|
I’m really curious what the vibe is like working somewhere like k mart, radioshack a few years ago, etc. When it’s a small business it can be reasonably easy to make things at least somewhat ambiguous but like no sane person expects sears to have a future. It must be a weird atmosphere.
|
#
?
Jun 28, 2022 21:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 08:03 |
|
|
I work for the U.S. Federal Government. It's ok.
|
|
#
?
Jun 28, 2022 21:16
|
|
|
I worked for a single failing movie theater of a large chain OP. It's pretty cool, nobody gives a poo poo and you pretty much could just steal whatever the gently caress you want and get free drinks from the bar after work. I got out before they closed the location though. Not sure what it's like at the very end.
|
|
#
?
Jun 28, 2022 21:48
|
|
|
SLICK GOKU BABY posted:It's pretty cool, nobody gives a poo poo and you pretty much could just steal whatever the gently caress you want and get free drinks from the bar after work. This is the hallmark of a failing large company imo. Total lack of care or concern among the line staff. Anyone below Store/General Manager or maaaybe some assistant managers just doesn't give a poo poo anymore. This is how it was when I worked at Radioshack and that was like ten years before they finally collapsed. I can only imagine what it was like in the homestretch. At my store only the Store Manager gave a poo poo about anything. Nobody else cared at all. People stole poo poo to relist on Ebay or use for themselves, basic duties were neglected, regular no call no shows, just a complete mess. One time on a particularly slow day I hooked up my N64 to one of the display TVs and we played Mario Kart right in the lobby, full view of any customer who walked in (only two did on the whole shift). The assistant manager was part of that shift. That's what happens when a company is dying, it doesn't value its employees if it ever did, and the employees are aware of both those facts.
|
|
#
?
Jun 28, 2022 22:30
|
|
|
RadioShack stopped stocking all the nerd poo poo and breadboard diy crap and started stocking all this poo poo you can literally just buy at Walmart so they lost their loyal customer base for a quick and dirty temporary revenue boost that ultimately tanked the company.
|
|
#
?
Jun 28, 2022 23:25
|
|
|
my friend worked at Circuit City until it went out of business and the stories were pretty funny he was a naturally talented sales guy in the tv department but had, frankly, a history of behavioral problems, but just sticking around on the sinking ship put him on the fast-track to management, because when the company was beginning to face financial hardship they started firing all their highest paid (read: most tenured, experienced, knowledgeable) employees to save money (while giving bonuses to the executives, of course). he'd worked there probably less than two years when they offered to make him a store manager if he was willing to move to alabama, on a salary that he could have afforded a house on they had him attend meetings and presentations where they explained they were in the process of rebranding themselves as "The City" to appeal to the youths or something, and showed off their amazing advertisement strategy of paying millions of dollars to have a Circuit City get destroyed in a few seconds in some cgi smash-up movie that, I want to say by the time it came out the company was already in liquidation once they found out the store was closing, the employees were told how the clearance process worked: they'd start pricing all of their inventory down a pretty reasonable amount from msrp, like 10-15%. after a while sales would naturally start to slow, and they'd increase the discount percentage. eventually everything left would be at like 99% marked off, because it would be all poo poo that no customers really wanted, but had to be moved well, somebody figured out that the shelves on the display racks were not nailed down, they were basically just thin sheets of metal resting on a fitted frame, which meant the space under the bottom shelf essentially formed a hollow kind of compartment. apparently these could be used to keep excess stock, but since it wasn't in regular practice for so long, nobody really thought of it. this meant anything that was small enough to fit under there, you could basically hide it from the customers. chances are, nobody would think to check, but it was technically a valid place to keep inventory and conveniently "forget" about while the discount price slowly went up. bide your time for just a couple of months, you could get anything you wanted in the store for pennies, and the employees essentially made a quiet pact not to rat each other out but then one of the employees who wasn't in on it just sort of stumbled across it and, not realizing the items were hidden there on purpose, asked a manager if he should be moving them to the display shelves. so management found out and the plan was blown. my friend said everybody hated that guy after that, even though he didn't really do anything wrong and they knew it, but it was just like "god, gently caress you, dude"
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 00:13
|
|
|
I used to work at Blockbuster and stuck around until after they declined to buy Netflix. Things got weird when they started having us push Blockbuster's knockoff mail order service to customers in the physical store. Then I got fired for writing swear words in the shift log. Good timing!
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 00:17
|
|
|
It's like posting on an obviously failing large forum, except you get paid for it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 00:22
|
|
|
Cubone posted:
My brother worked as some upper manager type for some decently sized tech firm in California until COVID forced its shut down. He said that when the writing was on the wall that they were shuttering, the first thing HR did was literally take an excel spreadsheet of everyone's salary, sort by largest, and fire the top 20 percent. Every month that repeated until nobody was left. He said the other guys on his level, which was a level eligible for those unicorn MBA bonuses, would compete to be the last ones around because they would absorb other divisions and other bonuses. Like the R&D director gets fired so the Ops director absorbs the 0 person R&D division, but that doubles the Ops director's bonus. Then the Ops guy gets fired and takes his double bonus, but then Ops and R&D gets absorbed into Sales, and the Sales guy gets triple when he's fired. My brother made it to the final three humans in the whole place apparently.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 00:41
|
|
|
Skeleton Ape posted:I used to work at Blockbuster and stuck around until after they declined to buy Netflix. Things got weird when they started having us push Blockbuster's knockoff mail order service to customers in the physical store. Then I got fired for writing swear words in the shift log. Good timing! Wait….Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix? Lmao
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 00:50
|
|
|
Skeleton Ape posted:I used to work at Blockbuster and stuck around until after they declined to buy Netflix. Things got weird when they started having us push Blockbuster's knockoff mail order service to customers in the physical store. Then I got fired for writing swear words in the shift log. Good timing! The issue with that plan was that nobody based how many movies they rented a month on price. Nobody was renting two movies a month, longing for the ability to rent more. You rented however many you felt like/had time to watch. So the only people who got the unlimited plan were people who were already spending more a month than the plan cost. Not a lot was really changing at that point, no major store closings or anything, but it felt like there was blood in the water.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:21
|
|
|
Cubone posted:my friend worked at Circuit City until it went out of business and the stories were pretty funny 
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:28
|
|
|
I've talked plenty on the forums before about riding RadioShack down (nearly) till the end. It was definitely a weird atmosphere and starting about a year before it all went to hell it was obvious to those of us on the front lines who were paying attention that very bad decisions were being made by corporate management. There was really no reason it should have failed, it was just hubris and idiocy and it was incredibly frustrating to watch.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:32
|
|
|
Confederated Slave Holdings
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:36
|
|
|
My first job was working at a Blockbuster video from 2001 to like 2005. It was obvious to me by 2002 that the business model was doomed due to the internet because even though I had free rentals I still downloaded poo poo because it was less hassle. When I first started working there the whole store was renting VHSes except for 1 shelf that was those newfangled DVDs and when I quit it was all DVDs. I left right as they were starting up that mail order poo poo and after the whole shitshow that was "no more late fees." Corporate was opening up new stores in a county that already had 83 loving Blockbusters alone and they were absolutely cannibalizing their own business. It was also fun because my store was the 2nd store of at least 3 that were ultimately opened all along the same named road in the same town so every phone conversation was "oh no you mean to call the store a mile away at this intersection..." Corporate did everything they could to hit the gas on the way down and eventually I gave up and dropped my store keys in the drop box and ghosted that job.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:38
|
|
|
Other Blockbuster goons: Did ANYONE, even a single person, actually sign up for DirecTV through the store? Our in-store demo unit didn't work ~50% of the time due to lovely signal, so great selling point there.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:44
|
|
|
I worked in a Kohl's for almost a year. Quit last month. Worst place I've ever worked, and I was blown away by how behind the times it was. Old white men in upper management, lowest pay in the area, just treated every young employee like poo poo. We sold nothing but overpriced garbage. No idea how it's still going. I can't imagine it will exist within... five years or so, but I'm sure it will still be there.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:46
|
|
|
Oh, another great part of working at Blockbuster was having to sell people DirecTV 
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:54
|
|
|
haljordan posted:Other Blockbuster goons: Did ANYONE, even a single person, actually sign up for DirecTV through the store? Our in-store demo unit didn't work ~50% of the time due to lovely signal, so great selling point there. Lol, beaten--yes, one of my coworkers literally asked every single person who walked in the door "hey! You want to buy a satellite dish?" in this big overblown joking tone. He got a surprising number of takers doing this, I think like 3 or 4?
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:57
|
|
|
BAGS FLY AT NOON posted:Wait….Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix? It's a great story, Netflix actually pitched it themself even for a hilariously low amount, like a few million or something.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 01:59
|
|
|
*Holds up two thumbs* What has two thumbs, is large and is obviously failing?
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:00
|
|
|
Bear in mind Netflix was mail order only at the time, and they were losing money. But yeah they wanted something like $50 million
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:04
|
|
|
Omon Ra posted:It's like posting on an obviously failing large forum, except you get paid for it. becoming a goon in 2022 must be like getting a job at Blockbuster in like 2010
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:13
|
|
|
Working in manufacturing and distribution for WoodWick at the moment. You wouldn't be able to tell from the candles at the store so much, but company is struggling hard right now. Basically no one cares about quality beyond "Won't kill the line workers", shifts are being cancelled for a day or multiple days, some shifts have been outright dissolved, all but a few of the temps have been laid off "until further notice", and rumblings are we might lose our biggest contract. Needless to say, people are fleeing the clearly sinking ship with a quickness.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:14
|
|
|
AngryRobotsInc posted:Working in manufacturing and distribution for WoodWick at the moment. You wouldn't be able to tell from the candles at the store so much, but company is struggling hard right now. I need to see you in my office
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:19
|
|
|
haljordan posted:Other Blockbuster goons: Did ANYONE, even a single person, actually sign up for DirecTV through the store? Our in-store demo unit didn't work ~50% of the time due to lovely signal, so great selling point there. Blockbuster goons, did you ever pull up the fake accounts for like, Homer Simpson and what not? 21212121212, 213213213, etc?
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:21
|
|
|
Midwest Sears post-recession was a trip
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:21
|
|
|
The best thing about Radio Shack going bankrupt was when they auctioned off a bunch of random crap from their corporate office. I don't mean like inventory or even office supplies. They had stuff like a framed picture of their board of directors from 1982 or something and a gold record they somehow earned from an album of trucker songs they somehow published. They were clearly just pulling stuff off the walls and raiding their storage rooms for a few bucks, it was so weird.
AKA Pseudonym fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Jun 29, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:31
|
|
|
I’ve put a lot of posts is another thread chronicling the impending downfall of the company I just left which I have loving called Plague Company. You can look up my history if interested but the short version is… They are a large specialty retailer/manufacturer that is privately owned by a family. I joined them last year to lead the modernization of their e-commerce site. The leadership all turned out to be actual narcissists who wanted their employees to basically worship them like they were part of a cult. The CEO has people who would go and prep facilities for him to arrive so that they are hyped up and cheering by the time he gets there. He is obsessed with his name being in any news article or trade publication and would often invest in new ventures just to get them to give him meaningless awards. He spits out every power of positive thinking bullshit quote, hangs out with Peter Diamandis and believes all of his bullshit, and is borderline into QAnon. The CEO opened up his facilities from the pandemic as soon as possible last year and ignore the massive outbreaks multiple times. He openly ranted into company wide letters about how Covid is overblown, the pandemic is over, and we need to get over it with positive thoughts. Notably, when a member of the executive team that is his illegitimate brother (their father slept with his own secretary and has the kid) tested positive from Covid, the CEO refused to let his brother on the corporate plan with him and told him to just work from the office. The CEO sent around conspiracy videos about how China is attacking America through the supply chain and trying to starve us. The business is failing because the CEO saw the massive sales spike from Covid and leveraged all that income against tons of loans to build facilities and buy logistics companies to carry goods from Asia expecting the massive demand to continue forever. Now all his warehouses are full of goods that won’t sell, his customers are returning product, and he has hundreds of containers sitting at ports getting fees levied at them every day for not being moved. Some days he pays tens to hundreds of thousands in fines for leaving containers at the port. One day was over $1M in fines. Despite having record sales last year (>+100% vs LY), the CEO paid no bonuses out because the company failed to meet plan (+200% vs LY) His mandatory in office all the time policy has caused 50% attrition in a year with no backfills. Whole departments in Tech are unstaffed and being wholly outsourced to the lowest bidder. This has already gotten too long but it got absolutely wild in the few weeks before I left. Everyone was looking and interview. Absolutely no one was working. Things would break constantly and people would just shrug and say gently caress it. No one knew who was still working in any department. They had stopped doing departure emails. Despite all this, I expect the business to limp on for a few more years simply because of their market penetration. I think they will probably close or greatly shrink their retail arm in the next 1-5 years but manufacturing will keep going so long as the CEO isn’t fully bankrupt. I look forward to their closures hitting the news in a few years.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:38
|
|
|
AKA Pseudonym posted:The best thing about Radio Shack going bankrupt was when they auctioned off a bunch of random crap from their corporate office. I don't mean like inventory or even office supplies. They had stuff like a framed picture of their board of directors from 1982 or something and a gold record they somehow earned from an album of trucker songs they somehow published. They were clearly just pulling stuff off the walls and raiding their storage rooms for a few bucks, it was so weird. I wish I had known about it, there was some baller art in the Fort Worth offices
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 02:43
|
|
|
Lawlicaust posted:The leadership all turned out to be actual narcissists who wanted their employees to basically worship them like they were part of a cult. That sounds like Severance. Jon Bois used to work at RadioShack and had lots of stories: https://www.sbnation.com/platform/amp/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories My favorite was him working a 12 hour shift alone and eventually having to run out for 30 seconds to use the bathroom and someone stole the register. Corporate was indifferent and he realized he could have taken it himself and got a nice bonus.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 03:09
|
|
|
Hyrax Attack! posted:That sounds like Severance. That is... Well, it's not a typical experience in any way
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 03:32
|
|
|
ClamdestineBoyster posted:RadioShack stopped stocking all the nerd poo poo and breadboard diy crap and started stocking all this poo poo you can literally just buy at Walmart so they lost their loyal customer base for a quick and dirty temporary revenue boost that ultimately tanked the company. yup. remember going in with my friends being in 4th or 5th grade buying resistors and such poo poo to build phone phreaking boxes. my friend who held onto the completed thing kept it very carefully hidden in his closet in case the FBI came by. ...they never did, oddly enough.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 04:17
|
|
|
SilvergunSuperman posted:It's a great story, Netflix actually pitched it themself even for a hilariously low amount, like a few million or something. Skeleton Ape posted:Bear in mind Netflix was mail order only at the time, and they were losing money. But yeah they wanted something like $50 million Lmao. Although to be fair, it’s not like Blockbuster would have done anything good with it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 04:28
|
|
|
I worked for a mid-sized bank (10,000 employees) that bought out a somewhat large bank that was out of Arizona and Florida. No one did their due diligence, and when the housing market crashed in 2007/2008, it crashed especially hard in Arizona and Florida because everyone gave out loans to the sketchiest people ever. During the crash, all the loans we had from the acquisition were junk. Literally everyone defaulted and we had properties rotting all over the states. I saw our stock go from 60 a share to less than a dollar in a week until we eventually got bought by a Canadian bank because they have uber heavy banking regulations and were flush with cash because the crash didn't do poo poo to them, and they bought up a ton of USA based banks because we weren't regulated to do anything, so we didn't, and went under because of greed. Well, except the super huge too big to fail banks. We did repay our Tarp loan, but it did nothing for our stock. Eventually they let almost everyone go because we were all dumb Americans who have no idea how to run a bank. The CEO got a 20m parachute when they kicked his rear end out.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 05:28
|
|
|
BAGS FLY AT NOON posted:Lmao. True, Netflix taking off was probably helped by not having to worry about closing 9,000+ retail locations. Philthy posted:I worked for a mid-sized bank (10,000 employees) that bought out a somewhat large bank that was out of Arizona and Florida. Lol drat. Some friends worked for WaMu corporate and that downfall was quick. I remember they’d have so much pressure to give home loans to anyone that a photo of someone in front of a truck was acceptable for proving you run a thriving landscaping business.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 05:46
|
|
|
I worked for a department store chain called Bealls (like a smaller version of JC Penny's with less resources and quality control) and things took a massive nosedive in 2015. I was a store manager and needed the health insurance (plus it's nice to be surrounded by attractive women everyday) so I stuck around till the end. Outside of holidays the store was a ghost town staffed with CVS-level payroll and tasks became impossible to complete. From 2018 on there was a palpable feeling of dread in the air as the stock price sunk to miniscule levels. In early 2020 we had just completed our remodeling into "Gordmans" (like a smaller version of TJ Maxx with less resources and quality control) which was a last ditch effort to save the company. There was supposed to be a big "re-opening" ribbon cutting ceremony with mayor coming but the COVID shutdowns came that week. We got placed on leave for three months and at the end of that we all got an email saying the company was bankrupt. I had to oversee the liquidation of the (pretty nice looking) store that we had just painstakingly remodeled while the company looked for someone to buy us out before the bank could foreclose on all of the 800 stores. That didn't happen and the head of store operations had a conference call with all the managers where he broke down crying. Burkes Outlet (the Family Dollar of retail) bought the name just so that it could never be resurrected. The store is now a giant Planet Fitness. I regret not embezzling money during the liquidation.
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 06:00
|
|
|
Well over a decade ago I worked for a company that was a conglomerate of web hosting companies. Basically, this rich kid from India went to business school and then came up with a brilliant business strategy and used his connections to meet with investors at major investment firms. They gave him a lot of money. Like, a lot. This was back in the 2000s and I don't think any of the investors understood the internet, but man did this kid sell them on it. He contracted his cousin to write an "innovative, proprietary control panel", which was literally just a reskin of cpanel with things moved around and a fancy new name which was literally just a derivative of the name cpanel. Then he began to deploy his business strategy. All of those investment dollars went to work. He began to purchase small, struggling web hosting companies - the kind of "web hosting companies" that were just a few web savvy college roommates running a couple old PCs as servers in their garage, with a few hundred customers maybe, struggling mostly because they were poorly monetized or because the owners didn't understand how to run a business, not because the tech or concept was bad. Of course all these people were happy to cash out - I have no idea how much money he was throwing at them but I know it was a rather sizable amount. If you're wondering what happened to [some old web host from the 90s/2000s that disappeared], it was probably this guy. His acquisition strategy was pretty much this: 1) Purchase the company, email all of the customers letting them know, announcing that nothing would change. 2) Wait a few months, not changing anything. 3) Begin announcing exciting new upgrades coming in the future, reiterate over and over that nothing is going to change and the service they know and love will stay the same. 4) Wait several more months, occasionally sending out more, similar announcements. 5) Finally, do a gigantic data migration of all of the customers from the old servers to their in-house servers (which at the time they were doing this were totally fine), show them the brand new control panel, and begin monetizing. It was legal extortion - if they wanted to keep their website as-is, they'd need to start paying more. If the customers were angry - "I'm sorry you feel that way, but feel free to go somewhere else, we're happy to help you move to another provider in any way we can". But over time as he bought up more and more "other providers", most of the market became this same provider. Over time, they became one of the top 3 largest shared web hosting providers in the world - but no one would ever know it, because they operated clandestinely, under dozens and dozens of different brand names. The vast majority of web hosting providers you would find online when searching for a hosting provider were them. (this was in the late 2000s/early 2010s). I joined the company right after their first 'major' acquisition - it was the largest one yet, and the company they acquired had their own call center, so that became the company's official support center. Calls for any of their brands were routed to that call center. I was hired to manage not just any call center team, but specifically the team that delt with advanced technical problems and customer complaints from customers of newly-acquired brands that were being forced through the migration process. If you're not a computer toucher now is a good time to understand that any time you move a massive amount of data from one location to another, a whole lot of things break. A lot of it breaks in relatively simple ways, so the easy calls my team took would be things like when we found out that the company we acquired had a large customer base who wrote their entire website based on explicit links to e.g. images by the server IP address. Just like, garbled messes of code written by someone back at the dawn of the early internet who had no idea what they were doing. And their hosting provider had promised them repeatedly over and over that their IPs would never change, and that their links were safe. Well now all their links broke and they're mad, and so my team would have to soothe them and then find creative solutions like just writing a script that would update all of the links to relative links and fix it for them. That was basically how we operated - just do whatever you can to fix the technical problem for them. Once that's done, or determined to be impossible, just say "Sorry, it's up to you to fix this, we gave it an earnest try but we're not able to troubleshoot your code for you". The building this team operated in was old. Rumor was it used to be a mental institution, of some kind. Parts of it were partially torn apart in abandoned renovation. There were holes in the roof. One of the doors, the emergency exit right where everyone sat, did not lock and did not have a functioning alarm. It was in a really rough part of town and being accosted by mentally ill homeless people on your breaks right outside the back door was common. So we would all get together there every day, and then they'd get yelled at and screamed at by understandably angry people, and lots of people who completely incomprehensibly angry, some real characters. To illustrate what I mean, a figure who I believe is fairly well known around these parts, the Real Life Peter Pan of http://pixyland.org/peterpan/, was forced to become our customer several times over the years, as we acquired each successive host he moved to. And he hated it. He was just vile, truly awful, abusive, hateful, etc. Every time it would happen, he'd be even angrier than the last time. And being a manager, I took "escalated calls", so he and I spoke enough times over the years that we were on a first-name basis (hi Randy!) Anyway, sometime around 2012, 2013ish things started to fall apart. I was one of the first long-timers to leave so I never got all of the details but it started with ICANN fines and ended up somewhere with the owner being arrested or charged or something for a huge litany of financial crimes. One I know of for sure was misrepresenting customer data to investors - turns out that in his presentations to investors he was counting every single account that had ever been created across all of these 70+ hosting companies as an "active account", making it sound like the whole operation was massively larger than it was, several orders of magnitude larger. Anyway leading up to when I quit it was the most depressing job on earth. My team got paid $3/hr more than anyone else in the building and didn't have to deal with any of the usual bullshit in call centers like sales or satisfaction metrics. Their job was literally to get customers to shut up. There were 2 other teams in the department and my team was the smallest (overnight) and delt with the least serious stuff, but we also got fallout from things like the daytime shifts promising things and then failing to follow up constantly. It was very common for managers on the other teams to tell a rep to do something to get a customer to go away, then fire the rep for doing it the next day because someone in corporate found out that it was illegal. One time a guy from NOAA called us in a panic because when we migrated a recently acquired host, we hosed up some IPs on his server and it turns out all of their tsunami monitoring buoys had been down without dns for an unknown amount of time, but at least a week, because of us. He wasn't even angry, he calmly called in and asked to talk to me and was just like "Jesus christ dude. Like, I know it wasn't you but gently caress, you guys could have got people killed." The ones with the really serious problems like that were never angry, they just wanted it fixed and then were happy that it was fixed. The super angry ones were basically the MAGA crew but before they were unified around Trump and they'd call in just to power trip and harass reps because of the tiniest slights against them, like their site being down for 15 minutes one day and they were claiming they missed a $700,000 deal because of it, despite the fact that they usually sold $30-50/month. Just lawsuit baiting us. There were constant actual lawsuits too. I almost got deposed for a joke I placed on the notes in an account once. A lady who used to work for fleischmann's vinegar had become disgruntled and quit. She took their recipe and started bootlegging it in her bathtub and selling it at farmers markets. She started a website hosted with us and Fleischmann's lawyers called us to seize it. This lead to both parties calling us on a daily basis for weeks. Someone on the day shift was fired because they handed the account over to the lawyer when they were not the owner of the account (they were supposed to get a court order). Anyway I placed the note "Apparently the vinegar industry is pretty bitter!" in the account. That was shocking enough that corporate saw it. Jokes were strictly disallowed, but the department head fought for me because he laughed at it and I got to keep my job. Eventually I started chainsmoking and I got to the point where I would sit in the courtyard chainsmoking all (work)day long and only enter the building when someone texted me that I was needed because I hated the job that much. I went from smoking 1/2 of a pack a day when I started the job to 2 packs a day while working there, sometimes more. And yeah, I let my reps have the same freedom because at night the call volume was incredibly low and we mostly only worked emails. As long as at least one person was there to answer phone calls we were solid so people took lots of extended breaks. Anyway I quit after they told us that they needed to start monetizing this team and we needed to become revenue-generating. And I just said no gently caress that, with what this team does, gently caress you for even asking that. Everyone I know who worked there was depressed as hell. Two different colleagues both committed suicide on the same year a few years after I left, they were still working there. One time shortly after I left a black woman from the overnight team got fired for taking her own monitor home. She brought it in, it was her TV from home and she brought it to work because they did not have a second monitor for her. She had worked late, and the morning security guards saw her walking out with a monitor, and since she was from the overnight team they didn't recognize her, they racially profiled her and assumed she was stealing and she got fired for it. Hope that answers ur question OP e: Last I heard the money dried up and they are now owned by a holding company of investors that picked up where they left off and began buying up major shared hosting providers to merge them all together, but the industry is dead. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Jun 29, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 06:30
|
|
|
quote:So we would all get together there every day, and then they'd get yelled at and screamed at by understandably angry people, and lots of people who completely incomprehensibly angry, some real characters. To illustrate what I mean, a figure who I believe is fairly well known around these parts, the Real Life Peter Pan of http://pixyland.org/peterpan/, was forced to become our customer several times over the years, as we acquired each successive host he moved to. And he hated it. He was just vile, truly awful, abusive, hateful, etc. Every time it would happen, he'd be even angrier than the last time. And being a manager, I took "escalated calls", so he and I spoke enough times over the years that we were on a first-name basis (hi Randy!) hahahaha quote:One time a guy from NOAA called us in a panic because when we migrated a recently acquired host, we hosed up some IPs on his server and it turns out all of their tsunami monitoring buoys had been down without dns for an unknown amount of time, but at least a week, because of us. He wasn't even angry, he calmly called in and asked to talk to me and was just like "Jesus christ dude. Like, I know it wasn't you but gently caress, you guys could have got people killed." 
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 06:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 08:03 |
|
|
deep dish peat moss posted:Well over a decade ago I worked for a company that was a conglomerate of web hosting companies. Basically, this rich kid from India went to business school and then came up with a brilliant business strategy and used his connections to meet with investors at major investment firms. They gave him a lot of money. Like, a lot. This was back in the 2000s and I don't think any of the investors understood the internet, but man did this kid sell them on it. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2022 06:43
|
|
