Eclecticism

Bye-bye Andersen

November 27, 2019April 1, 2002 by Michael Hanscom

Okay. How’s this for an ‘April Fools’ day post — I got fired.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke.

The best way to make this all as clear as possible is to back up a few months to set the scene.

(Just in case you’ve stumbled across this blog and have no idea who I am, in brief, for the past 8 months or so I’ve been working in a fairly convoluted setup. Follow this one, if you can — I’m employed by Today’s Office Staffing (a temp staffing agency), who contracts me out to Xerox. Xerox, in turn, contracts me out to Arthur Andersen‘s Seattle office to run the XBS [Xerox Business Services] print shop at Andersen. So, I work for the Today’s, who contract me to Xerox, who place me at Andersen. Got it? Good. Now back to our story….)

A few months ago, I’d been having some problems with getting supplies from Xerox for my machines. One day we ended up losing a machine due to this — it had a problem, and without the right part to replace it, we were dead in the water. Normally this would be just an inconvenience (albeit a fairly major one), however when this happened, we were in the middle of a large print run. Not a good thing. I was able to track down the part we needed, and one of the Andersen people I work with volunteered to run over to the Xerox building on their lunch hour to pick up the part. She did, the part went in the machine, and we got the print run done. All’s good in the world, right?

Not nearly, unfortunately. After having to deal with frustration from my supervisors at Andersen while the mess was going on, the next day it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that Xerox was unhappy with the way I handled things as well. Apparently, they try extremely hard to present a ‘happy’ face to their clients, and in dealing with the situation, I’d made it known that I’d had problems in the Xerox channels. My Andersen supervisor indicated her displeasure with this to the Xerox representative, who then informed me that under no circumstances was I to involve any Andersen personnel with any problems I might be having with the Xerox side of things.

Okay, fine. I’ll go with that.

Back to current events. I’m doing my best to run the print shop while walking a tightrope between what the two companies want from me (Andersen wants me to do my job to the best of my abilities — no big surprise there — and so does Xerox, I just can’t let the either company know anything about what’s going on at the other). Then, over this past week, I run into a new and improved problem with supplies.

Up until about a month ago, ordering my supplies had been going fairly well. I typed up my order, faxed it over to the Xerox supply person, she faxed back a confirmation within the hour, and goodies would start showing up the next day, day after at the most. Then, about a month ago, that person went to a new position within Xerox, and things went very quickly downhill. Of the three orders I’ve put in since the new person took over, two were ‘misplaced’ until I called and harassed people, and one was just late — not actually ordered until the day after I faxed the order over. So things have been a bit nuts over the past month, as I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m not getting paper like I’m supposed to — while trying to keep four floors of accountants from ripping my throat out when they can’t use the copiers with less than a month before the April 15th tax deadline. Not a fun situation.

So, last Wednesday, I put in a paper order for 35 cases. Thursday goes by, nothing. Friday goes by…nothing. Great. By this point, there was virtually no paper in the office — a few reams scattered among the floors, and one case in the print shop, but that was it. I still hadn’t been able to get ahold of a status on my order, and was at a loss of what to do (meanwhile, of course, trying to stick with Xerox’s demand not to involve Andersen. By the end of the day, I knew that there was no way anything was going to be showing up, so when one of the Andersen people asked me about paper for over the weekend, I let them know that they’d probably have to round some up on the other floors if they ran out.

Apparently this didn’t go over well at all, and this morning I was told by my supervisor at Andersen that after getting an e-mail complaining about this, she’d requested that Xerox find someone else to cover the print shop. After I explained my take on things she seemed to understand my position a bit more, but it certainly wasn’t going to change her decision — which, to be honest, I can understand. What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was how fast all this was going to happen (funny, Xerox can’t get me paper with less than 5 days turnaround, but they can get me out of there in a matter of hours). When I got hired, the prior Xerox staffer hung around for a couple weeks to give me a basic training on how Andersen likes things to be done, and my Andersen boss didn’t give me any indication that this was going to be an immediate thing. So, when I got a call about an hour and a half later from my contacts at Today’s (after spending that hour and a half on the phone trying to convince anyone at Xerox to get me any amount of paper they could), it was a bit surprising for them to tell me that I was to leave Andersen and come down to their office immediately. So, at 11am I left Andersen, went down to the temp agency, and was told that Xerox had made it clear that I was not to return, and that my assignment was over.

Yay.

On the bright side, I’m not actually fired. Since my employer is Today’s, while I’m not actively employed, I wasn’t fired either — my assignment ended — so if I need to go on unemployment, that can be done with very little hassle. Hopefully things won’t come to that, though. It’s also good that this all happened on the first day of the month — had this happend mid-month or towards the end, I’d be much more stressed about dealing with rent. I’m stressed now, but I also have a full month to examine my options and see what I can come up with.

So, that’s how things stand at the moment. Wish me luck…I need all I can get right now.

Bye-bye ‘Enterprise!’

November 27, 2019March 29, 2002 by Michael Hanscom

I’ve been watching the new Star Trek show, Enterprise, off and on for a while now. I haven’t caught every new episode, but those I have, I posted my thoughts on. It doesn’t look like I’ll be doing this anymore, though.

Wednesday evening I turned on my TV to watch the show, and as it turns out, my reception here at the new apartment is actually worse than it was at my old one. So, watching the broadcast isn’t an option, and there’s no way I’m going to pay for cable access just so I can watch one show. At first I was kind of disappointed by this, but something else has happened this week that made me realize that I probably wasn’t going to miss Enterprise all that much.

This Tuesday marked the release of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation in a very nice DVD box set. I picked up my copy on Wednesday on my way home from work, and when I found that I wasn’t going to be able to watch Enterprise, I started watching TNG episodes.

The thing is — I’d forgotten just how good this show really was! Sure, it was their first season, everyone was still getting the hang of their characters, and the special effects were fairly horrid (and that’s not just hindsight talking — I remember being extremely unimpressed with the effects in “Justice” at the time it first aired) — but even with all that, each episode I (re-)watch drives home more and more just how good TNG was…and just how much Enterprise pales in comparison.

Watching the first season of TNG now is actually much like watching it for the first time. I watched TNG almost religiously when it first came on the air — it first aired during my sophomore year in high school, and for quite a while it became a ritual for my group of friends to gather at someone’s house (usually Tammy’s, though I think Royce, myself, and some of the others hosted the gathering from time to time) and watch whatever the newest episode was. However, by the time I graduated in ’91 and moved out to live on my own for the first time, television was less and less of a priority, and I ended up missing the majority of the last few seasons of TNG. In the ensuing years I’ve caught the occasional episode of one Trek show or another in reruns, but those times have been fairly few and far between. I remember bits and pieces of the shows I’ve seen, but much has faded in the mists of memory over the years.

In essence, then, it’s very easy for me to compare watching the first season of Enterprise fresh out of the bottle to watching the first season of TNG the same way — and I’ve gotta say, ENT just doesn’t compare. Up until now, I’ve been somewhat of an apologist for ENT, doing my best to give it a chance, and one of the most common arguments when someone says that ENT just isn’t that good of a show is that it’s still their first season. Often someone will offer up, “remember just how much better TNG was after a few seasons, and how shaky their first season was?” Well sure, it was better after as it went on (which makes me look forward even more to those seasons being released on DVD later this year) — but that argument was a lot easier for me to accept when I hadn’t actually seen first-season TNG since 1987. The episodes and dilemmas presented therein are much more interesting, the characters are more engaging — about the only point that I can see that first-season ENT really has over first-season TNG is the special effects, and much of that is the simple fact that it’s 15 years later (side note — 15 years later? Ugh…I’m feeling old again!) and modern-day F/X technology is that much better.

Perhaps ENT will mature as it goes along, and perhaps it will grow into being a truly worthwhile addition to the Star Trek universe — it’d be nice to see that happen, as I still think that some of the new ideas and directions they’re exploring in ENT could be very interesting (the new take on the Vulcans, for example). However, at the moment — I can’t say I’m going to really miss not being able to watch it anymore.