The Death of the Good Old Order Process

I work for a large multinational computer corporation. I'm not employed by them because I'm outsourced. So I work for this large corporation, but I'm paid by another company. The company I'm paid by is actually owned by several other companies, including BDO, and advertising firm which helped bankroll Bush's election campaign the last time around.

Around the beginning of February, the company's president (this is the company I'm paid by), a figurehead more than an executive, informed us that we had not been successful in winning the contract we had worked the previous three months for. The computer company we work for had decided that the system used for our particular area of business was antiquated and, rather than just telling us to upgrade to the new system they had picked, saw a decent opportunity for a brand new contract (and thus competition).

This competition was completely and utterly fair. On the one side, our office in Barcelona: cheaper than London, we're experienced in the job and The Process. On the other side, an office in Prague, much cheaper than Barcelona, run by a Partner firm of the big computer company we are working for. The partner won the business. Our president warned us that in four months, they may have to start letting people go.

Now that is about seven weeks away and, though I'm confident I'll be working until September, I thought I might keep a record of a dying office.

First observation: The fact that I can write this.

When I joined the company on September the 10th last year, the work was very hard. We handle the order process for our large computer company. We're referred to in official mails as "members of the family", and we help other large companies order computes from the large company we work for. We're not Sales, and we have absolutely no contact with the clients we assist. We are completely internal, and invisible to the customer in the outside world. All we do is process orders in an ancient computer system: my job is to help large companies buy computers from another large company. Or to help a large company send computers to other large companies. At any rate, the work was tough, we didn't chat much, internet surfing was official warning territory, and we did what we were told.

Since our president's address explaining the mystery of how a much bigger company than ours (the one which pays us), a partner of the large company we work for, with plans to set up in Prague, the cheap labour capital of Europe, had managed to win a contract away from us; since then, standards have slipped at work. People talk all the time. Me included. It's great. People don't have that much work to do. Partly due to Process, which I'll explain at a later date, being improved and partly due to customers being shifted to the new system, the number of enquiries we receive (the bulk of the work we do) has fallen suddenly. Now I can spend half an hour typing this, and I genuinely have nothing better to be doing. This is going to carry on for months. Management don't say a word, though it's impossible that they haven't noticed the decline in our work ethic: this is a sinking ship, and they can't punish us for playing the odd card of games (or whatever it is that pirates did) as it goes down.

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