Meeting Email 3b

Background

There were two data modelers - Thomas Emerson and I. (There was another one, but his tenure at Xamplify was short-lived.) I have extensively covered Tom Emerson's 'working' hours on this website at various places. In contrast, I spent most of my waking hours at the company. My estimate is for at least 60 hours per week. Company's security system will show that generally not only I arrived in early morning, much earlier than 9 AM, but most nights left late, as in 10 PM, 11 PM, midnight. Most weekends too I was there. Computer logs of parking garage will show the same things. Or the cleaning staff of the building will tell the same story.

From: Sumer Johal
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2001 2:16 PM
To: Me
Cc: Elaine Mullarkey; Jeffrey Klein
Subject: RE: Schedule

Hey,

I'm running a bit behind this afternoon and would like to meet with you at 4:45 pm today rather than 3 pm, as we originally decided. Jeffrey will be joining us as well. Frankly, I am having a difficult time converging what we had agreed upon when we decided to hire you and what is actually happening - due to the following issues:

...(My Note: Point 1 covered in the previous email segment.)

2. The second point of conflict between what I thought we agreed to and what is actually happening is your schedule. As you mention below, your class schedule takes around 11 hours/week during normal business hours of our work. While I am aware that you compensate for that time during the evenings and weekends, it was my understanding that the class that you were going to take were going to be around lunch time, one class, everyday. So, this is also quite a different reality to what I had envisioned regarding your presence at Xamplify during business hours. This impacts any collaborative work that we need to do.

...(My Note: Point 3 is covered in the next segment.)

All of the above create an air of "uncertainty" regarding your presence at Xamplify and negatively impacts the general workings of our company (e.g., the modeling group cannot meet ad-hoc, since we need to have all modelers present for any meeting).

On a positive note, your effort and work towards the modeling team has been matching my expectations and I also realize that you work very hard during off-peak times. This gives me reason to try hard to meet your needs and requirements - while ensuring that the company's interests are not harmed.

Jeffrey and I talked about this quite extensively and need further thought on proceeding further. Before we do that, we want to talk to you to get clarity on all this.

Thanks!

Sumer Johal

My Comments

11 hours during normal business hours! So you were counting lunch hours to be normal business hours for me! Yes, it is true that I missed less than 9 hours (not 11) of work during normal business hours (which I more than made up working late and during lunch hours) but what about Tom Emerson? Also, while we are at it, what about working hours of Julian Brookes or even Jeff Klein? I found this letter¹ from a Seth Kaplan in salon.com about working style at Mother Jones while Jeffrey Klein was the editor, which mentions: (Second letter from last)

When I was there on Market Street, I was always somewhat perplexed by the absence of many of the editors and other staffers, who seemed to use the lull in the bi-monthly schedule to sleep in or take off. The magazine has floundered because the staff, collectively, let it. No one there was working New York hours.

It is funny how some things don't change.

¹No New York Hours (second from last)

Special Note

While Thomas Emerson's hours look horrible, you should have seen one more employee's hour. He was worse than Tom! However, when Sumer Johal talked to him, his voice became soft and kind, as was his norm when dealing with Caucasian males. There was one more male on the employee list - Joseph (Joe) McCannon and Jeff Klein testified in front of the Unemployment Appeals Board that in his view Joe McCannon was perhaps the hardest working employee in the company, woking 12-hour days. Only problem with that was during my 8 months at Xamplify while his name was published on the Xamplify's employee list, he was never there. My witness too testified to never seeing him at work. From my checks, I found that about that time he was in Boston running another company.