Chapter 9 – QC
I sat in my weekly team meeting drawing a picture of a man hitting his head against the wall. “Wall Man”, as this piece was titled, was the forty-fifth installment of my “I’m so bored I want to kill myself” series. I knew that it had potential to be a big hit on Myspace and Facebook someday. Most of my work was good. Sometimes it would take me two or three meetings to finish an episode depending on how close I sat to management or how boring the meeting was. The biggest thing that affected the amount of time it took: a PowerPoint presentation. I could sleep through most of those.
Adrian joked, saying that the stick figures killing themselves in various ways were mysterious and shed light into the artist’s soul. Yoda said that I needed therapy. I think that may have been what Adrian was poking at too, but that didn’t seem to stop either of them from making suggestions for future masterpieces.
Today was to be a meeting about our QC or Quality Control. I should have been paying attention. My quality sucked but I didn’t care that much about it because well, everyone’s did. The program was stupid to begin with. Someone at corporate headquarters randomly pulled three audits a month to QC, which in reality meant that they rummaged around looking for policies that were jacked up so they didn’t have to give you a bonus. This was fine with me. I took my bonus in excessive bathroom breaks and surfing the internet every time I thought I wasn’t being watched. I had to admit that the bathroom was my favorite though. No one bothers you in the john, and I could read the Wall Street Journal on my Blackberry unimpeded without the constant annoyance of management or infinitely worse, customers. That wasn’t to say that the bathroom was the end all for me, but I considered it a personal sanctuary.
Adrian took her QC very seriously and she stressed about it almost constantly. She also freaked out about hitting her production quota everyday. This was also something that I was mediocre at. It was easy. When you don’t care about the overall quality of the work, then you can do it much faster. To be truthful, my audits were correct most of the time. I just chose to not remember some of the dumb rules that were in place. For example, we were too write “ok” by the customers name on the first page of their paperwork after we made sure it was the same name on the tax forms. Not a check mark and certainly not a circle around the customer’s name—oh no that was the end of the world. And if you did it wrong, then you got dinged. Here was the crazy thing, if the name on our form wasn’t exactly the way it was on the tax forms, commas included, we got dinged if we didn’t call the customer to ask them dumb questions about the proper spelling of their company name. So whenever I picked up a stack of work, the first thing that I did was to write “ok” next to all the names. If it was wrong, I would get dinged, sure. But if it wasn’t then I was good to go.
We must have been diving into the meat of the meeting because I heard frantic scratching on paper coming from Adrian; plus Chester looked pissed. He was convinced that they only used his policies for examples in these meetings because again, the company was after him. He could have been right; I didn’t know. They didn’t show us the name or policy number of the example policies, but Chester said that they all were his.
“Bill?” said a voice that sounded like Manager-lady’s.
“Bill?” Again the voice, now sounding a bit irritated. Why wasn’t Bill answering? Wait—I was Bill.
“Sorry, yes?”
Manager-lady looked at me sternly. “Why do you think QC scores are so low this quarter?”
What the heck was this? How should I know why? To my knowledge, everyone else in the office actually worked hard at this stuff.
“I don’t know, maybe we should change the QC program…” I let it hang out there, waiting for the tidal wave to come.
Star Wars stiffened his back. He was big on the QC program. The Master Jedi didn’t make mistakes and no doubt it was due in part to his essay writing in his comments. He gave me his signature glare that he gave people when they said something that he considered to be wrong or inappropriate. That aside, I had to give the guy a little credit. Ever since Ankle showed me one of Star Wars’ audits and I saw that the guy covered every inch of paper with what he was doing at the time of audit and why he did what he did, I understood how serious he took this stuff. Lunch breaks were even noted on them. I didn’t see how he got anything done.
“Well Bill it’s attitudes like that that are putting Riders out of business. Personally, I look at every audit with the idea that if I did it wrong the company could go out of business.”
“Are you for real? Dude, the most we bill customers is like thirty grand. All the big stuff is done by people who go to the customer’s location and audit them there. Also, we’re a Fortune 500 company and we made like ten billion in profit last year. I think we’ll be ok.”
“And one audit could jeopardize all of that.”
Manager-lady cleared her throat. “Well I don’t think that it will put us under. I mean people can call and we can change the audit and even then, like Bill said, we don’t bill customers that much money.”
Star Wars looked put out, but Manager-lady was the superior officer after all. Thankfully, they appeared to be done with me and I was able to go back to finishing my drawing. If I really needed to know anything, I could ask Adrian. Even without that, they sent emails that recapped the meetings so I was good. To my great pleasure, the meeting was done before I knew it and just in time, my drawing was done. It must not have been a good meeting however because everyone was grumbling on the way back to their desks. This was another added benefit for me. If you didn’t pay attention in the meeting then it could never really suck that bad for you. I could tell that Adrian was upset.
“Do you want to grab an early lunch today?”
“Yeah that sounds good. I just can’t believe them you know?”
“Um yeah they’re dicks, that’s for sure.”
She gave me a wry smile. “Do you even know what we talked about?”
A mock look of outrage crossed my face. “Are you saying I don’t pay strict attention in meetings?”
She laughed and her voice was full of sarcasm as she spoke. “You? How could you think such a thing? I would never think you were not paying attention. I could tell you were clinging to every word today, especially when Manager-lady asked you a question…”
“That’s good because if you were going to say that I was a slacker then we were going to have some words…”
“Oh I bet. You’re such a goof. But seriously, were you listening?”
“You know I wasn’t. QC is retarded; why would I listen?”
“Well you should have. Other than QC they said that they are going to be off shoring some of the audit functions.”
“They’re shipping us over seas!”
“No Bill just our jobs, but they said they weren’t considering layoffs.” She didn’t sound all that convinced.
“Well that’s crap. They can’t just fire us all.”
Chester was with us now. “I don’t know; it could be nice. They give you like two months severance.”
“And then you get to find another job,” Adrian said.
We were making our way down the stairs now. The confined space echoed as more and more of us entered and then began to discuss the news of the possible layoffs. Personally, I was a little pissed about losing my job. Chester may be cool with it but he was probably going to be arrested anyway for flashing the kids at the park or something. So the question was what should I do? I hadn’t been at Riders for very long and I wasn’t keen on looking for another job. It took me four months to find the one I had now. So should I start looking for a new job? Or should I just tough it out here and hope for the best? I didn’t want to think about it, so I changed the subject.
“So what are they doing about QC?”
This didn’t help the irritated look on Adrian’s face. “What happens if I stop telling you everything that happens in meetings?”
“Then you wouldn’t have anyone to vent to.”
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She scowled. “Ok good point. So here is the deal: all of the other audit centers’ QC sucks like ours, right?”
It was more of a rhetorical question. We were all aware of how bad quality was. There was a new QC lady and we were all convinced that she was related to Hitler. I nodded my head in acknowledgement.
“Ok well they’re too dense to figure out everyone is now sucking because there’s a new person who hates the world, and they’re saying that none of us are going to get bonuses anymore.”
That wasn’t much of a surprise. Our incentive program was based on how many audits we did a month and what our quality was. So if QC sucked then yeah, we didn’t get a bonus.
“Ok…”
“And to make life easier for us they’re going to add guidelines to QC.”
I stopped her there. “So wait—because they’re mad about QC they’re going to make it harder to help us? This is ridiculous. We’re already like the most anal company in the industry. Why does it need to be higher?”
“That’s what we said. And they said that by making it higher then it will somehow help all of us out. It’s crap—they’re just going to throw it in our faces when they fire us.”
There was a true statement if I had ever heard one. The day continued to go down the crapper when I got back to my desk to see an email telling us that the Houston office was closed today. They didn’t say why it was closed but we knew and people were getting edgy. Moleth even said she was thinking of postponing her vacation. That was not acceptable. She was leaving, dang it!
“Moleth come on, how often do you think they…” (I put emphasis on the they) “…are going to visit? Really, the things of this world shouldn’t bother you right? I mean after all its stress and hate that’s going to end us right?”
She considered this for a moment. “N- no, no you’re right. I- I’ll still go itsss—its probably better for all of us if I go. Af- after all, if the world is melted down, it won’t matter if we get laid off.”
“That’s right, Moleth, do it for earth. We need you.” I was laying it on thick but this was crucial. She bobbed her head up and down resigned to her task. She walked off with purpose and as I turned around, I knocked my Choffy all over my keyboard. I thought about getting mad and then decided against it. I did deserve it after all.