The Christmas Carol Phone call

Dear Bloggers,


Unfortunately I am getting unemployed again and I really start to think that it is a fetish to bosses to lay off staff just before or during Christmas. As this is not the first time that it happens and yes I can handle it, but some of my fellow drivers can’t. One of them ran straight up to the office and told them that he would leave straight away, another driver said that he will leave just before Christmas. Hmmm.......these are hard times to keep a job, as soon as the temps office called alarmbells started ringing and the applying machine was started up again. As Scrooge was on the television I twisted this into a hard feelings Christmas Story. Sit down by the fireplace and read and weep.

In a phone call from the temps office that I work for on Tuesday, the Christmas Spirit of the Past from the company had announced the plans to lay me off by the first of Januari. F**cking great but I am the choosen one together with the Ghost of Christmas Present along with his entire Department of Concurrent Events. This restructuring will result in the reduction of the busdrivers the ones that made some mistakes are chucked out.

Despite being able to provide instantaneous hi-def visualizations of events happening simultaneously anywhere around the world, the Ghost of Christmas Present’s capabilities have been largely superseded by the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, making his offerings redundant and too expensive to maintain.

Spirit reminded he will still retain the services of the Ghosts of Christmas Future and Past, along with their entire staffs. He announced that that the remaining departments will continue to provide a valuable function in the Christmas Spirit’s operations by continuing to leverage the blissful memories of Christmases of long ago as well as demonstrate the pain and despair that will occur if the target doesn’t reform his ways.

Average Boss
“Nostalgia and dread have always been what ends up redeeming the scrooges anyway,” The temps office Spirit said on the call.

These organizational changes were necessary to reduce costs and recover from three straight holiday seasons of stagnant growth in Spirit’s mission to restore hope to humanity and bring together estranged family members.

The Ghost of Christmas Present never saw the layoffs coming.

The Christmas Spirit expects to reduce operating expenses by a unknown percentage and is confident he will still be able to meet his business objectives of turning grouches, grinches and scrooges into tolerable timetable for the traveling by bus human beings.

A look into the future

 

The life-like imagery and special effects produced by the three Ghosts have always looked impressive but was expensive, forcing Spirit to do a full cost benefits analysis for each department. Unfortunately for the Ghost of Christmas Present, Spirit’s review made the outcome all too clear.

The Christmas Spirit’s analysis confirmed his suspicions that the Ghost of Christmas Present was too expensive to keep on the payroll and was not nearly as effective as Past and Future in making holiday grouches reconsider their anti-social ways.

“With mixed emotions, we regret to announce that the Ghost of Christmas Present has to be seeking for opportunities outside the company,” said Spirit. “He built a strong foundation in allowing us to see how our target accounts were ruining the lives of their family or demoralizing their employees.”

Spirit says that if his account managers need to know what was going on in some house across town,”now, we can just check their Facebook status updates or read their tweets.”

The Spirit of Christmas says it simply does not make sense to carry the expense of a six-figure executive salary when these capabilities can be provided at little to no cost. He then demonstrated on the webcast what social network applications can do by revealing a Facebook post about one of his targeted accounts.







  

” Spirit said. “It really is a beautiful thing.”

Additionally, a Facebook status update can reveal how holiday-impaired grouches can negatively affect the quality of life of their employees during the Christmas season. He showed this screenshot as evidence.

Spirit said that prior to the announcement, the Ghosts had visited him in his bedroom, each over the course of three nights to plead their case.

“The Ghost of Christmas Present really disappointed me and didn’t show me very much,” Spirit said. “All I saw were other people sleeping. Although I now have an interesting story about our director to tell at this year’s holiday party.”

He could have become a good man

 Spirit revealed that the Ghost of Christmas Past showed him as a young upstart corporate director and how much joy he experienced in restoring hope and faith in Christmas, saying “I was reminded of how much I love what we do, how we make a difference in people’s lives, and how hot that one girl from accounting was.”

“Christmas Future had a great presentation,” Spirit explained to the hotshots and the blokes from the provence of Friesland. “Once he showed me that the decision to drop Christmas Present and make some changes in our tax liabilities and investing in new systems will give us a double digit growth over the next five years,. . .well that sealed it.”

The Ghost of Christmas Present was understandably distraught with the news that his lifelong career had recently come to an end, saying “I only wish I had seen this coming.”

What happened to the Merry days of Christmas

Because his only skill is quickly being replaced by another driver after the first of Januari, the Ghost of Christmas Present is worried about what will come next, especially considering that his former colleague Christmas Future kept giving him knowing glances of pity as he left the building.

When reached for comment, the Ghost of Christmas Present still maintained that his services are invaluable.

“You won’t get that on a ‘what are you doing now’ status update,” Present said.

Have a better Christmas than me.

The Old Sailor,



driving an empty bus

Dear Bloggers,

This morning I had an epiphany about a difference in style between the two major jobs I’ve held. One style was driving an empty bus and the other was my time on board. That the busses are empty has to do with the summer holidays anyway this can be prtetty boring as I was used to work hard and long days. I am going to examine both as anecdotes from my perspective and try to avoid grandiose analysis.


The Empty Bus

So, I start the job and the first thing the company does is hand me the bus and give some instructions how to run it. Actually, they leave it to me and fully trust me with the material. However, once on the bus driving, I am pretty much on my own. I have a destination to reach that has been vaguely described on a scribbled piece of laminated paper. The directions are unclear and not all of them have been there before. They keep changing the directions as there are roadworks and it makes me wander if I will learn the right directions this way. But I get to drive. That is fun.

Everywhere it is empty

Every now and then, I pick somebody from the bus stop up, they make changes to my daily life as I have found someone to talk to. They do a lot of empty rides in the summertime, and that is such a shame as they have good offers you pay single fare for a return ticket. But I get to drive. That’s usually fun.

All in all, I am asked to develop my skills as a driver and with very little cooperation or directions I am improving. I am left on my own to make almost all the decisions. Even though I have weekly meetings with my mentor, I am not really given much feedback on whether I’m going the right way. He’s not a developer, he is like me just another driver so he doesn’t really know enough about what I do at the moment to give me useful feedback. My quarterly reviews aren’t very cooperative or helpful, they are more about the manager wishing that I would drive faster and make fewer mistakes (mutually exclusive goals when you think about it) so I will cost less money.

loads of space today

I nearly get into a wreck a couple times, but there’s no one on the bus to help me out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an excellent driver. I’m still learning, but some help should help things go faster in process, you’d think. The city of Groningen is not that easy to drive in with her narrow streets and sharp corners. Usually, though, my directions are so clear and well written down so they become difficult to follow that I am directed to get into wrecks as I need to do to much reading. This is not actually all that fun as time goes on.

The Ship

I know that there is no way back there and some journey’s could be boring. They sail around in circles from A to B and the other way round. On the other side of the water the doors pop open and an absurd number of hilarious characters hop out of the ship. This job is not quite like this. It’s actually more like a really crowded ferry in the summer and a ghost ship in some months of the winter, like the trip I took the other day with my wife and my two daughters there was space enough on the ship lthough it did not feel empty as you always met someone on your way. But now, imagine, that all of these people have a stake in where the ship goes and have a slightly role and different idea about how to go about getting there. Now, we’ve got a good analogy.

my last ship and loads of memories

The manager’s seat was next to mine and she gets in and out of the desk whenever she feels the need or when I ask her to. She’s a busy woman: lots of crew to help as some of them have trouble getting it, even some simple changes can make them run to her office. Usually, she gets in right before we dock which is a busy period together with the secretary we answer most of the queries and make the announcements over the public address system. We are carefully explaining things at those guests and point or sometimes even turn them into the right direction. Directly after docking we have to find drivers that did not show as they overslept or got lost. On the cardeck beneath me sits an officer whose job it is to navigate and discharge the cardecks to get them ready for the next run. He tells me by radio the license plate numbers in Nato alphabet and gives those instructions pretty regularly. Beside him there are the passengers that are waiting for the airbridge and have loads of quetions about what to expect and where to find the bus to the city. That’s annoying, but still fun.

my ''old'' working place

I get to work. As I mentioned, sometimes the job is heavy as I need to get ready for the next flow of passengers. Not many hours are left so let’s get started, visitors show up and like to talk to some of the officers and engineers who have their hand on the wheel and help push the pedals for me. This is pretty fun too, unlike the bus though, this actually gives us a lot more control. We seem to be getting places in a much more controlled way, though we do have to control our speed much more carefully. It might take us longer, but the sailing is fun along the way.

The old sailor in a new uniform as a bus driver

Unfortunately there is no chance to return to the ship and driving the bus is a lot of fun too. But a few more passengers would absolutely be a pleasure even a grumpy one would be fine. But what can I do it is summer holiday for most of us, that is why I got the job. That’s a bummer in some ways, not as much fun. I like control. And a busy day. Overall, this is more fun.

So far, I prefer the ship to the empty bus. It’s less bipolar and more slow, steady, and directed.
Unfortunenatly there is no point of return as my body cannot handle it anymore and busdriver is a nice job again when the schools will start again in a few weeks.