First Tech Job: The Penultimate Story

How I recursively certified myself, found myself in the CEO's office, and royally pissed off the office manager

Previously, on the Young and the Deskless:
Ten hours, ten minutes, what's the difference?
I wandered, lonely, through the cloud
Freed-up Fridays
Yer a wizard, Harry!
Destroy the Grand Poobah! Eliminate even the toughest stain!
Did I do that?
A demonstration of office-fu
Kids these days
Work your cares away; dancing's for another day...

Now read on...

 

 
Well, we're getting towards the end of my time at this job - but this isn't the last post about it. That comes later.

This post is about a stunt I pulled to achieve multiple things simultaneously for minimum effort.

---

See, I'd gotten pretty much my fill of metaphorically kicking the office manager in the neck, and had figured it was time I should be moving on. But first, there were a couple of things yet to do on my list. These included:

• Scoring some credentials for my CV and to wave around, to make the inevitable transition to another job easier and more fun; and
• Having a chat to the CEO in person, because I like doing that when I'm on the bottom of the ladder; and
• Monumentally pissing off the office manager one last time, in such a way that he couldn't do a damn thing about it.

 

 
So I used my free hours to sit back and consider how to achieve all of this together. And after a while, the answer came to me. I went to my section manager (the nice one), noted that I had a lot of vacation time coming to me, and asked for a week off. Given that this would decrease the amount of drama occurring when the office manager (her boss) was in my vicinity, she readily agreed. And I went back to my desk and made a couple of long-distance calls, then booked a flight.

On the day before my vacation, I called up the list of all the innovations and ideas that staff had submitted to HQ over the preceding months. Then I spent some time with an office printer and some thin cardboard, and walked the results out to my car during the lunch break. I was ready.

 

 
The weekend saw me on a red-eye flight out of the city, and headed for the nation's capital. There was a friend there who was willing to cover accommodation, and I didn't need more than a sleeping bag in a spare room - apart from a standard business suit, all my props fit into a single clipboard, and everything else was in my head.

Monday, I started. You see, the names of the controlling Board - the CxO people - were available on the office intranet. As were those of their secretaries. And there was a corporate phone book where you could look up extensions all across the country. And it seemed that an awful lot of the CxOs's secretaries had received phone calls a week or two ago, asking politely for ten minutes on the relevant Board member's schedule, if they would be so kind.

This included the CEO.

So I spent Monday through Wednesday happily chatting with the Ultra-Bosses about this and that, having prepared some conversational topics relevant to their area and using it as an excuse to bring them up to speed on my home state, which was the furthest away from HQ and pretty much never ever got visited. I was the courier from the far frontier, and happy to play up the angle that people at home would love to hear all about anything coming down the pipeline. Thusly, I gave myself a crash course in talking to CxOs and picking up relevant HQ-specific jargon, phrases, and mindsets.

Then came Thursday.

 

 
Thursday, I met the head of the Innovation and Ideas program. As I suspected, she'd never actually talked to any of the staff who had submitted anything. After all, they were out in the public-contact offices and state offices, not in the National office.

Well, I told her, I have an Innovative Idea. Why not make a little award, like a certificate, for the person who submitted the most ideas in a year? It'd give the program a little publicity, a little boost, a little legitimacy. It might even encourage more submissions, which had been tailing off.

Why yes, she thought, this would be an excellent idea!

Great, I said. Because according to the data of the first year of the program, the person who submitted the most ideas in the entire country is... me. And as fate (and an office printer which took thin cardboard) would have it, I coincidentally have here with me a fully designed and printed certificate stating so, needing only your signature. Of course, I'd be more than happy to provide details and assist the I&I program with any writeups it wanted!

She signed it. Stage One: Complete.

 

 
Friday was the big one. Friday, I met with the CEO. I'd managed to get onto her calendar purely because she was new, she had been appointed from outside the Service, she was interested in shaking things up, and she'd never before had a bottom-rung employee ask to talk to her directly about something other than a complaint. This made me oddly intriguing, and I got my ten minutes.

I spent the time rabbiting about a half-assed idea for rewarding employees who generated cost savings with either a percentage in cash or access to things like spare executive furniture and better coffee makers for the office. I didn't expect it to go anywhere (although if it had, I would have milked that sucker like a dairy cow), and was fine with having her shoot it so full of holes it could have auditioned for the Miss Swiss Cheese swimsuit competition. It was all smokescreen, anyway. My real reason for being there was to be seen as a really nice guy. A solid, reliable, dependable employee who really liked the organisation, and was enthusiastic about the direction the CEO was taking it in. Because as we finished up, she walked me out past her secretary, and at that moment I asked if I could get a photo of us together. With this camera I just happened to have brought along with me.

There was a loooooong pause. I grinned brainlessly at the secretary, who gave her boss a look which said Aw, give the kid a break and something to show his friends. And ten seconds later, I had a photo of me and the CEO, standing in the CEO's chambers in the heart of central HQ. Stage Two: Complete.

I flew home, with my certificate (which I'd laminated, after photocopying it and its signature a couple dozen times onto other thin pieces of cardboard) and my photo. I spent the weekend having the photo blown up to A4 size and framed. Monday, I took it to work.

 

 
Now, what I hadn't mentioned to this point was that the desk I had been given was about fifteen feet away from the office manager's little glassed-in mini-office. He could see me and everything on my desk every time he walked out his door.

I put that photo of me and the CEO up exactly where his eye would fall whenever he looked my way. And I made sure that everyone in my section (and thus via gossip, everyone in the office) saw both that photo and the "official certificate of excellence signed by the I.I. board member" where it was pinned up in pride of place. EVERYONE knew where I'd been, and who I'd talked to, and it looked a lot like the Very Top Brass had taken something of a personal shine to me. Stage Three: COMPLETE.

Soon after, the office manager took his first vacation in over a decade. And I launched my final and most Machiavellian plan of my time working in that place.

...and that is going to be my very last story - at this office, anyway. It would be eight years before I returned to the city.

 

 
But that, and everything that came after, is a story for another time.

 

 
tl;dr: "I'm certified because I say I'm certified. Also, screw you."
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