I loved my last job. I mean, it was a seriously kick ass job. I was the Executive Assistant and I set my own tasks, answered only to the President and supported the various Vice Presidents and company officers. I was also the Internal Sales Trainer and filled in at that position during the periods it was vacant. I was also the Network and Communications Assistant. The second part of that meant I managed the phone and email systems. The first part was a bit of a misnomer as the Network Admin was a Unix guy so I was the defacto Network Admin for the Windows computers, servers and supported systems. I also handled analysis and defect tracking for Quality Assurance, wrote apps and databases for QA, the Lab, Sales and Accounts Receivable in addition to scheduling and setting up the Christmas Party (yes, we had an actual Christmas party, not a non-denominational winter get together) and the summer picnic.

I know what y'all are thinking right now. An office of 10 people where I was the Jack of All Trades. No, my friends, it was a manufacturing company with a couple hundred employees and over $10 million in annual sales. I just worked like a dog in my many roles. And I loved it. There was always something to do and always something to learn. I was depended upon by the majority of the non-union staff and a goodly portion of the union boys (and gals) as well. It paid squat but we made do with the salary and I was compensated with just about any training class I could at least partially justify.

So why did I leave this job that I liked so well? I'm glad you asked. Partially it was because we were aiming to move down south. Partially it was because that meager salary was getting closer and closer to not quite covering things. Partially it was their fault. You see, they destroyed my faith in the management and direction of the company. They lied to me, y'all.

It started one day as I walked through the plant floor and Stephanie pulled me to the side to ask about her printer. She was the team leader for the QA insectors and she couldn't print out the needed inspection requirements at their work station. I didn't have time to get into it right then so I unplugged their printer, rerouted their default printer to print to another station and told her I'd come back to fix it later.

About an hour later Stephanie came up to my office. Not wanting to wait for me to get back down to the plant floor she had plugged the printer back in to try to get it to work herself. It turned out that the problem was a simple paper jam and the printer being unplugged and plugged back in was all it took for it to start spitting out a few blank sheets and then a few unblank sheets that were left in the print queue. The unblank sheets were the problem as they showed a girl's face with a massive cock in her mouth.

This was a problem. Stephanie was one of the coolest grandmas I've ever known but this went a mile or two beyond what she considered appropriate in the workplace. I concurred.

I got some info from Stephanie. She was the first one in from her team. It was highly unlikely that anybody from another first shift team had been on their workstation. I asked her where the picture was now and she told me that she had gone to the third shift captain to complain. He had taken it and told her he'd handle it but she didn't believe him. That was mainly because he crumpled it up and tossed it in the dumpster on his way to the locker room.

We went to the Executive VP and gave him the skinny. Somebody on second or third shift was surfing for porn and printing it out. The third shift captain was not going to help. He was livid. He instructed me to find and document everything I could about it because this was going to get somebody fired and all of the I's had to be dotted and T's crossed to satisfy the union.

I got him everything he needed and more. Whoever it was knew enough about computers to purge the Internet Explorer cache and wipe the history when he was done. He didn't know enough though as I pulled the proxy server logs and documented every site that was accessed and the time of each infraction. I went back a month and compared my results with production information entered by workers (I had godlike access, remember) and fleshed it all out in an impossible to misinterpret report showing exactly who the possible, probable and definite abusers were. There was only one definite abuser. Any guesses?

The Executive VP was not pleased with the findings. The third shift captain was one of "his guys", one of the few actual machinists in the shop and somebody who he was grooming for bigger and better things. He had a little chat with captain third shift to get his side of the story. Then he had a meeting with all of the big guys - The President, the HR Director, all of the other VP's. After that he had a talk with me. He asked me if it was possible that somebody could just pull up one site and a bunch of others would just pop up. This is when my sinking feeling began.

Captain third shift's excuse was that he would occasionally pop up a web site as he was walking by the workstation to the laser and high intensity imaging equipment to inspect parts. That site would pop up dozens of other ones. I explained that yes, sites certainly could do this and porn sites were notorious for doing so. However, I pointed out, the logs showed a repetitive abuse with lengthy sessions. Could those have happened during lunches and breaks? Well yes, they could have. They didn't though, unless time clock abuse was also happening and what difference was there anyway? It is not okay to surf for porn on the factory floor no matter whether you are clocked in or not. I ended up defending all of the information and their resulting conclusions against the flimsiest idiotic excuses you can imagine.

I got out of that meeting and went straight to KH's office. KH was one of the salesmen and a genuinely nice guy. He was one of my biggest supporters as he had received incredible benefit from the changes I had made there. I told him that I thought upper management was going to bad for their golden boy despite the absolute evidence. I said that if they let those flimsy excuses fly it was going to be an absolute morale destroyer on the plant floor. He agreed and he wasn't happy about it. I told him if it happened I was going to be out of there within a quarter. He cautioned me against making any rash decisions.

Well, it happened. Captain third shift was moved to first shift. That's it. No firing, no suspending, no dock in pay, no nothing. Morale in QA went totally to shit. QA was mostly girls and Stephanie was their matron. Management had basically told her that she didn't matter. It was okay for the guys to search for porn on her workstation. There would be no bad repurcussions for them if they did so. Stephanie asked me to disable internet access in QA and I did. They actually used it for work purposes which was why they had been the only workstation with access. Now when they needed to look up requirements, specs, etc they would have to go into the office and get them from the QA Manager.

Management lied to me. They had absolutely no interest in justice or fair play or the morale of the plant floor or creating a decent work environment. They put favoritism ahead of the company's interest and hung out an honest hard working person to get their boy off the hook. It took me a bit over a quarter but I did get out of that job. When I said that to KH it was bravado but after it went down the way it did the job just went completely sour for me. It wasn't only the morale of the QA department that collapsed from that mishandling of the situation.