I worked at Websense for a long time. This is the first time in almost 3 years that I have actually posted the NAME of the company that I worked for. Before I had not posted it because the management in support actually had threataned me about it. I did some reasearch in another post, and found out that talking shit about people in a company, to a degree could be considered libel and if the company wanted they could pursue legal action.

Now that I no longer work there anymore, I can freely say whatever the fuck I want without any reprocussions (like them firing me). I can FINALLY FINALLY express to everyone exactly how miserable I was after the first year and a half at the company.

Let me switch gears a little. I watch a show called Penn and Tellers bullshit. In this show they debunk claims like the bible, recycling, people who can talk to the dead, alternative medacine, and those dickpumps, pills, and shit to make your dick/ass/tits whatever bigger. Naturally the show is seen by millions as it is shown on showtime, I am sure Penn and Teller do not want to get a the legal version of a sand and tobasco enema. This is an excerpt from one of the episodes I saw :

Penn and Teller - You gave gained worlds of respect in my eyes. I wish i could do something for them to repay them feeding my brain as well as they do :)

MOVING ON, basically what happened to me was your typical abuse of power. A false paper trail was created under me and I was excommunicated from the company based on said paper trail. Unfortunately for me I’m an *HONEST PERSON* and I do not partake in the typical corporate bullshit you see in tech support at websense. Being corporate in my eyes is being a liar, or a politician. I speak english, the management in tech support does not. They do not say what they mean, and they do not do what they say.

A couple years ago you guys might remember me posting threads on here about how I thought the director of support didn’t have a clue what he was doing, and he was driving the department into the ground.. It was a half truth. I didn’t yet know the full story. What was it the merovingian said in matrix2?

This was ultimately my problem. I was yapping a lot and making a lot of noise without the ‘why’. I was in a sense, powerless. Now I have the why, and I may use the why to describe to you details about my previous actions, because you see, hindsight is 20/20.

Upper management at websense had been shuffled around, you see. People were moved and entire department wings had been tossed around and restructured - fine and dandy. Tech support used to be under operations (IT, buisness application development team, security). They had been moved and we went under sales. This is where things for the techs began going downhill. People had to start talking/looking differently, the emphasys was no longer on the well being of the techs, it was on the money the customers gave the sales people. The wellfare of the employees was no longer a concern. The workload more than tripled, but the staff did not increase. Everyone in support grew miserable as the pressure was on. This pressure you see was entirely political. Now that Ken(the asshole director) was under a sales guy, he was forced to manage his budgets differently and forced to cater to sales, who as a department are greedy, and self centered. This was bad for the techs. We started getting a turnover rate. Every few months someone decided they couldnt hack it, and quit. The management was reluctant to fire people for one reason or another so what they did was put pressure on people untill they couldnt hack it and quit. This didnt work with richard, he was eventually fired. Next was larry. He buckled, and eventually quit and walked out. I was next in line. I didnt buckle. I took it lightheartedly and kept asking what I could do to improve and asking for guidance so that I could be the tech they wanted me to be (*chuckle*). I followed all of their instructions to the letter, so they started coming up with new ones. This played on for about 2 years or so. For two years I followed their little instructions like a lapdog, but what they did was send me on a wild goose chase. They’d tell me what to do, and then promote someone else, and say that there was another avenue I didnt take. They always kept me one step behind so that they could tell me there was something I didn’t do, so not to promote me - while the entire time, in all of my feedback sessions and reviews they told me I was the most technical person in tech support.

This to me didnt make any sense at all. Its tech support. People call to talk to TECHS. people call to get THEIR PROBLEMS FIXED. You would think that the most technical person in the department would be a senior tech, or someone of some authority, who has been around and knows the shit in and out. This wasn’t the case. The people they promoted in tech support were typically the people in the middle. The people that knew just enough to get by, but had more skill in kissing ass or could potentially be turned into more corporate lapdogs.

After richard and larry bailed, I was the next one on the list. It took my old manager, John, bullshitting HR and basically fabricating a case against me to start the ball rolling. This was last october. I remember posting images of the writeup :). John didnt like me. When the new guy, Dave showed up i was put under him. Dave was .. well.. he was a little more up front, which was good, but he was still a typical self centered asshole whos only concern was for himself. He gave lots of little speeches about how he wanted to see his team succeed, but when youd talk to him in private you could plainly see his only interest was keeping the heat off of himself. If something went wrong, there would always be someone to blame. This, for him - was me.

He put together another writeup for me listing shit like “I didnt update one of my web portal calls in 24 hours” knowing full well that my supervisor at the time, markus, would assign these to me after I had left for the day (i left at 3:30). So when I came in the next morning, the calls were already nearly 18 hours old. Everything else he put on the writeup was bullshit. He put that I was reprimanded about some customer, but when I went back in my email history and looked, the entry was made on the same date, for the same customer THAT SENT ME AN 80 DOLLAR BOX OF COOKIES. If im such a shitty tech, why are resellers sending me huge crates of cookies? If im such a shitty tech, why do I have emails from both Ken and Dave telling me how awesome of a job I did?.. Fuckers.

Feh, this is the type of shit I was saying before.. before I had the why.

I was a chink in their armor, so to speak. Management in tech was getting pressure from sales to churn out more work. Someone up the line wasnt convinced that tech was doing as much work as we could have. This I’m not sure how, as we were supporting checkpoint firewall, cisco pix, microsoft ISA and proxy servers, cisco switches and routers, nokia ipso platforms, windows nt/2k/2k3/xp/95/98/server, linux, solaris.. god.. i was a full blown systems engineer for these people, and they paid me a grunts salary. Sales didnt understand that an average phonecall for us was two hours long. They said the customers were complaining because of the long hold times, but for some reason we could never get enough people to satisfy the phones because Ken couldnt get the funds from his boss Kurt. Kurt was a sales guy (now the president). Ken is a pussy, you see, and a fucking douchebag. He wouldnt stand up for tech - he lied down and bent over for Kurt and Kurt had his way with him. This made Kurt happy with Ken, see.. because Ken just obeyed. Ken didn’t say ‘We need more guys. the phones are killing us, and we need sales to give us some slack” No, he shook his fist and demanded we work harder. The people that questioned his motives were quickly eliminated - richard, larry, me… other people that were fortunately enough more attuned to the ways of coroprate sleazery than I. They were able to get out. Once tech went under sales though, the career path out of support was snipped. not ONE PERSON was promoted out of tech to another department. Techs began to realize the only way to fix things was to get out. In the two weeks before I was canned, two other techs had put in their 2weeks notices. Everyone is bailing, and not just from tech. Something is going on upstairs.. whoever it is in charge of “how well the employees are feeling” is gruesomely failing.

I was fired in the end because Dave said that I didnt update a ticket properly. His exact words were something like “you were doing really well, and you were making leaps and bounds in improvements”. Same bullshit they were telling me before “oh youre the most technical guy!”, but not promoting me or not giving me fair raises.

So here I sit jobless, but more imporantly free. Free from their stupid fucking assnine corporate charades, free from the stink of the corporate enviroment, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, free from fucking liars. Ken told me, the last time I didnt get promoted that it wasnt up to him to make the call for who got promoted, it was up to the managers. Well the managers wanted me, but Ken didnt want to let me succeed. he couldnt just look at my work - he had to make it personal. Ken is a peice of shit.

My search begins for another job. Systems administration or contract work. No more phones. Ever.

If you would like to help out, it would be most appreciated. Simply email me and let me know what I can do!

P.S: There are a lot of very cool people still at websense. There are also people in management that I very highly approve of, and people that were kind to me and tried to help me out. To those people, go my dearest condolances, and I wish them well in the future.