Friday, April 5, 2013

more meetings

So we had that devastating mandatory meeting the other day, and then yesterday, we had internal meetings that made things seem a little less dismal.

The upshot is that IF there are lay offs, they won't be until next year some time, most likely.  Not in September, like the guy led us to believe.

How so, you ask?

The fact is that there is going to still be so much to do in what is going to become the "central processing office" (instead of what it is now....the billing office), that, for anyone who wants to stay, who knows how to  or WANTS to do stuff OTHER than medical billing/coding, etc, there will probably be jobs.

Probably.

Now, as I mentioned previously,  these jobs will not be anything like what any of us are doing now, but they will provide pay checks.  Maybe smaller ones.  Maybe larger ones.  No one knows yet.

But it's not quite as dismal as it seemed originally.

Also, I got to ask if there will be severance for those whose jobs disappear, and the answer was "that's company policy,  yes."

Of course, it could all -- all of it -- be bullshit, too.

The office is currently in attrition, meaning anyone who chooses to leave now, rather than sticking it out to go through these intense and stressful changes, will not be replaced.

So, any of us who stay behind will have a temporary overload of work before that work goes to Boston.

It's all pretty much going to suck, and I haven't fully decided what to do yet.

At first, I thought I will just stick around and see what they offer me.  If I get cut, I get a break from working for a while....nice severance, take my time finding something I won't hate...etc....

I really don't want to have to pound pavement for another billing job.  Just going to another company to do the same thing won't improve things. 

So---let's see what ELSE they offer me eventually, right?  Wait.... what if they DO offer me something I would hate EVEN MORE than what I already do?  Namely, CUSTOMER SERVICE in the call center.

Oh. Dear. God. NO.

In which case, if they offer me something that I turn down, I am screwed out of any potential severance package, and am at square one....

So, what I have to decide some time in the next few months is : do I want to go through the upheaval (which includes a SOFTWARE CONVERSION--anyone who has been through one of those knows it's pure, living hell)  in order to wait this out and see where I land, and risk that I will have to quit anyway in the long run?

I see this process as a steam roller.   We have the choice to either grab onto the side of the roller, and see where it dumps us off down the road, or we get squashed under it--now or later--when our current work disappears.

Lots of pressure and stress...either way, which is exactly what my health doesn't need.

First Louie, and now this.  2013 has SUCKED ASS so far.  I have changed my mind.  13 is now OFF THE LIST OF LUCKY NUMBERS. 

1 comment:

bhd said...

Sweep, the best job I ever had was working for ACS, an outsourcing company, for ASI (stationers) at the client site. And then it was going away. The client was merging with another stationer and breaking our contract. Some of us would be offered jobs by the client. Not all.

We were a small shop of, essentially contractors, at the client site. 15-18 of us? Almost every one of my co-workers went into a tailspin. There was much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth.

I was rather astonished to see all the angst. It just seemed to me that I got to make the choice about where I wanted to work. I wasn't fond at all of the idea that someone else would make that decision for me. (I also knew that the new boss - whose office was a few doors from my cube - was an asshole. I knew I didn't want to work for him OR commute further to the consolidation site.

So I hit the pavement. I left on my own terms. I did get offered a job by the client but as I said before, that wasn't an option for me.

Start shopping around now. You don't know what you might find! But take charge. I have a bad feeling about waiting around to see if you'll get a severance. That's not going to help your stress one bit.

Good luck!