UPDATE
Aw yeah! C0nstructive d1smissal, baby! Feeeeeeeeeeeeeel that!
MAIN BODY
I am so pissed, and yet not pissed at all, if I'm honest about it.
How to explain to my readers? And I don't hesitate to explain, just to explain in such a way that won't be googled by my co-workers, who (as soon as they open the email that Robin, my less big boss, sent around late last night) will be googling furiously in an effort to find out what their rights are. Or at least I will be. I'd be doing it now, except if I'm honest with myself once more, I'm not furious.
Here's the thing. I'm a rese&rcher and wr&ter for an ind&stry ma&azine about t&levision - about how great it is and why adv&rtisers should spend their hard-earned m&rketing bud&ets on that instead of on pr1nt, r@dio, 1nternet, outd0or, et cetera. As far as my girlish hopes and dreams go, I've never thought it was much of a job, but it was okay; 80% of the things I spend my day reading are nice things like the Economist or the Globe and Mail or some such, and I like writing. What I had to write about fell into two categories: trends within &ndustries (for example, right now I'm working on a little article about how the new f&lm Blo0d D1amond is making the d1amond industry go on the defensive in a huge way so as to shore up traditionally huge H0liday sales) and trends within @dvertising, specifically t&levision @dvertising, especially in terms of how great it is.
The first category is fun. The second is stupid and the perpetuation of a great lie, since there is no solid proof any t2levision c@mpaign ever increased the m@rket for anything, and quite a bit more proof in the opposite direction. That is, almost all @dvertising b&dgets across the board are absolutely sqaundered, and that the only thing that moves a product is so-called 'br@nd buzz' - a fancy (i.e. GAY) term for people trying a product, liking it, and reccommending it to their freinds.
This has been a little disheartening for me . . . leads to spontaneous prayers throughout the day along these lines:
Oh, merciful Jeebus, in your wisdom tell me why your Father allows his children here below to waste billions of dollars and a whole industry of college grads trying to map out and understand br@nd buzz when it's obvious it might have something to do with, I don't know, the fucking QUALITY and DISTRIBUTION of the product, and while there are millions of children slowly starving to death because we haven't quite figured out the importance of food distribution either?
. . . but I could live with it. The m@rketing 1ndustry, hollow shell of smelly useless bullshit though it may be, is the cornerstone of North American capitalism and it boggles the mind to think about the white-collar unemployment that would slam down on this continent if it was flushed down the shitter for the shit it was tomorrow.
What I can't live with is last night's announcement that when Batman, my big boss who I love, ret1res in a few months, the m0gazine is going to be practically decommissioned and our jobs will migrate to helping the t&levision ch@nnels prepare s@les p@ckages to convince @dvertisers to buy time.
Obviously, I can't countenance doing such a thing, because I'm not a big stupid whore. I'm praying to get sacked or that the change in out job descriptions is going to be so radical I can demand severance so I can cash in on EI. And considering the F-word is so frustrated with illegal shit work, we may leave Canada a little earlier than I was thinking. (Don't worry, Sugar, I'll be back for the wedding if we leave before.) My only real regret is that this boom fell while I've got an awful head cold and can hardly think through my options, outside of spending the next two months glued to the Guardian job board while I feverishly apply for - well, actually there's only one more PhD programme I'm applying to, so while I feverishly apply to one more PhD programme.
I need time to digest, but I don't look forward to seeing my co-workers this morning or our Christmas party this afternoon. One of them is getting married and another just had a baby.
10 commenti:
Urgh. Sometimes it takes something like this to give you the kick up the arse to actually *leave* the Industry, instead of hanging around like those people who make so many compromises with their ideals that it actually seems... well, *normal* to them.
Now's your chance to leap towards something much more like what you really *want* to do. Once you figure out what that is, of course.
You're absolutely right, Boom.
Since I was planning a May departure anyways, my cries of "Screw this shit! I am not a whore!" are somewhat superfluous.
But I have to say there's an element of niceness in realizing there actually is a professional line I won't cross any more in terms of ideology and my sense of self.
I'm just so good at rationalizing things that I've always wondered if that line was still there!
Wow. That is royally shitty. And you were trying so hard to suck it up and earn some cash before heading into uncertainty on foreign ground. You just had a few months left. I hope you are able to turn this to your advantage and get money out of it.
Me too, Sugar. Thank god I've been belt-tightening and looking into my options a little bit already.
Congrats, girl! Constructive dismissal sounds like a dream come true. Now you'll have time to write and relax and do whatever you want.
Do you think they wanted a bunch of you to quit?
I don't know . . . the decision seems to have come from the board, and not from the people like Batman and Robin who actually work in our office . . . in fact, my guess is Robin'd be even more pissed than I am.
I think the very real problem is that t@levision is heamorraghing ad money both to other media and through dilution. As more and more ch@nnels go on offer, you see, and @dvertisers very sensibly want to target, say, golfers on the Golf ch@nnel with golf clubs instead of wasting millions on ad time during a hockey game on TSN.
So . . . since our industry organization is already being funded with their money, they can fire researchers on their internal sales departments and use us instead.
It's economical, you see.
And it won't slow the deterioration of their industry's decline one iota.
Hi Mistress - wow, that's pretty huge. Will the c0onstructive d1smissal work you think? Good luck with it!! Thinking of you!!
Thanks, Mel! It's huge, and it isn't - in the sort of way Boom suggested it's welcome.
I just hope I can cash out a bit, and so far it's looking good. Even if not, it's better than working in sales. Selling . . . sales.
Did I mention I'm not a whore?
But didn't you say that this will happen only when your big boss retires in few months? Big organizations move slowly, and maybe there won't be any real change in your work until the time you want to quit anyway.
You're quite right, Jiri. What we got yesterday was a heads-up about the content of an official policy announcement that will come in February at our @nnual conf#rence, and Batman isn't scheduled to leave until April or May. We won't know the timeline until February and I certainly wouldn't have the grounds to claim c0nstructive d1smissal until then at least.
I think it was very nice of Robin to circulate the news so prematurely so we can digest it properly.
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