Best Company Ever, Chapter 6

In less than a fortnight, it will be time for me to push my office chair back from my desk, stand up, and leave behind all that is left to do. It’ll be vacation time, as I shall head for warmer shores following the wedding. The official vacation will be the week thereafter, but there is a strong possibility I’ll duck out a little early prior to the big weekend. Shouldn’t be a problem, I have approximately eleventy billion vacation days saved up.

Now if I am to take off that Friday, All Wedding’s Eve, I am going to have hand off one of my biweekly duties that will fall on said Friday. I serve as the Timecard Administrator (TCA) for Facilities and Finance. It’s not a hard job – I just have to monitor and make sure all 72 employees not only submit their electronic timecard, but also that they get approved by the 7 o’clock deadline. With some crash course training, I could easily delegate to a co-worker. Well then, wouldn’t that make for a boring Monday blog?

Enter BCE.

Best Company Ever sees this not as a scheduling fiasco for our protagonist, but an opportunity to find the perfect timecard administrator. A TCA must hold many key personality traits. He must be analytical – finding the fine line between those who are slacking off and who have plain forgot about timecard submittal. He must be authoritative – able to convince even the most important of managers to stop what they’re doing to submit. He must be firm – bending the rules for no one in order to ensure that everybody gets paid. Charismatic, cunning, and cool – these are the prereq’s for the Best Company Ever’s TCA.

He must be Morpheus.

With all due respect to former President Theodore Roosevelt, I’ve never seen someone speak as softly and carry a big stick as Laurence Fishburne’s character in The Matrix. A man so menacing that even a machine-run world fears what he is capable of. Yeah, that’ll strike some fear into submittal slackers. The TCA program has a lot of rows and columns to it, and it takes a keen eye to notice time charging discrepancies. After years of reading computer screens of vertically-moving green code, I think my boy will be up to the task.

On Timecard Friday, no task is too important that you cannot take the time to certify and submit your timecard. Morpheus will make sure of this. Well versed in the ways of telecommunications, our leather-overcoated TCA will stop at nothing to get you to take care of it, even if it means entering your phone line and embarrassing you on your call, no matter who is on the line, the VP of Sales or Dear Aunt Ginny.

Whoa.

Furthermore, as a TCA, I currently am the point-man for when anyone has a time-charging dilemma. They come to me with their questions, and unless I have experienced it in my own recording of hours. Usually, I do my best to not let them on to the fact that I have no idea what they are talking about, and merely instruct around the actual problem. Morpheus, if he were to take my place, is the zen master at such conversation technique:

Employee: I worked four hours on a Sunday, and I am an exempt employee. Is that overtime?
Morpheus: Do you want to know what overtime is?
Employee: Yes.
Morpheus: Overtime is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your computer. You can feel it when you go to the copier, when you get coffee... when you sharpen your pencil. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Employee: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. And you aren’t eligible for overtime.