Ever work at a place where a supervisor called you at home and told you you were driving your mini van to the next county? He hadn’t cleared you for time off with pay. He hadn’t even cleared pay for your gas. He just needed you to empty your car that night. Even the next morning, the managers weren’t sure about either the time or the gas.
When I complained, my manager defended that supervisor’s professionalism.
That’s what it was like, working for Yahoo! Search Marketing. As it turned out, I was told after the fact that I’d be using a vacation day—as if there weren’t better ways to use a vacation than driving a load of donated goods to firefighters to make Jerry Yang look good.
I only found out later when I complained that although we worked next to Burbank airport, the supervisor thought it was too much trouble to rent a van. Why have someone else clean the car, pay to lease a car, pay for insurance and drive when you can have an employee do it on their off hours and vacation time?
The week after that incident, as a reward, for that sleepless night spent cleaning and washing my car, I was told I could never volunteer for any charity-related activity again. Up until then I had been the co-chair of the Yahoo volunteer committee. My co-chair was the supervisor who made the decision to take my mini van on a trip that I hadn’t expected to go on. I was also one of the thousands laid off a few months later in mid-February.
What do you expect? This is the same place where a manager prevented me from changing my Tuesday-Saturday schedule to my preferred Sunday-Thursday for two years. Employees couldn’t turn in a form for a schedule change request; they asked their managers. My manager just decided that my interest in taking business classes on Saturdays wasn’t important enough and never turned in my name—for two years or eight quarterly review sessions. Was that manager punished? Of course not.
When I finally was granted permission to have a schedule change, her manager demanded that I never, ever ask for Sunday off.
The reason for this? I had taken too many Saturdays off the previous year. I pointed out it wasn’t written down anywhere (like our contracts) that we had a limited number of weekend days we could take off. He replied that managers would take aside an employee when they had reached their limit. My manager never did and managers have to sign off on each vacation day request. So you might ask, if I got permission, why was I being restricted for doing what my manager had given me permission to do?
The person I was trading schedules with wasn’t under the same restriction. No one in my department was. This wasn’t a secret. Other managers knew and instead of stepping in and objecting, in my opinion, they took advantage of the situation.
When my aunt died and I asked to take a Tuesday off, I was told I was too late by my immediate manager even though it was a Saturday. I persisted. She relented. When the software designed to measure our productivity had obvious problems—showing one thing to the manager and another to the employee, I was held to the score I could not see and put on probation. A request to have the equation used for each value so I could make an Excel spreadsheet was ignored.
Even when I could show that the score might change—going up or down for the same day in less than 24 hours, it didn’t matter. I found that other people had noticed the problem and just worked around it. I had been there before, working during lunch and overtime without pay in order to make my quotas. The first time, I had thought I was at fault. The second time, I wasn’t sure any more. The third time, I knew that the problem was in the methodology used to determine the metrics. I wasn’t willing to work any more overtime without pay.
When I challenged that manager in question about the no-Sundays off policy, he sent me an email. I responded with legal questions and cc’d his supervisors and HR in Sunnyvale. I got a month of silence and then the no-Sundays policy was rescinded without an apology or admission of wrongdoing. Instead, I was given a bonus and told that I talked too much on the phone among other things—things that were subjective.
I went home and cried, basically having a nervous breakdown. What I should have done was complain to Fair Employment. What I did instead is try to go through the bureaucracy of Yahoo’s HR department and workers comp.
Yahoo! Search Marketing was founded in Pasadena. One of several ideas that came out of Idealab, it was the first company to over pay-for-placement services on Internet search terms. Y!SM wasn’t always under the purple flag. Beginning as GoTo in 1998, it was renamed Overture in 2001. In 2003, it became part of Yahoo! and eventually its name was changed eventually to Yahoo! Search Marketing in 2005. I was there through the launch of a project called Panama and laid off in 2008 while on workers comp sick leave, having asked for arbitration as was required by my contract. My lay off was the first response given by Yahoo to that request.
According to Wikipedia, Panama, a new online advertising platform created by Yahoo! was an effort to close the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising dollars, a fast-growing and incredibly lucrative business that Google dominates. The platform provides advertisers with a dashboard on which they can manage their marketing campaigns and includes tools that can suggest how advertisers budget their money. It uses a quality index by which advertisers can see how the system will rank an ad and understand how effective their campaign is. This replaced the simplistic Overture algorithm that ranked text ads according to how much advertisers bid for keyword searches by users and this attempts to give higher ranking based on click through rates as well as bids like Google. I paraphrase Wikipedia to ensure that I am not giving away company secrets.
If you’ve listened to the financial news, you know that Panama has not been successful and Yahoo is under threat by Microsoft and has turned to Google for help.
Clearly Yahoo! is having some problems, but the problems are not just in its failed business models, but also in its failure to understand the laws that govern industrial relations in the state of California as well as some basic, old business rules.
On the prowl in this locale since 22 June 2008:
10 October 2008
07 October 2008
Theater Review: Inside Privates Lives for a Slightly Catty Characterizations of 20th Century Newsmakers
You’ll be asked to turn off your cell phones, but for the Sunday evening performances of “Inside Private Lives” at the Fremont Centre Theatre, you don’t have to zip your lips. Backtalk is heavily encouraged.
After all, the six people who will make up the bill are from a cast of 16 newsmakers who often sought attention.
The cast of characters are all from the 20th century and changes from night to night. While they break the fourth wall and speak, touch and even dance with audience members, they do not interact with each other. One character at a time, tells his or her story. The night I attended, Kristin Stone opened the evening as Christine Jorgensen, the first transgender personality. During her heyday in the 1950s the joke was: "Christine Jorgensen went abroad, and came back a broad." Jorgensen is disappointed to find that Playboy magazine isn’t interested in having her as a centerfold and chides the audience members as Hugh Hefner and other Playboy related people for their lack of interest. Stone is charming and polished, the model of the June Cleaver-type of woman who was just naughty enough to become a nightclub act (Jorgensen died in 1989)
Adam LeBow was a sincere, young Elia Kazan, who is meeting with his friends who had been in the Communist cell with him. He’s been recalled before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee where he will names names, an act that will save him from being blacklisted but would follow him for decades.
While Kazan and Jorgensen are polite, Leonora Gershman’s Julia Phillips is a foul-mouthed bitter woman on cocaine, railing at the executives who are firing her even though she won an Academy Award in 1973 for producing “The Sting” (an honor shared with Tony Bill and her then-husband Michael Phillips). She also was one of the producers of the 1977 “Taxi Driver” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and would, in 1991, write “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” a book that topped the New York Times bestseller list but named high profile names in Hollywood.
For those who don’t remember, former president Jimmy Carter had a younger brother, Billy (Bryan Safi), who was best known for swilling beer and behaving badly. With his brother running for re-election, Billy has just been told he won’t be allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention and proceeds to get drunk.
David Shofner as David Koresh isn’t mesmerizing, yet does have the kind of confidence one would expect from a man who was accused of taking young girls as his wives and concubines and made Waco, Texas a fiery inferno in 1993. Shofner’s Koresh has just announced the abolishment of all marital bonds and his intention to become the husband of all the faithful women.
Mary MacDonald as Marge Schott has come before a committee hoping to be cleared to adopt a child. The infamous foul-mouthed former owner of the Cincinnati Reds was well-known for her love of her St. Bernard, her racist slurs and her praise of Hitler who began good, but just went too far. MacDonald’s Schott is a tough woman, who wants to be one of the boys and is utterly oblivious to the effect of her cringe-worthy sentiments.
Phillips died in 2002. Kazan in 2003. Carter in 1988. Schott, in 2004. None of the characters are living.
Other characters who might appear would be King Edward VIII (Freddy Douglas), Ann Landers (Diana Morrison), evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (Molly Hagan), Channeler of the spirit “Seth” Jane Roberts, (Maddisen Krown), Tupperware Home Sales innovator Brownie Wise (Eileen O'Connell), IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands (Paul Thomas Ryan), and the woman Edward gave up his throne for, Wallis Simpson (Shelia Wolf).
Under the direction of Lee Michael Cohn, the segments are funny and generally flow although with audience participation some of the pacing is unpredictable. Yet on the night I attended, the performers handled the questions and minor heckling with grace and in character.
Originally opening in Los Angeles in October 2006, this production was performed in New York City and was part of the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Inside Private Lives continues until sometime in November at the Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena. Sundays, 7 p.m. General admission, $25; seniors and students $20. Call (866) 811-4111.
After all, the six people who will make up the bill are from a cast of 16 newsmakers who often sought attention.
The cast of characters are all from the 20th century and changes from night to night. While they break the fourth wall and speak, touch and even dance with audience members, they do not interact with each other. One character at a time, tells his or her story. The night I attended, Kristin Stone opened the evening as Christine Jorgensen, the first transgender personality. During her heyday in the 1950s the joke was: "Christine Jorgensen went abroad, and came back a broad." Jorgensen is disappointed to find that Playboy magazine isn’t interested in having her as a centerfold and chides the audience members as Hugh Hefner and other Playboy related people for their lack of interest. Stone is charming and polished, the model of the June Cleaver-type of woman who was just naughty enough to become a nightclub act (Jorgensen died in 1989)
Adam LeBow was a sincere, young Elia Kazan, who is meeting with his friends who had been in the Communist cell with him. He’s been recalled before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee where he will names names, an act that will save him from being blacklisted but would follow him for decades.
While Kazan and Jorgensen are polite, Leonora Gershman’s Julia Phillips is a foul-mouthed bitter woman on cocaine, railing at the executives who are firing her even though she won an Academy Award in 1973 for producing “The Sting” (an honor shared with Tony Bill and her then-husband Michael Phillips). She also was one of the producers of the 1977 “Taxi Driver” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and would, in 1991, write “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” a book that topped the New York Times bestseller list but named high profile names in Hollywood.
For those who don’t remember, former president Jimmy Carter had a younger brother, Billy (Bryan Safi), who was best known for swilling beer and behaving badly. With his brother running for re-election, Billy has just been told he won’t be allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention and proceeds to get drunk.
David Shofner as David Koresh isn’t mesmerizing, yet does have the kind of confidence one would expect from a man who was accused of taking young girls as his wives and concubines and made Waco, Texas a fiery inferno in 1993. Shofner’s Koresh has just announced the abolishment of all marital bonds and his intention to become the husband of all the faithful women.
Mary MacDonald as Marge Schott has come before a committee hoping to be cleared to adopt a child. The infamous foul-mouthed former owner of the Cincinnati Reds was well-known for her love of her St. Bernard, her racist slurs and her praise of Hitler who began good, but just went too far. MacDonald’s Schott is a tough woman, who wants to be one of the boys and is utterly oblivious to the effect of her cringe-worthy sentiments.
Phillips died in 2002. Kazan in 2003. Carter in 1988. Schott, in 2004. None of the characters are living.
Other characters who might appear would be King Edward VIII (Freddy Douglas), Ann Landers (Diana Morrison), evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (Molly Hagan), Channeler of the spirit “Seth” Jane Roberts, (Maddisen Krown), Tupperware Home Sales innovator Brownie Wise (Eileen O'Connell), IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands (Paul Thomas Ryan), and the woman Edward gave up his throne for, Wallis Simpson (Shelia Wolf).
Under the direction of Lee Michael Cohn, the segments are funny and generally flow although with audience participation some of the pacing is unpredictable. Yet on the night I attended, the performers handled the questions and minor heckling with grace and in character.
Originally opening in Los Angeles in October 2006, this production was performed in New York City and was part of the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Inside Private Lives continues until sometime in November at the Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena. Sundays, 7 p.m. General admission, $25; seniors and students $20. Call (866) 811-4111.
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