gnrgh.

Ok, I would like it if MT had a privacy option so I could post things that only friends could see, except I have no idea how that would work, so anyway I’m posting here to rant.

My new boss is an idiot. Or perhaps he’s just a jerk and a micromanager; anyway, he’d really rather those of us who don’t work in the office did work in the office, and he’s already laid off (or rather, failed to re-hire) a contractor who’d been with the company more than 3 years, because the guy works out of Minnesota.

He followed that up with asking if Veronica (the other out-of-town HTMLer who works with me) and I would be willing to move back to the Bay Area. Well, that’s a big fat no: we just both bought houses, and if we’d wanted to live in the Bay we wouldn’t have left, would we? Since we’re full-time employees I think he’s going to have a much harder time getting rid of us than he did getting rid of Mike, since Mike /was/ a contractor. But still. It doesn’t lie easy.

And now he’s trying to get rid of the guy who does our graphics and site design for us. He envisions me (us?) spending at least 50% of my time on graphics and site design. If that’s a 50% for just me, ok, well, that’s half Eric (the graphics guy)’s job right there. If it’s 50% for me /and/ Veronica, that pretty much wipes out Eric’s job.

Okay, well, on one hand, I really enjoy /doing/ site design and that sort of thing. On the other, Eric does things I don’t know how to do and don’t have a burning need to learn (flash movies, f’rex). Furthermore, Eric, being a graphics guy, has access to a whole lot of stuff Veronica and I don’t: stock photography, fonts, clipart, the sorts of things that are used to build sites.

And the whole idea of stealing somebody’s job out from under him just pisses me off. I’m practically certain Larry (the boss) would say, “No, of course that’s not what I’m doing,” but I’ve /had/ a job where I taught someone else to do what I did, and then you know what? They didn’t need me anymore. Go figure. I would be *so* fucking reluctant to share any of the wealth, if I were Eric. I’m reluctant to share it and I’m *not* Eric!

This is incredibly frustrating. What makes it worse is I’m already bored and tired with this job and this new crap makes me just want to say, “Oh, fuck it, I quit,” which of course I cannot possibly afford to do. It might be possible if there were any JOBS for people like me in Alaska, but there aren’t. So, *grrr*! I don’t know what to do! Grrr!

Somebody referred, in a meeting last week, to talking to Larry about some subject or other as “falling on your sword”, which doesn’t give a girl a lot of faith, either. It wasn’t even somebody in our department, which makes me think he’s just not real well-liked. My meta-boss, who used to be very cool, has now gone completely hands-off and everything is Up To Larry. Grrrgngngngh.

*sigh* okay. Rant over. At least for now. :P