Stupid Cost-Cutting Tricks: You Are Not Appreciated
Your stupid corporate cost-cutting stories (and photo, above) are getting worse better and better! Today's cuts: plants, scanners, entire offices, and all appreciation of employees, period:
Every year, each dept. of our company would have an "Employee Appreciation Lunch" to give something back to the employees that help our company thrive. Just yesterday, we received a "company-all" email:
All-
While the staff appreciation lunches we enacted a few years ago are very nice and something each of us enjoyed doing-they are not necessary. Hence, I am officially cutting all staff appreciation this year because of the spending freeze.
Lucky us. Thank you."
The CEO always signs off his emails with "Lucky us for getting to do this with our lives," or just "Lucky us." I found that particularly comical given the context of this email. Lucky us for not being necessary to appreciate.
Oh, and the day after this email went out, said CEO began his 3 week vacation in the Bahamas.
Thankless rat!
When I was at the Wall Street Journal Online in 2000/01, Dow Jones decided to cut out the plant service at the Journal. HR sent a memo that the company would no longer be paying for someone to come in and water the plants, so employees could either take over responsibility for the plants near them or take the plants home.
A bunch of people ended up taking the plants home and it wasn't till a few weeks later that word trickled down that the paper hadn't owned the plants and had to reimburse the company for all the ones that had disappeared.
Thieving ingrates!
I work in a small design agency down here in South Jersey. We struggled through all of 2008, so the recent economic downturn really kicked us where it counts.
Then our ten-year-old scanner gave up the ghost last week, and there is no money in the coffers to buy another one. Now I take the images home to scan them.
It's the strangest form of job security I've ever had.
Incredibly unappreciative!
I work for a company that is contracted by a state department. We used to work in the state office in an outer borough, but now, due to a new, budget-oriented contract, we can no longer exclusively occupy the state's space. This means we now work a half day in the state building, then trek to our company's building, in another borough, for the rest of the day. We can't use state property anymore, so we had to get laptops, which we get to carry around during rush hour on the 4 train. Also, our phones at the state department have a GIANT "no outgoing calls" sticker on them now, in red, as if we're children. We can't use anything to do the work they need us to do. The best part of all of this, is that NO ONE uses our office in the state building. It sits there empty, while we no longer have our own desks.
At least I'm employed.
