The End of an Era

My time at Panda Software USA is almost at hand. Yeah, that's where I have been working for since Earthlink decided it would be a good idea to send their Accounts Receivable department to India. While I can say that the people I met while working here at Panda have been quality folks, and I will miss them on occasion, I can't say that I will miss the actual job and the upper management structure that it set up. They just don't know how to take care of the employee.

I don't want to say anything bad about them . . . but they're witless morons, much akin to a chicken running around with its head cut-off. Except, this chicken is trying to sell you an anti-virus product at the same time. Disorganized? Hell yes. Totally unaware of how to wrestle away a piece of the market that Norton and McAfee capitalize on . . . absofuckinglutely. And do they know how to keep morale up while they try to squeeze production out of their workers? What's morale? I can tell you that I actually make less now, than when I started working here. How does that work? That's the miracle of mis-management.

And this is how it works (looks like my "not wanting to talk bad about them" is not working out very well). Panda had a great set up when I first started working here. They had monthly and yearly bonuses set up based on sales. They even gave me a raise 3 months into my tenure here. It was a small "Cost of Living" increase, which they said they would do every year, which helped. Then, the changes started coming. I got a promotion in May of 2006, which came with more responsibilities, harder work, etc. Panda said, wait 90 days, and your raise will come through. It's now the middle of February of 2007. That raise? That never happened. They tell me it was finally going to go through 3 paychecks ago, but that has yet to materialize. And I don't expect it to.

On top of that, I got a second promotion about a month ago, which came with even more responsibilities, and another promise of an increase in pay. But they're all empty promises to me. Even if they did come through with the original raise, I would still have to wait God knows how long until the 2nd raise came through. At least 90 days. If I'm lotto-winner lucky. Which I'm not.

Then, those nifty bonuses went the way of the Dodo. So, that nice extra 100 bucks a month went away. We did get a bonus at the beginning of 2006, for excellent sales in 2005. And it was substantial. There was only one problem. There was a little fudging on the actual wording that we were told and what we ultimately received. At the time that they established, the sum of the bonus was going to be "post-taxes". So, the bonus we were working towards, the actual amount that we were told, was actual money that we would get. The time comes around when it's time to give out the bonus, and we get a florid-worded letter from the President congratulating us on our hard work and letting us know that the amount we were going to get was pre-tax. So, that screwed us out of some money. Then, they told us to wait until March of 2006 to get our end of the year 2005 bonus money. We waited. March came around, and they let us know that we were going to get it in installments. Kind of a lay-a-way program if you will. So, for the next two and a half months, we got a slow trickle of bonus money.

Then, Panda decided that it would be a good idea to save on their medical plan. They touted this as savings across the board, for everyone. People that were paying for family members would pay less. At the time I didn't have to pay for my wife's health plan. This, would also change. While the company saved 30 grand/year on the plan, I started (and I believe I was the only one that suffered under this new change) paying 75 bucks every paycheck for something that I had not been paying for before. So that contributed to me making less money than when I actually started. It's ridiculous really. Not even the help of the HR department, who tried to get me a dollar raise to offset the cost helped. The proposal got shot down. Thank you upper management. You really sealed my loyalty there (please note the pungent sting of sarcasm in that last sentence).

Remember that cost of living raise I got at the beginning of the year in 2006. It mysteriously disappeared as well for 2007. Oh, and 401K matching also became extinct as far as Panda is concerned. Sure, you can still defer a certain percentage of your bi-weekly paycheck, but now they don't match a certain percent of it. Which is a total mistake. I can't really think of one successful company that doesn't do that. So even when it comes to retirement, they don't have my back.

You think that a company would want to keep its one and only Spanish-speaking retail technical support agent happy. Not the case here. It feels like they have done pretty much everything possible to force me to get a new job. I feel bad, on a very minute level, for the guys here in tech support who will have to deal with Spanish-speaking customers. Panda has systematically shot itself in the foot. And it's not a process that started and ended with me. There were 3 Spanish-speaking employees that left before me, and not by their own volition. They were fired. Good people too. One of them was "The Sal". Which pissed me off immensely, because they let him go just as I was going to get my referral bonus for getting him hired. $500 down the drain. I'm not mad at The Sal for that. But all of these things contributed to my decision.

Tuesday I start training for my new job. Where is it at? Well, I don't like to divulge where I'm working while I'm working there, so let's say it's one of America's largest financial institutions. I just hope that come 2008, I'm not writing a long post about how they have mistreated me. I'm sure that's not going to happen (crossing fingers), but if they do, rest assured it will be posted here.