So.

Laid off 2 employees today.

And, to make things even more fun, they're a married couple.

Frankly they deserved it a long time ago. Not that they were worthless, by any means.

But D, the husband, I hired almost 2 years ago, on a "temporary" basis to help out Boy around the office. Like I just said...that was 2 years ago. He hasn't had hardly anything to do, especially lately. He's mostly a networking/systems/hardware guy, and our need for that is very minimal.

D2, the wife, was not his wife, or even his girlfriend at the time. A friend of his. He recommended we hire her in an office-managerial capacity. We talked to her, and did so.

And she's really very good at much of that. Mostly the administrative -- as in, papers, accounting, computers -- stuff.

As we -- repeatedly -- discovered, she REALLY sucks at the human relations part of the job. Whether negative or positive news (though to be fair mostly the former), she managed to deliver it in an offensive and frightening manner. Many, many have been the times I have had to send out an email immediately after one of her saying, basically "IGNORE D's EMAIL". She seemed to have some sort of persecution complex wherein she believed that all the team was against her.

Oh, but man, does it rock to not have to do anything with all that bullshit other than come in, pick up the clipboard on your chair, and sign and date whereever there was a sticky note that said "sign and date here" (with an arrow). That is fucking beautiful.

Though honestly it does not justify a full-time salary.

Not to mention the fact that neither of them has even hardly been around for like the past six months. One or both would stroll into the office every once in a while. This week, we waited till today to do this largely because they weren't IN for the first 4 days of the week.

Yeah, I know, you ALL want to work for us now.

But, see, that's the kicker. We have folks who have been working their ASSes off for us. Over and over again. Steadily. And for them to see these two...wandering in, and basically eating off of their hard work? Not cool.

I've been bitching about work a lot lately. I'm sorry. I'm sure it's dull as dishwater. But it's all I've got on my mind at present, so it's kind of tough to come up with anything else to say.

Even I'm becoming billable. I've got a hardcore three weeks ahead of me for Large Unnamed Client in order to try to repair the train wreck of an internal project they've been working on for a YEAR and a HALF with almost no results whatsoever. My poor little hands are gonna be in saaaad shape this month. All typing, pretty much.

So that's my day. Hope yours was better.

Oh. Forgot to mention. D. One of my older friends. Was like a brother to me in my late-ish teens. Is in various of the stories, and is the D1 in the Burlington Saga (or what I wrote of it, anyway). Makes this all...that much harder.

And oh again. Something I sort of wanted to get off my chest. I mean, D and D basically knew what we wanted to talk to them about. We (me and Boy) took them out to dinner, having told them that we Needed To Talk. Didn't want to say much before actually getting to sit down with them, because I didn't feel right emailing stuff like that. But anyway, they had a pretty good idea, and I figured as much. So D1 on the walk to the restaurant, and sprinkled throughout conversation etc, and lots more after the Official Moment, was all kinds of complaining about money, how broke they are, etc etc.

NOW. I have many problems with this. It actually made the whole ordeal a little easier, actually. First problem: Dude, I don't owe you SHIT. I have given you what essentially amounts to a free ride for TWO YEARS on mine and every other employee's dime, and if you didn't figure out a way to keep some of that cash, sorry. Not my problem. You are a grown-up human being, and you and your wife can take fucking care of yourselves WITHOUT ME.

SECOND. I too, and Boy, are broke as shit. The difference here being we did not just have ourselves a $10,000 wedding, an $x,000 honeymoon, and we do not own TWO FUCKING CARS. IN NEW YORK. Sure, I'll grant you that some of that was not necessarily entirely on purpose. But fuck that, I don't wander around arbitrarily spending tens of thousands of dollars. In point of fucking fact, I own zero cars (too expensive), pay LESS rent, have 1 entire fewer dogs, and have not bought a goddamn thing that cost more than twenty bucks with the exception of Boy's xmas present in like a YEAR. Not to mention giving up my salary to help pay everyone else whenever humanly possible. Not to mention borrowing personal money from my own personal grandfather to help feed aforementioned others, including your own damn self. And ain't none of that MY fault.

Jesus. Anyway. Now that that's all out of my system. If I hadn't been in the middle of firing the bastard to begin with I might have said some of that to HIM.

- onehanded