Yes, it truly does get better. I haven’t even gotten to the best part of all of this. Here are 2 more strikes against this group, as if their complete and utter lack of respect for me and my 15 year career wasn’t enough. These motherfuckers decided to rope me into a meeting with another Sector’s Vice President who gave this organization money to do work in my engineering area. When he heard they had cut their funding in this area from $4.5 Million to a measly $550k he was asking the same question all of us Sector representatives were asking; “What is going to get done with that money?”
Some background here, there are 5 sectors at my company, we do healthcare, and international business. My sector is Aerospace and Defense Systems. My role as Engineering Director for my niche engineering area is to represent my Sector and its needs to other organizations that are supposed to be going work that involves my type of engineering. I’m being intentionally vague because of what I’ll be talking about soon, which is the severe mismanagement of funds. But we will get to that.
My other sector counterparts are at various levels, depending on the needs of the sector, and I mention this because in defense there is spill over from the military so levels and titles are semi-important. My counterpart in this other Sector is a Vice President level, and I am 2 levels down as a Director. See my fancy art work below…
This is pretty standard in most corporate jobs in the US. The director of this other organization invites me to this meeting, and I go with popcorn in hand knowing exactly what they are planning to do and say to my counterpart. I have already heard all the excuses and it seemed they thought I was going to vouch for them and their decisions. I did not. I made it very clear what I wanted, what the VP in the other sector wanted, how those 2 things were the same, how that’s what we all wanted, and how that is not what this organization was going to give us after being awarded $4.5 MILLION dollars to do it. It was my first clear message that they had pissed me off. I then told the VP that I was still planning to deliver what I needed since it was clear I wasn’t going to get it from the other organization whose entire existence was to do work that benefits all the sectors. They are at the corporate level after all.
They insisted that the work I was talking about would only serve my sector so they wouldn’t prioritize it, and after all 4 sector leads met with, emailed, or called to say “no, we want what she wants, please do it.” Rachel sent us all a message that she was going to move forward with her plan and use those $550k to do it, and not going to deliver any of the work we discussed, agreed on, put money towards, and hired towards.
You can imagine how mad we all were, especially since we can’t exactly get that money back. It got earmarked for certain work, but it was put in the “bank account” of the corporate organization. This meant that Rachel could technically do whatever she wanted with it, and not face any consequences. This is where strike 3 comes in.
At this point we are near the end of March. I have accepted that I will not be getting the deliverables I needed, and am neck deep in damage control within my own Sector to figure out how we are going to take our sad little $1.25 Million budget and have something of substance. We expected this corporate organization to do A LOT for us so we could add onto their deliverables with our capability that we were developing. Around the first week of April I get a Teams message from Rachel.
This woman had the AUDACITY to ask me if I would oversee the technical work, or put someone on my team to do it. The people I hired for their team, were now all busy working for me. There was a very long message from her that explained how she was so busy running her other projects, you know the ones she had soooooOOOOooo many interviews to lead, and she wasn’t an expert in this other area, you know the area that I am a subject matter expert in. After all that she did, and all that she pushed back on, she had the audacity to ask me to take the project back. Now that is was too late for me to change it to what it needed to be, she wanted me to be her bookkeeper and she would still get all the credit. Nah, sis.
But of course, that is not the end of the story.