July 6, 2010Dynamic dignity, corporate ignominy #5: Even my IPod says good-bye, Part B: Calendared out

Filed under: Uncategorized by merylrunion |

Last week I posted about how a company I’ve been associated with for 13 years cut my book from their lists right after I printed 30 thousand copies. They made no mention that their projections had changed, and I found out about the decision weeks later from a third party. When I asked why they hadn’t told me they were thinking about cutting my book before I went to press, they explained that they never tell vendors they won’t be ordering from them anymore – they let the vendors figure it out on their own.

I loved Grace’s comment to the post.

“We just let them figure it out when they don’t get orders anymore??? Hmm. This makes me think about being a manager and having an employee once in a while just stop showing up for work (nature of the business I was in, unfortunately). They too seemed to think that we would just “figure out” that they didn’t feel like working there anymore. We did — sometimes after several phone calls and quizzing of other employees and often with much concern as to what had happened to them.”

Grace went on to note,

“When you lay off employees, do you tell them or do you just lock them out one day?”

Well, Grace isn’t that far off. This company uses independent contractors to teach their seminars. They schedule them by sending out calendars with their dates and cities listed. Some months are heavy and other months are light. Even their top trainers get blank calendars at times. No message, just a calendar that looks like this.

I stopped teaching seminars in my prime, so I never experienced this, but my son worked for them for a year. When they decided to stop scheduling him, they sent him month after month of blank calendars. Yep. he would open his Fed Ex package each month to find an empty calendar. They just let the trainers figure out they no longer had a source of income with this company. They just let the trainers figure out that they’ve been “calendared out.” So why should I be surprised that after a 13 year association, they let me figure out I had 30 thousand books to move?

Even my Ipod says goodbye when I shut it down. It’s simple courtesy, isn’t it?

(Please note, I had many great years in my assocation with this company. That’s what made the senseless heartlessness of their final behaviors all the more devastating.)