Aaah, what a great beginning for a weekend.

Today at work, we had an extraordinary team meeting including our CEO. The message? "Our customer has decided, effective July 1st, to pay for two people on the early and late shifts, one for the night shift, one dispatcher, and half a project leader. Furthermore, one office supporter will stay here for the rest of the year to train the workers employed by our customer - next year they will completely take over the office support branch".

Let's see. That's 7.5 people, 6.5 starting next year. Currently, our production line support and office support teams include a total of 16 people.

The workers who will have to take over office support are 100 % useless. They don't know jack about PCs and large-scale (domain-level) networking, they are lazy as hell and so belligerent that they already once insulted one of their direct superiors face to face.

As for our production line support, this will work even after the decimation of our staff until the next major patching/updating orgy or until the next time a nasty new virus breaks through the defenses of Volkswagen. With so few people we simply won't have enough capacity to fix more than minor problems, and oh, only one after another please. Hey, it's only an automobile factory with 3,500 employees - no problem to manage that all with one single person on night shift, eh? After all, we're no wimps...

Don't even start me about how much of a specialist every single one of us became, had to become, in order to keep the damned factory running. Ever imagined how many completely different PC systems there are in a modern factory today? The simple problem of "whoever has to leave has to train one of the few who stay to be his replacement, and oh, all in two weeks please!" boggles the mind.

Bottom line is, it's a typical paperpusher decision. Someone was too dumb to do his financial calculations right (again... it's by far not the first time in the 18 months I've been working here), and we, the "foreigners" (no direct employees of Auto5000), have to pay for their incompetence by being (partially) fired.

Yep, it'll be a wonderful weekend after all that.

The two minor nice points:

1. Never ever has our company fired anyone just because one of our many projects was terminated. It will become difficult to reassign so many people to somewhere else, but it should be possible. At least we'll keep our jobs - in all likelihood that is.

2. I wonder how dumb and embarrassed the managers of Auto5000 will look when after some weeks or months they realize that it simply doesn't work with so few people in production line support. The very first time some system has to be patched, we'll have to reboot (it's window$ after all...), therefore the system will be down for a while. As we will no longer get paid for working on Saturday evening or on Sunday, this means that production will have to pause whenever something has to be patched. One minute "downtime" of the production line means the calculatory loss of € 6,500... let's take a guess about what this will mean for their profits.

Ha-haa!