Erosion

Much as I like hearing things in advance on the grapevine at work, there are times I wish I'd remained ignorant of the machinations of certain elements.

Bad enough that the company is making me redundant, but asking me to carry on working till January because they're not quite ready to make me redundant yet... Now one of the local managers is proposing that we change the structure of the department ahead of schedule.

So here's the thing: In January, three of the Designers officially become Editorial staff, the rest get made redundant. The Group Editor, along with his boss (also my boss's boss) and our new Publishing Director, believes that we should switch those three Designers over to purely Editorial work now, rather than waiting till January. This would leave just 3 Designers (should be 4, but one of them has decided to go off on a long-term sickie) to do all the advertising for all 10 magazines - one of which broke the 300 page mark this month - that's Property, Lifestyle and Classified.

It's a collossal shift in workload - the three Editorial Designers would, granted, have it bad enough with their unbalanced page counts (Group Editor apparently feels it's not important to ensure their workload is balanced) and their Prima Donna Editors (untempered by their pussy-whipped boss), but the 3 or 4 other Designers lose their creative input on the magazines, and have to split an increased proportion of ads between themselves.

Far be it from me to complain about fairness - in know full-well that such high concepts have no place in an office - but it is ridiculous to make such a change before the imposed, Groupwide change makes it necessary. The current system balances the workload perfectly - nothing is ever left untouched for too long. Altering the department's dynamic such that half the number of staff have to tackle the same number of ads is just asking for catastrophe... And yet the department's Management will still be charged with making it happen.

And then there's my role - with full responsibility for getting Editorial to print transferring to the Group Editor, I'm no longer the Production Manager I was, dealing only with ads and final pages. This 'great idea' is eroding my part in producing my magazines while the company as a whole erodes my love for them by continuing to permit their ruination by lazy salespeople.

I just need to be out of there in so many ways...

In other news: barring any unforseen disasters, I shall be off to Auto Assembly 2010 tomorrow... Watch for details of my massive haul... I hope.

In other, other news, Flock seems to have rediscovered its affinity with Photobucket, and I can upload photos again. Hurrah.