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America's Worst Christmas Parties
Ant writes "Slate Magazine asked its readers to submit reports of horrible office Christmas parties, gifts, and bonuses. Of nearly 200 submissions, they've chosen quite a few tales for The Corporate Scrooge Contest Results ... and they're not pretty. From the article: 'A contract consultant sends word that the company to which he is currently assigned recently sent out an e-mail to some 2,000-odd consultants. The company would give away two $100 gift cards--to two of the brave souls who would commit to work 80 hours between Dec. 18 and Dec. 31. As our correspondent noted: "Hey, if you work Christmas, we'll put you in a pool of 2,000 other folks to maybe win a hundred bucks."'"
HP has to be up there. In the four years I worked there, not only was there no bonus, they shut the office down that week, forcing you to either go without pay (even if you were salaried, your pay was docked) or take sick days.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I work at a daily newspaper as an artist and web developer (primarily) - high stress, low pay.
We got $20 Chamber of Commerce gift certificates. Woo. I actually wouldn't care if my hours were decent - while I am supposed to only work 8 hours a day (and regulations state that I can't work more than 6 hours without a break), I have many days where I end up working late when everybody else leaves.
Take, for instance, the day before Thanksgiving. It started at 9 AM, and went until about 12:30 AM Thanksgiving morning, with no break. 15.5 hours. The overtime sucked, too (thanks to taxes).
This friday everybody in the office was told that they could leave at 3 assuming the paper was done. Of course, this means that hourly employees lose a couple hours work. Thankfully, though, my day wasn't done - not even close - at 3 PM. Most people left - one of the artists stuck around and helped for a while, but there wasn't much she could do, so she left too. I got home about 7:30 PM.
Of course, since I'm just a 5 minute walk from the office (I couldn't afford a car and gas, anyway), I'm the one who gets called in whenever something needs to be fixed before the paper can print.
Hooray. $20 that can only be used locally at select places. That makes me feel really valuable. Sad part is, corporate actually has a policy against Christmas bonuses.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I work for Big Oil, and this year every employee in the state got a gift worth $450, after taxes. Yep, they paid for the gift via our paychecks, deducted taxes from the additional money (it was like $620 gross) and deducted the $450 after taxes for the gift. I.E. the paycheck was no larger than normal but you got a $450 gift with taxes already paid. I thought that was pretty nice.
We also received 'end of the year' checks for $1,000 after taxes and our bonus is usually around 10% of our yearly gross (so anywhere from $11,000 to $20,000 for most employees).
When I take a second to think about it, I really consider myself fortunate. I love this company.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
When advice on to how to deal with the current state of the employment market is summed up as, "Don't expect anything and you won't be dissappointed", perhaps it is time for workers to get pissed off, and start doing something about it.
Where I work the christmas party is $35. This year the ticket count was so low that one of the people in charge sent a company-wide email telling people it was in their "best interest" to attend.
Did I mention we get nothing in terms of bonuses, etc?
When I worked for a division of the world's largest media company, bonus money was given to middle managers to divide up amongst their staff, including themselves. A few years ago, I saw the email announcing the amount. My manager was given $9000 to divide amongst a department of 11 people. We received half gallon jugs of maple syrup from her parents' farm, she received $9000. The best part was that she failed to notice the stamp across the label that read "Quality Control: Rejected". The next year, it was certificates thanking us for a $10 donation to a local soup kitchen. Apparently, she thinks she's the only one who watched Seinfeld.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
I used to work for a manufacturing company that promised profit sharing if profits were above a certain amount. For years, they never had to pay out, but it was always mentioned by management as an incentive. Then a really good year came along, and we crossed the profit sharing line with several months to go before the end of the year. Every month, the profits were tallied, and the profit sharing pool grew, and grew.
December hits, and our company buys another company for 8+ million dollars, in cash. Two weeks later, they pay off some big loans with cash, eating almost a million dollars in pre-payment penalties on top of the loan amounts. The profit sharing pool drops to zero on the last week of the month.
Christmas comes and they pass out $15 gift certificates for Safeway as appreciation for all of our hard work. Most of the certificates were collected and given to the local food bank as a mass protest. I haven't paid attention to bonus programs or incentive programs since.