"30 and 30"

Got a nasty surprise yesterday at work. Our usual monthly status meeting had a strange bullet point topic that read "RAL: 30 & 30".

"Next we come to the new 'Resource Availability List.' What this is, is when you are off projects and 'on the bench' for 30 days, your name goes on this list," My manager, Kelly, began. "We shop this list around internally, to see if we can't find you some work within the company." Following that was two paragraphs dancing around the words "If you're not billable after 30 days on the list, we let you go."

We lost some deals that we were banking on, and now we've got more staff than we need, and we're already a great deal over-budget for the year. So first we do the list, and we'll probably have to do a layoff at the end of the year.

One of the bolder employees asked the right question: "How bad off are we? Let's say that we're all 100% billable for the rest of the year. Would we still have to do layoffs?" Yes. It's that bad.

Well, that's a real encouraging line of thought: Even if you're billable and productive, the company may still lay you off right before Christmas. About as effective as a Yellow Terror Alert: Something bad is going to happen, but we can't tell you when or where or to whom, so just go about your business and be "vigilant".

So now being billable is now paramount to all else. I've been working on a project for someone named Tina for three weeks, and she's yet to approve me to bill the project, or return any e-mails from me asking her to do so. In light of the new warning, I decided to take it to the next level.

Boss-Lady Kelly was happily chatting up some other project managers in the Cube-hall when I walked up. She turned to me and grinned "Hey Chris, what can I do for you?"

I grinned back. "I need you to get medieval on someone."

Her face fell. "You want me to get what?" The other project managers left quietly. They might have caught the reference to "Pulp Fiction", but it was definitely lost on my boss.

I switched to business dialog and explained that I wanted her to "escalate" this Tina for not "allocating me to the billable PlanView buckets". She visibly relaxed and promised to take it up with accounting. I thanked her and walked back to my cube. Sometimes you just have to give your co-workers the acid test and see if they respond.