Pretending to be American Company When All the Staff is in the United Kingdom
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Envisioning Bankruptcy
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Summary: The story of last summer at Sirius (it started in late spring) is told now in retrospect, based on about 5 hours of recordings (3 meetings); it didn’t work out as the managers had hoped/planned and instead the company’s last chief is now doing double-shifts (16 hours in a row!), basically trying to make up for extreme understaffing amidst a clients exodus; the CEO left last month as well, so he seems to have become unemployed after sinking the ship he rode on
MY final year at Sirius ‘Open Source’ was last year and it was already getting pretty awful. There was lying, deceit, and cover-up. Managers were pretty much predicting doom (without saying it out loud) and they had already silently robbed past staff.
The video above has a period of long silence in it because, for the first time, I forgot to unmute myself after playing back what a manager said last summer (90 minutes after the start of this recording). People can hear right from the horse’s mouth that things were getting really bad, no matter how much lipstick was put on the pig. The silent bit hopefully didn’t cover anything too critical (which wasn’t repeated later, but it’ll serve as a lesson for future videos regardless).
‘Fantasies’ of Sirius became more commonplace, and this wasn’t limited to just discussing “re-infrastructuring” and other ‘big words’. After taking notes or listening to suggestions from staff they eventually did what they planned all along. In other words, nothing has been implemented since then that wasn’t premeditated. Previous suggestions were rejected… despite never-ending options put forth by staff.
It’s regretful that I lost part of what I said due to the muting lasting too long; this is probably the first time I lost audio since last summer when we recorded about Belarus/EPO (a bad mouse button was to blame back then).
Anyway, as a side note I recall how one of the romantic partners of a manager (he has several) kept suggesting that we should lower the already-low salaries of people who work all night long and are highly qualified, have high seniority or have long served the company during a year of massive inflation (about 10% in the UK!) while leaving in tact the salary of her girlfriend, who covers daytime. This person does not seem to have any understanding of the law; when people work overnight the salary must be a lot higher than in daytime/Office Hours. Sometimes it’s better to be quiet than to say out loud something foolish if not illegal.
But that’s not “the” crime; it’s just a side issue for a company that became “petty thief” (very big thief).
This is the last part of this mini-series. We hope it has helped explain what happened last year without naming any people or revealing any clients.