Little Men with Big Egos

Kronos is a workforce management software company. My nickname for my nemesis manager was Kronos but my insufferable editor insists that KRONOS is a better pseudonym for the company. My nemesis will be hence forth known as Napoleon, i.e. Napoleon syndrome/little man and all that jazz. Likewise, my choice of Jezebel as the name for the supervisor doesn’t agree with her low brow popular culture sensibilities. Everyone knows what Jezebel means but she is digging her heels in on David Brent being a better name. She says anyone who hasn’t watched the office and doesn’t know that David is short-hand for intolerable, incompetent, un-self-aware, and self-important, isn’t the type of person you want reading your biography. A bit hypocritical of her expecting people to understand her references while calling me a snobby exclusionist for mine but we will ignore that because what is life without occasional un-fair contradictions?

The venom of my little man syndromed nemesis KRONOS and David, had started to take its toll not only on my body but my mental health as well. When a new job opportunity arose, I lunged at it like a middle-aged house wife barrelling towards a slightly gone to seed man-power stripper on a seedy hen’s night cruise. It was a better job/bod than my current job/the husband at home but that’s the beauty of being in a shit place. A gone to seed stripper looks glorious when compared to a lazy good for nothing slob with a beer in their hand and stained tightly whiteys. So, while I’m sure my new job will lose its gloss eventually, for now it feels like I’ve traded a trailer park for a rom com/porno and I’m moving onwards and upwards in life.

It breaks you down in a slow and insidious way when the people you work for are corrupt. The dancing monkeys like myself were amazing but awesome monkey dance moves are not enough to make a situation tolerable when the monkey owner is a corrupt evil person who treats the monkeys like shit. For a job to be tolerable it needs to tick certain boxes, one of which is being treated like a human being.

The Beaches Supervisor Jezebel/David was pretty stupid. Why KRONOS would ever make a person like David manager of an area about to lose staff to a new Hospital, I will never understand. Who sees a tsunami coming and gives the job of managing it to a non-swimmer from the desert? A non-swimmer from the desert who turned out to have tsunami tendencies of their own. KRONOS knew the new Hospital was being built, and that they would aggressively poach the best staff, but she still gave the job to a David Brent. I know the saying goes fight fire with fire, but high school science can tell you that the same principal doesn’t apply to tsunamis. You don’t mitigate tsunami damage by sending in your own tsunami named David. Boy did she underestimate the tsunami like damage a non-swimming desert dweller like David could cause.

The Government was liquidating two semi old Hospitals on The Beaches to make way for a proposed new and effective Hospital. The promise was the new hospital would be up-to-date and would better serve the growing health needs of The Beaches. Despite the fact that KRONOS was the area manager for the largest Pathology provider in the World, this was not enough for them to win the contract and in fact worked against KRONOS. With KRONOS ltd a non-option in the long-term plans for the hospital, Hermes pathology stepped up and put in a bid the hospital could not refuse. Because the truth is far more ridiculous than fiction, KRONOS had a long running feud with the company that developed that would run the hospital. It takes a special kind of person to jeopardise a multi-million-dollar contract between international companies based on a personal grudge, but his story is nothing if not epic. While I modestly refer to the ordinariness of my tale in earlier chapters, shades of epic drama raise their seductive heads and sing their siren song at suitably dramatic moments along the way. Any chance of professional friendliness between the new Hospital and KRONOS was lured to its death by the siren song of KRONOSs competitive nature, sheer stubbornness and ability to bear a grudge.

Hermes Labs taking over the hospital pathology was a gift from the gods themselves to me. Hermes Labs was an upcoming pathology company mostly based in Perth, Adelaide and Queensland and was now trying to spread its wings into the Sydney sector. A year before the story you are reading right now, Sharon, in a similar mental and emotional place to where I now found myself, had decided she wanted to leave KRONOS and asked if I would be her character witness. Sharon got the job, undoubtedly due to the fabulous and persuasive reference I gave her and in time was made Manager for the new Beaches Hospital. It was a relief to see a friend and ally when I was being interviewed for my new job. Because Sharon had been where I had been and seen what I had seen under the management of KRONOS, I knew that things would be different here. They would be fair, and stable, and caring and harmonious.

Sharon was enjoying working for Hermes and said they had done everything right by her since she started working there. She said the vibe was easy and the communication was open, and they understood the need for work/life balance. It felt like the signs were adding up and that this job could be the right place for me.

The job was advertised on a large country wide job seeking website and app. Despite the well-oiled gossip train on The Beaches, several of my colleagues managed to apply for jobs on the down low. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one struggling with KRONOS. All in all, 6 staff were rumoured to have applied including my good friend Leonie. I think all of us were offered jobs at the new Hospital and why wouldn’t we be? We were all experienced collectors, trained by the largest pathology company in the world. A company that didn’t appreciate us or see us as assets so left six senior collectors ripe for the picking. A week after being interviewed I was ecstatic to receive a job offer. Both Leonie and I wasted no time signing our contracts and returning them before the end of the day. Once I knew I was leaving something inside me broke free and I couldn’t face the prospect of going back to KRONOS for even a day. I had had over 160 hours of annual leave and a few sick leave hours left on the current job. Obviously, you get paid out your annual leave when you leave a job, but with a 17.5 percent leave loading and ball sucking tax (the bad sort, not to be mistaken for the good kind of ball sucking) it’s a bit of a letdown (like bad ball sucking, the comparison is quite apt) financially. Sadly, despite the fact you earned them, you don’t get paid out your sick pay when you leave. With the new job starting, my previously made holiday plans for my 30th birthday were messed up. I wasn’t willing to jeopardise my future with this new job over a holiday (see how grown-up and sensible I can be!) but I still deserved some serious R & R so I chucked a massive fake sickie and took myself off to Bali for a mental health break.