Happy birthday, Tom!

Nobody I work with has gotten any raise at all - not cost-of-living, nothing - since I got hired in August 2008. We had furloughs last year, and health insurance has gone up, so take-home pay is actually lower for most people. I find it incredibly demoralizing to get nothing at all (and they don't even try to fake us out with appreciation stuff).

Yeah, I think 3 was around the average here. But we use an incredibly complex process to decide these things, so that performance scores are determined, then department heads all meet to "recalibrate" scores across groups to even things out and account for particular managers scoring higher or lower, and then things like comp are determined based on then. On top of that, the acutal budgeted funds for comp and bonuses are deliberately targeted so that the greatest proportion of the pool is allocated to people at the top of the scale. So things end up pretty lopsided by design.

I find it incredibly demoralizing to get nothing at all (and they don't even try to fake us out with appreciation stuff).

That definitely sucks. Incredibly demotivating.

Yeah, ditto.

ION, the cat just overbalanced and fell off the counter. Now I'm getting the "what you looking at, punk?" bitchface from across the room.

ION, the cat just overbalanced and fell off the counter.

Cortez tried to jump on my dresser the other day and missed. Then he went and sat in the hallway and stared at the wall, licking his paws, all "I meant to do that, hmph."

Management theory is seriously screwed up these days -- it forgets that efficiency can be wrongly defined as "doing more with fewer people" especially when it really means "doing a shittier job" But since that's not nearly as noticeable as a short term result, they get away with it, and move on to new jobs when the company does worse.

More than a few times at Houghton Mifflin I pointed out that if I went along to a sales conference to work on the Notes applications, I could avoid numerous and expensive calls over the next year to our Help Desk with a few hours of hands-on preventive maintenance. (A lot of times I could just look at a screen in person and see immediately what was trouble.) But "there were no funds" to send me or anyone else from our department...

OK I may still be bitter about this going on five years later. Being the award-winning brass polisher on the Titanic does that to you.

Theodesia, I just vented yday in write way about what that looks like from the author end.

If I didn't already love my Rep (Capuano), I would defintely love him for this from Friday's e-update:

I don’t really know what to write about the bill that passed in the House this afternoon, H.R. 1255: The Government Shutdown Prevention Act. This bill proposes to “deem” H.R.1 enacted into law if communication on the budget is not received from the Senate by April 6th. H.R.1 is the budget bill passed by the House that contained $100 billion in cuts from the President’s FY 2011 budget. It has already been rejected by the Senate.

Not only is this bill a complete waste of floor time, it is also clearly unconstitutional. As I am sure you realize, the way the legislative process works is that a bill has to pass BOTH the House and the Senate and THEN be signed by the President before it is a law. I’m pretty sure they still teach that in elementary school. I voted NO. Shockingly, this unconstitutional bill passed in the House and the entire vote is recorded below