A Moral Victory

My former boss, who is now just a regular team mate of mine, came up with this 'plan' to reduce costs by eliminating pagers for the company. Now, this is fine as there are alot of them that are not being used but it is the way she was going about it that I had issues with.

She started out by picking random pagers (L and I have yet to figure out how she chose these devices) and sent them one page with her phone number in it. When they didn't call back by the end of the day she had their pagers cancelled. This 'plan' failed miserably when about 20 people came forward wanting to know why their pagers were turned off. She did not quite get the fact that most people, me included, will not return a call from a number that I do not recognize.

So for the past few weeks we have been meeting the the procurement department who is responsible for vendor relations and the contract side of the pager relationship.

I kept bringing up the fact that I did not think that it was right that since the IT dept requires that if you are on-call that support is required 24x7 and that they then tell you that you have to use your personal wireless device to be notified when there is an issue. I think that if you want me to be on-call after I leave my building that you had better provide me with a device to be notified with. No one listened to my concerns. Until a higher up mucky mucky was on last weeks call and thought that "hey, maybe we better check this out with HR, just in case".

Turns out that I was right. HA!! We cannot force people to use their personal devices to be contacted by off hours. If they choose to do so and submit the expense for reimbursement that is fine, but we cannot mandate this.

I'm not sure why my former now demoted boss never thinks that what I have to say matters (ok, so maybe it has something with going over her head and turning her in for taking kickbacks (weekend in Vegas) from a vendor), but I am damn good at my job and I know what I'm talking about.

Some day I will post examples of her 'math' skills. It is hilarious. She puts together these proposals with number so out of whack I'm positive that my parrot can put random numbers that make more sense.