Punkie's Online Diary
The Ongoing Saga of Punkie into the 21st Century

[Home Page]
[Go Straight to Blog Archives]
[Technical (Livejournal) Journal]
[Enable Frames]

[ Previous entry: "Work Weirdness - Sending data over jungle vine to big rock idol next to cave" ] [Main Index] [ Next entry: "Convention Pre-reg woes: the latecomers" ]

08/28/2003 Entry: "Random layoff story - ice cream"

My previous entry reminded me of a company I used to work for that had this odd habit of trying to soften the blow of bad meetings by serving a sundae cart. You would show up to a meeting with bad news, and there'd be a catered setup with 2-3 flavors of ice cream, toppings, and so on. After a few of these, it became quite disconcerting. The big one was the meeting where they said, "We've found a cheaper way to do what we do by moving your whole department to Jacksonville! So you can either quit, move to Florida, or stay and get laid off." That's not really how they said it, but their version took two hours with slides and stuff. After that, it was like ice cream = doom. You'd hear this for years with that company:

Phil: We had a meeting at the Hilton today.
Bill: Did... did they serve ice cream?
Phil: No, thank god. It was good news.

This caused a lot of confusion for new employees.

Powered By Greymatter


[ Home ] [ What's New ] [ About Me ] [ My Writings ] [ Web Links ] [ Post Office ]