A Starling In Velour

I haven’t worked for The Starling for almost a month now, and it’s been a beautiful and wonderful thing! I love my new position and my new bosses are very Non-Starling Like. 

Unfortunately, The Starling remains firmly engrossed within my life through no fault of my own. 

The other day I even had to give her a rather stern talking to via email (yet still only half the sternness of the talking to I wished I’d been able to give her when I quit). I won’t give two much context, because it really does become plainly evident as you read through first the email from The Starling and then my own.

Keep in mind, I haven’t worked here in over a month. One glorious month.

Her email below:

We need your help immediately as Coworker is unable to get into the company’s facebook, twitter, and in addition Client’s fan facebook page.

Coworker needs to be made an administrator.

We are in a dilemma and would appreciate an immediate response.

— The Starling

And now for my response:

Starling,

Though your dilemmas ceased to be my dilemmas on August 31st, I consider Coworker and Coworker friends and have done my best to make myself available to them for any questions they might have had. In fact, I told them to feel free to message me if they had trouble working with any of the social media systems. I left the office with the user names and passwords for the two accounts (facebook and twitter) I used on a daily basis, and when I left these accounts were working. Coworker first notified me via GChat on September 19th that the Facebook page had deleted he and Coworker as page admins. I told Coworker that I would look into it and I have. The same with the Twitter account. Again, both were working when I left your office. 

I’ve gotten questions from your office on a fairly regular basis on various things since leaving, and I’ve tried to be understanding about it because I did leave suddenly. Plus, I know in the end Coworker and Coworker have to answer to you and I don’t necessarily wish that on anyone. However, with this Facebook and Twitter issue I feel the need to make this incredibly clear to you: I do not work for you anymore.

I have a full time job and I do not have the time to field your phone calls during the work day. Nor do I think you have any business contacting me on my personal email —an email address I know for certain I purposely never provided you with— trying to get a hold of me during the work day, when I had just explained my plan of action to Coworker and Coworker. My answers were not going to change in the ten minutes between my emailing and messaging with them and the period when you both emailed and called me. Nor did I require two voice mails and three missed calls from you at the end of my workday. I don’t have immediate access to Facebook at work, and I wasn’t going to take any more time out of my incredibly busy day to cater to the demanding needs of someone I no longer work for.

Whether you were aware or not, I’ve already been back to the office once to help troubleshoot a computer issue (an issue that wouldn’t arise if you would simply purchase the necessary program and you weren’t forcing your employees to run an illegal one), but I’ve spent the past few days being bombarded with Facebook and Twitter questions. The issue is no one’s fault but the respective companies as far as I can tell, and without some sort of consulting fee, I will not be coming in to the office to troubleshoot. Besides, any troubleshooting ideas I come up with can be done from any computer.

I have written to Facebook as I told Coworker that I would, explained my theories as to what went wrong with both accounts, and gave my ultimate suggestion to him concerning twitter which was to simply create a new account. Barring hearing back from Facebook, this is all I am doing concerning these matters and I hope you realise how lucky you are that I’m even willing to do that. I left the office with working systems that Coworker and Coworker were managing to update, none of this is my problem, and given the headache (ie, you) I’m beginning regret getting re-involved in the first place. 

Also, I think you should know that though you told me on your second voice mail that the office had lost access to Client’s Facebook and Twitter as well, I confirmed with Coworker that this is not the case. You would do well to make sure you have a basic understanding of everything before calling someone repeatedly to complain and ask for help.

I will inform the office as soon as I hear something back from Facebook.

— Me

I had intended for this to be a three part post, but this morning gave me a lovely part four coda to add on in the coming week. I swear, if I didn’t have a blog to update with this craziness I would probably just sit in a corner and cry.

More to come later this week!

Details (and the final part of my exodus, plus a few ‘bonus material’ posts) to follow. 

So in June 2010 I accepted a position as an intern at this place called (CTC). It was four days a week and paid $200 a week. With my side gigs coaching and umping softball in the summer, then reffing soccer in the fall, and coaching skating in the winter I figured it’d not only be a good chance to learn an industry semi related to my major, but it would also be a good supplemental income. 

And hey, it was only going to be a six month commitment! If I hated it, I would leave in December and be done with it. What could possibly be bad about this? Most kids fresh out of college were lucky to get an unpaid internship.

Yeeeeeeeah, the rose coloured glasses did not last long with this one.

I came into CTC as a replacement for an employee who’d left a few weeks before me, who’d been a replacement for another employee that had left earlier in 2010. One of the guys I worked with was a replacement for another employee who’d left in 2010. Over the year I was there I saw four people come into the office and three leave. All of these guys were actually pretty wonderful people who I still talk to and grab drinks with on a regular basis. Most of us all had one thing in common…

We found our boss impossible to work with and/or be around.

I don’t know why I stayed as long as I did. Our boss was out of the office a lot, and I think whenever she was gone I would just say to myself, “oh, it’s going to get better” or “oh, I can deal with this.” Except, how does one actually deal with being told that Muslims should proven themselves to be good people after 9/11, or being yelled at by a woman insistent upon the fact that Mormon is spelled with an A. (To be honest, I’m not sure which incident pisses me off more in retrospect.)

Anyway, I quit the other day after finding a new job where it seems that everyone is a healthy amount of sane and quite lovely, to be perfectly honest. Quitting CTC was (and continues to be) and adventure in and of itself, and I’ll get to telling that story. But for those of you who might be new to my adventures in the backwaters of the entertainment industry, a time line of the crazy leading up to me quitting:

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[Voicemail]

The Starling: The fact that you are taking three days to get your wisdom teeth out is very unfair. Now that you’re out of the office for the rest of the week, I am having to get up at eight o’clock each morning and will have to do work throughout the day. It’s very unfair to me.