*** Important ***
People usually don’t fight corporations. Few do, even fewer win. It’s damn hard to win against one, as they have incomparably larger cash pool and endless human resources to torment you relentlessly (while you have to spend all your time to match them). I’m practical, so I don’t. So this text is pure fiction (wink!), just a product of my sick imagination (wink! x2), a dream - or rather nightmare I had yesterday night (wink! x3). Any resemblance to actual persons and events is purely coincidental (wink! wink! wink! wink! wi…).
So, I had a dream :)
In my dream, some guys (let’s call them "N Team") were working hard to assembly a team of specialists, artisans in their profession - capable, skillful, efficient and ambitious. They were offered good money for a good chunk of high quality software. It wasn’t an 1-shot adventure - "N Team" didn’t mean to get bunch of guys of 1 project and burn them out as much as possible. They meant to build a close network of professionals who:
- work well (match) with each other
- trust each other
- want to work with each other
But, my dream got more gloomy and dark. The bigger the company, the further it gets from the keywords it promotes as the most important, core values. And many people just forget what are they there for. That’s what happened (in my dream, ofc).
As the mother company was in an eternal crusade to form and shape processes, regulations and policies - all the cooperators (like the team members enrolled by "N Team") were put in 1 big bucket, regardless of whether they are individual entrepreneurs or corporations. And of course, as the mother company is based in Hamburgerland, no-one has imagined that there may be cooperators whose mother language isn’t English.
Now, the dream got really nasty.
Cooperators, who have already their contracts signed (yeah, a complex & precise dream, isn’t it?) where now obliged with signing additional legal documents that were not communicated up-front. These documents were presented only on English (even if cooperators were not English and there was nothing about knowing English in their contract) and they were NOT available in full form - poor ones had to accept them page by page without knowing full text up-front. Nasty.
In my dream, "N Team" members struggled - they tried to indicate that it doesn’t really make sense, that it’s not ethical, that it won’t help with building the positive image of mother company in the market. But no-one cared. If mother company gives 1 form without translation, how could anyone be mistrustful enough to reject signing it? How come you don’t want to sign off the legal document our highly specialized team of smart-assed lawyers created obviously because of the concern for the security of your future? ;P
If you don’t like it, pay for the sworn translator. But remain cautious, maybe tomorrow will have a humor to bring you some papers in Hungarian for a sign-off. You should be so grateful that we give you the opportunity to work with such remarkable and wonderful US. You’re welcome.
And then …
… I woke up. Fortunately as this was just a very disturbing dream. Looked so real and so … dilbertian. Looked like some imaginary people from imaginary world of hallucinations lost their common sense. Hopefully nothing like that will happen for real.