Our network administrator at the office was fired this morning.

I saw it coming a mile away. Okay, no. Maybe a few yards away. Mostly because it practically takes an act of God to hold a job at my company. But also because I could tell that his job performance just wasn’t going to cut it at my workplace. That’s not to say that he was extraordinarily lazy, but he wasn’t fond of taking initiative. Nor did he seem all that fond of following up with people on their requests. Or, now that I think about it, actually carrying out those requests half of the time.

So okay, perhaps I saw it coming half a mile away.

The man had just exited his 90-day “probation period” a matter of a couple weeks prior, so we’d all assumed that he’d managed to escape the falling axe of Bill Lumberg, the pseudonym I’ll fondly assign to the company’s Big Boss. Since I was getting requests from a few employees for new business cards, I decided to include our network admin on that list. After all, the previous net admin had business cards, and it seemed that our new guy ought to have some too. While I’m thinking about it, let’s call our recently-fired network admin “Michael Bolton”, in keeping with the Office Space wackiness (and since he looks quite a bit like David Herman anyway).

So, as if Bill was trying to play some sort of new game (which he probably calls “Fire The New Employee After His Probationary Period So As To Catch Everyone Off Guard”™), he waited until now to sack Michael. So now I’ve got 300 business cards coming in that I can’t really use. Okay, that I can’t use at all. Of course, since I just signed off on the proof a couple days ago, I discovered that it was too late to do anything about it. And I had people bagging on me to get those cards “eh-sap”, so I figured introducing more delay would not be acceptable.

It’s too bad about Michael, in a way. He was a nice guy. He and I used to chat about car stuff rather often. But ask me how good he was at his job, and in order to say anything flattering about him, I’d have to make things up. For one thing, I never got the impression that he much cared about what he was doing. The dude was completely mellowed out all the time, and he always seemed to be surfing the web or chatting over Winblows Messenger. By contrast, the net admin whom Michael replaced was doing the jobs of three people at once when he left (gee, doesn’t that sound familiar?), since two of those three people had been laid off months ago and never replaced. As a result he was skittish, snippy and stressed out at all times. (By the way, the “laid off and never replaced) shtick is a popular yet disturbing trend at my office—I figure eventually everyone’s going to disappear like in that Next Generation episode with Dr. Crusher and the warp bubble, until eventually I’ll be left talking to the computer to keep from going insane.)

Then there’s the fact that, mysteriously, ever since our old net admin left, shit’s been breaking constantly. I think the Exchange server has been down more than it’s been up. We’ve suffered from a whole myriad of virus attacks which got through unprotected machines stuffed away in closets somewhere, we’ve been through a shared storage drive move that was an utter disaster due to lack of communication from Michael the net admin…the list goes on. Recently, when we had a local tech come by to fix one of our aging printers, Mike went to lunch right as the guy was getting to work, leaving me to supervise him. Sorry…but when shit comes up during my workday lunch hour, I stop eating and take care of it. I don’t just go to Wendy’s and expect someone from another department to do my job. It might suck, but dem’s da breaks.

Anyway, the last straw for Bill Lumberg came today, when the third day of a massive e-mail malfunction dawned with no solution in sight. Apparently our mail server’s spam filter was rendered inoperable by the denial-of-service attack on the Osirusoft spam blacklist, and as a result, incoming mail was getting “stuck” while the filter tried to query the blacklist to run a check against it. Michael never figured this out after two days. But what’s worse, he never even appeared to be trying to figure it out. When he would even give answers at all, it was half-assed shit like “Exchange seems to be working perfectly as far as I can tell.” When the V.P. of Business Development asked him to reboot the server, Mike said “okay” and proceeded to ignore the request entirely.

This morning, as the poor woman in the cubicle next to me proceeded to lose her mind since none of her e-mail was getting to her and clients were screaming angrily over her phone about being ignored, I started trying to Google up possible answers to the e-mail problem. But then I stopped myself. “What the fuck am I doing this for?” I asked myself. I already do the jobs of art director, graphic designer, product developer, programmer, marketer, data entry slave, and occasionally, hardware support. I do not need to assume the network admin position as well. While I busy myself with five or six different jobs, the guy who gets paid to do nothing but administer the network is not doing jack about it. Fuck that, I’m not electively doing another person’s job!

The funny thing was, after Lumberg threw Michael out on his ass, one of our old network admins from years past was called in (he stills works in town; runs his own consulting business now) and within fifteen minutes he had discovered evidence regarding the cause of the e-mail problem and had developed a plan of action to correct it. More than we got from Mike in the past two days, I’m sorry to say.

So, now we begin the search for a network admin all over again! This is really a tiresome ritual; all the time and money spent interviewing, hiring, educating, training, and of course paying people who don’t really want to do their jobs. We’ve had that happen a staggering number of times, for positions all over the company, in the past year or so. That’s probably part of the reason why layoffs aren’t replaced. It’s such a goddamn bitch to do it. However, the tradeoff is that what’s left of the staff is getting run ragged, myself included, and I’m starting to overhear a lot of complaints about it from other employees. This whole fucking employment mess is going to come to a head pretty soon, I can just feel it, and it isn’t going to be pretty.

Until then, though, I have five jobs to do, so if you’ll excuse me.