Fortune 2

On a subsequent trip to the chinese restaurant on Hewitt Drive I received this fortune.


I have had a very trying time at work. I was the president of the company Toastmasters club. For some reason that I still fail to understand the company decided that we were not allowed to communicate our meeting times, place, or try to publicize our club using the bulletin boards or the intranet. The reason given was that any solicitation would guarantee that unions would have access to the same resources through laws that require equity in access. We are a closed club (to date) where only employees were allowed to be members.

One of the members of our club, as an Information Technologies technician, took on the task of creating a sharepoint website on the intranet. We already had a website that was hosted on company computers, but we had no direct links to that website. The IT employee went to Human Resources to verify permissions to publish the page. HR declined permission to post the web page and demanded that it be deleted.

I wrote an e-mail to the president of our company and his boss, outlining the events that had occured with our dificulties with HR and being able to run the club effectively. This propted a response much quicker than I had ever thought possible. The manage of HR sent a meeting notice to me, the director of engineering, and the manager of flight sciences for a 12:30 meeting. That was only an hour after the e-mail was sent. I touched a nerve. The manager of HR opened the meeting with the inflamatory question; "What makes you think you are smart enough to work here?" I answered that question with silence. He began then to inform me that I was not able to understand the significance of our Toastmasters club impact on the dangers of a union being started at the facility. He was wroth that I had not come to him before I sent an e-mail to the president. I told him that I did it out of ignorance because I was not aware that he was in the chain of command. He then informed me that was I not only ignorant but I was stupid. Both of the men that were there with me sat and let me be abused for 20 minutes with only one of them saying that this made us look bad like we could not handle our own internal affairs.

Ethics training is required at my company every year, with certain people having to take certain classes or training modules on the computer. As one of the modules for ethics training the participant is required to sign an affidavit that acknowledges that the participant understands the policies and agrees to abide by them and report anybody that does not. I felt compelled at this time to report the abuses that I sustained to the corporate ethics office. Retaliation is expressly forbidden to anybody making an ethics complaint. I was notified that an investigation was started and that I would probably be contacted soon. I was never contacted, but the club was evicted from the premises. So much for retaliation.