Desperate Freelancer

I had had many jobs in many different companies, working under the authority of many bosses and with many different people. After years and years of company switching and freelancing, I had developped a kind of sixth sense to discover if a company is worth working for or not.

I found myself gifted for finding out the little things they will never tell you at the recruitment interview. Things that really make the difference when you are inside.

Here is a short memento of what you should check if you get a proposal from a firm :

1.Find out who the real boss is
In many places, the highest ranking guy is rarely the real leader. There is always a sergeant that runs the place and will make your life looks like hell if you forget to pledge for allegiance. You have to know whose feet your are going to kiss before entering the arena.

2.Discover how much money the firm is playing with
Are they truly solvent or not ? Will they be able to give you a raise regurlarly or will it be painful to get a few cents more every five years ?

3.Spy out if there is a comfortable sofa somewhere
You definetly need a place to take your naps.

4.Count how many sexy colleagues you will have
It's more pleasant to work with attractive people than with ugly goblins. The more you have, the less quick you will get bored to get to work. And the more overtime you will do (which is good both for income and reputation)

That's why the finding of the sofa is also of great importance.

5. Find out how the food tastes
You will eat half your meals in the canteen or the nearby restaurants, you had better no poison yourself every lunch

6. Investigate wether your friends will be impressed by you working in this company or not
No matter what your job effectively is or what the company really does, will they think you are a lucky top gun or a pure stupid looser ?

If you want to keep some people coming for diner from time to time, you'd better choose the first option

7. Discover what the real working time slot is
Is ok to go at 5, or will you have to stay till 2 in the morning to pretend to be effective ?

It's better to know in advance if you have to cancel your subscription to the public library.

8. Search out what newspapers are available at the company
You have to know what you are going to read in the toilets. Some readings are really constipating.

9. Find out if the internet connection is restricted in some kind.
As some firms have the strange habit to limit the use of the network, believing it prevents their employees to waste their precious time surfing incongruous websites, it coud be good to have a hacker among your friends to recover a full freedom of surf.

10. Try to find how festive the company is
Do they organize parties and benders ? Well, if you have to get drunk because of your work, it's still better not to have to pay for the booze.

Big companies always have nice speeches about their Innovation Policy. How they want to make things change inside and outside the company, how they want to develop new products for customers, how they want to recruit only creative people, how they want to lead their market by beeing disruptive.. and so on. Every huge corporation has something to say about innovation.

The problem is that they all say the same thing.

I've found on Youtube an historical video dating from the sixties that shows perfectly that the main basic line has not evolved a bit for years.

I have nothing special against Xerox. Don't blame me for that. They have proven already they are innovative. But why do I have the funny intuition that today in 2007 I could find exactly the same tape in every big corporation?

The question is : if everything really changes all the times due to the innovation policy, why is the basic speech always the same ?

Maybe If you want to prove you are really concerned about innovation, you should start talking about it in a different way.

Do some of you know companies that held an innovative way of speaking about innovation ? I would be interested in finding a company that doesn't serve the typical bla-bla.

Stress has become an meaningful part of business life. It comes nowadays with the normal package of any employee arriving in a company.

You could get stressed for many reasons : The clients shortened the planning of your project in the last moment possible. You have been announced that there will be lays offs in your departement. A powerful virus is sending hardcore sexually explicit emails to all your contact list. The copy machine is out of order because someone stuck half a ton of toilet paper into it. Or just because your boss is having a headache and he knows you ate his last aspirin.

Contrary to what is usually said in books, you can't avoid stress, you can't neither "handle" it or turn it into something positive.

The only thing you can do is to push it up to someone else. Yep.

Stress is physiological process inherited of the time we lived in caverns wearing beast's furs instead of grey suits and ties. The aim of stress is to help us fight against any incoming danger. So, needless to say, you won't get rid of it unless you swap from the prey's role to the hunter's one.

If you have a mananing position or an acknowledge leader status, it would be an easy job. Just jump on one of your collegue's desk and scream orders like hell. You will immediatly feel better. Another solution is to bite his leg first, then bark like a rabid wolf.

If you can't claim a hierarchically superior position, It will be harder.

But, use your imagination, there is plenty of ways to stress someone. Here is a few things you can do :

- Make a silly phonecall to HR manager pretending to be Samuel (the best engineer in the place, the one your company can't afford to lose) and threatening him to quit if you don't get a raspberry pie brought to you at once.

- Go ask your boss if he knows about the missing files in the accounting departement.

- Cut the power in the main meeting room during the shareholder's annual congress, and then lock everyone in.

- Ask your office's neighbour to come and keep and eye on the installation of a new software. You have been called in the big boss' office urgently to answer a few technical questions asked by a V.I.P. You can't let your PC without supervision but you promise you won't be long. As soon as he agrees, take advantage of him watching your screen to launch a full reinstallation of the operating system of HIS computer, including the whole formating of the datas.

Since I've been working as a blogger for Delconsulting I finally got myself familiar with computers. Still, I have succeeded in not running away when I see one. But there is so many other modern devices I have to approach...

Recently, I learned how to use a photocopy machine.

So surprising it may seems, this machine enables you to produce a perfect copy of a document at an incredible speed. Moreover, you can make 3, 4 copies or even more. Almost as much as you wish. And you don't need to retype the whole thing or print it again.

After many tries, I did understand the best way to make the machine do what it was conceived for.

Let me explain to you which is the best way, according to me, to use a Xerox machine. Let's first imagine you have only one sheet to copy (we will deal with a massive copy matter once you assimilated the basics).

1. Open the cap and put the document you wish to copy.

2. Select the number of copies you want.

3. Push the copy button. (It should be the biggest button among a set of unuseful and ridiculous buttons)

4. The machine makes funny noises, and here comes out the copy. Perfect shot. A wonderful replica of your sheet. Can you imagine something easier ?

You got that ? You think you can try a multiple sheets documents ? Ok, let's try.

1. Put your document in the document handler.

2. Select the number of copies you want.

3. Push the copy button. (The very same)

4. Try to figure out what the twinkling error message on the screen really means

5. Fill the main tray with blank paper. Better, fill all the trays with as much paper as you can. Fill them to the brim.

6. Push the copy button again.

7. Put your fingers in your ears while the copy machine makes an absolutely awful noise of burning wreckage..

8. Open the main door, the one you saw opened by so-called specialists. Get the jammed papers out. Take the stapples of your document off (why doesn't the machine never warn you about that ?). Smooth the crumpled sheets, and put adhesive on the torn pages.

9. Set the document back in the document handler. Add one more copy to get a proper document to replace the one you destroyed.

10. Push the copy button again.

11. Read the same meaningless error message again. It was not about the paper after all.

12. Try to replace the ink cartridge. Open the secondary door, the one you saw opened by real specialists with high-level copier-mending accreditations, get the empty cartridge out. No. The black one, not the red one. Put the red one back in its place, without forcing it. Without I said.

13. Go the toilets urgently to save your shirt. Act as if having a shirt maculated with red is a normal situation and not as if you could be responsible of a mass-murder.

14. Wash your shirt with soap, dry it with toilet paper.

15. Hope it won't get worse. Try to convince yourself that having a irregularly faded pink half wet shirt is definitely a better position for your career.

16. Forget about it and go back to the copy-machine bare-chested. Don't pay attention to people whistling for you.

17. Explain to the trainee who is hanging round the machine, that YES YOU ARE DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM !!!!!!

18. Be tough but don't let anger come over you.

19. Replace the black cartridge with a new one. Close the secondary door.

20. Push the copy button once more.

21. Pray.

22. Look around to check if somebody else has heard that horrible noise of lethal breakdown.

23. Open the main door. Try to unjam your tie you forgot in the document handler while you went to clean you shirt.

24. Don't tear everything off.

25. Too late. Check if there is any witness in the surrondings.

26. Get rid of any proof you used the Xerox machine. Get your tie back. Destroy your dirty shirt. Put on a new one instead. Remove the jammed document from the copy-machine and burn it. As well as the few illegible sheets the machine managed to print. Breathe. And quickly distance yourself from the machine.

27. Print the original document again. Try to find someone hierarchically inferior and give him to the doc to copy.

28. Pray he will be luckier than you. If not, stand behind him and have a good laugh.

Some people get used to work so much they become addicted. They are called workalcoholics. Like every other junkies, they need their shoot every day. But we all have it, don't we ? (unless your are a child or a lucky retired person). Ok, most of us don't work on week ends. But we keep thinking about it, so it almost the same.

So what is a difference between a workalcoholic and an standard employee who accomplishes his duty properly ? The difference is ... workalcoholics just don't want to quit. Whereas the standard worker could easily after a week or two of holidays start to imagine he could do without his job, the druggies sort things out to never have a week holiday. Yep.

Here is a little test I made to check If you got yourself contaminated. Please, read the following statements and ask yourselves if you feel they are true or not.

1. In your cellphone directory, 80% of the numbers are business contacts. The 20% others are friends you can call sometimes to give you a hand for your job. And you feel great about it.

2. The last time you had a real deep conversation with the person you are living with and you sometimes remember you are in love with (what's his/her name already ?) was... in January ? February ? 1999 ? Or something like that. But you truly remember it was dealing about your new promotion.

The last time you had a real deep conversation with your boss was yesterday.

3. You sincerely believe that your job is the best part of your week end.

4. For their first 3 months in your company, the newcomers think your are the night watchman. Until they really get into work being assigned to your department.

5. You always have so many things to do, to think about or to validate that having a clone or two would be helpful. Though, your job would be boring and so far, you can handle it.

6. It takes 3 hours to synchronize your agendas

7. You just can't let something unfinished. Especially the launchment of a new project.

8. Some people in your company believe your are a zombie. Not because you are pale and terrifying but because your are contagious.

9. You like it so much when tasks are urgent and challenging that you settle an email alert every ten minutes to put pressure on you for every thing you have to on your to do list. Some days you spend your time checking your are late. And that gives you a wonderful boost !

10. For your son's birthday, you offered him a palm pilot to help him organize his life. Unfortunately, he couldn't read the manual because he was only 3 years old. During one minute, you did consider to lay him off for incompetence.

So. Are you or are you not ?

If you agreed with at least five of those sentences, you are one of them. But it's a normal situation in our modern society. And you could get fired for less than 3.

If you agreed with all, you should start to think it could some day become a problem.

If you thought some of the questions were perfectible, and you started rewriting them until you decided the whole process of this test should be managed differently and you settle a work group in your own company that would tackle the problem during its week ends... then it's time to get some help pal !