers until he learns a spiel we (I, likely) will write for him.

Of course, if he finds all that degrading, as I imagine he might, he can quit. She actually mentioned how even on cruise control it that if he wasn’t holding his weight, we shouldn’t be paying him a salary — and how else that money could be allocated for us to just take up a bit of slack.

Honestly, Mac is a “nice” guy, likable if you meet him, outgoing, personable, full of “funny stories” and ready to talk to anybody. And, well, he’s been with us from the get go, so it’s like we’re a weird disfunctional family. It is hard to just let him go when you’re really more concerned with why he’s gotten so bad at a job he’s done for so long. It’s sad to say, “We’re not getting any younger” but it is true and these kinds of screwups without any acknowledgement by him that he’s doing it are the most disturbing to us.

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2 Comments

  1. scienceiscool has made a Comment

    wow. that’s a lot more action than i ever would have expected the company to take. Mary is the boss or another coworker?

    October 8, 2008 @ 2:25 pm

  2. flerly has made a Comment

    she is essentially the boss. She has to okay all her decisions with Lloyd — who is essentially the financier only — but her word is generally go.

    Actually our talk had me wondering about how employers deal with people having poor job performance due to medical issues like dementia. Seems like that would be a tricky area when you start talking about firing people…

    I dunno. Yeah, I was happy with our discussion, so we’ll see what happens when she confronts him today. I likely won’t know anything until our next in person meeting next Tuesday — when I see whether he is there or not. She’s pretty much cut him off from contacting me at all about anything for now.

    October 8, 2008 @ 2:33 pm

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