The New Breed - Ettain Group Affaire (part 2, My First Day at “Work”)
Finally the “great” moment has arrived. It’s November 26th, 2007, a sunny and warm day. I am dressing business casual, and I look pretty darn good. My spirit is great, everything looks perfect. But wait! (as some commercials say). Do you remember the 4 red flags I was talking about in my first blog post? What is about to happen, is at the same time tragic and funny. Why funny? Because I have never seen in my life a “string” of stupidity and sloppiness all at the same time.
Well, the “nice” guy at Ettain Group (remember, his name is David Ekle) told me to show up for work at 9:00am sharp (I was expected to start at 8:00 not at 9:00, but of course he did not have a clue). He asked me to wait for him at the parking lot of New Breed; please note that, as far as I know, New Breed has 2 buildings in High Point. The “nice” guy gave me the address where I should work. Since he was late (extremely unprofessional), he asked me to wait for another Ettain’s guy; his name was Mike Cole. Mike called me and he said that he couldn’t spot my white Crown Victoria and I said to him that it was not possible to miss it; the parking lot is not very large while my car is. After several phone call, I finally got it. He was in the other building, where the Human Resources Department is located. The same building where the first guy I talked to (for my job interview) has his own office; this guy goes with the name of Bill Whitaker (in my previous post I mentioned his name). Now, not even secret lovers have to work so hard to make an “encounter” a reality. They sound a bit sloppy, do not they? I am always on time; I prefer to arrive 30 minutes too early than 5 minutes late. Why is that? Because I am serious in doing business, while I begun thinking they are rascals. I don’t know if rascal is the right word. In Italian we have the perfect one: cialtroni.
Finally Mike shows up (at around 9:30) and introduce me to my 2 new bosses: James Alley and Jeff Jacobs. While James seems to be a decent guy, I have strange feelings for Jeff. First of all his dictionary has a big preponderance of the word crap. Nothing against colorful language, I just feel a bit uncomfortable which is unusual for me, I am the kind of guy who have seen it all. But wait!
James, Jeff and Mike begun talking about the people they needed at New Breed; Solaris Administrators. They did not care much about Linux Administrators. They were talking in my presence and I felt really uncomfortable. Then Jeff took me for a walk around their data center, explaining something about the technologies in use, while disseminating the word crap every two other words etc. Finally they asked me to fill a ton of documents (with this hiring technique you work for 2 companies), gave me a badge and assigned me to a desk; I was in a room with another guy. His name is Leon and he was a very nice guy (no irony here). Jeff asked me if I was competent with Solaris, and I reminded him that they hired me (or better Ettain Group hired me) as Linux Admin. For the no-tech people, Solaris is a Linux implementation made by Sun Microsystems. It’s basically a “dialect” of Linux.
Jeff asked me to “play” with one of their servers for awhile, so I might understand the difference between Solaris and Linux. Well, after 3 or 4 hours I understood what I needed to understand and I was finally ready to start for good. Jeff was very busy the whole day (probably picking his nose) so he did not pay a bit of attention to me. He left at 4:00pm and I left at 5:00pm.
While driving back home I had mixed feelings. I though that the company was very interesting, James Alley was a nice guy, and everything seemed to be fine, but I could not understand Jeff Jacobs. My duty was to help him in order to free him from a group of servers, so he might have the time to work on other projects; the thing I did not understand at the time is why he did not take time to set me up with the job. You have to wait for the 3rd part of my story, in order to understand better.
Tags: david ekle, ettain group, jeff jacobs, mike cole, new breed, unethical hiring practice
