Even when Daniel S. Levine is happy with his work, he’s disgruntled.
He has to be. Since he began publishing the on-line magazine disgruntled.com in 1995, Levine has heard workplace horror stories, passed along tales of creative corporate sabotage and offered advice to workers about taking control of their lives.
Now he has produced a paperback book, “Disgruntled: The Darker Side of the World of Work,” offering some fresh material and many of the favorite tales from his on-line world.
Such as this one a reader sent him involving an office that had installed cameras on top of each computer terminal to allow employees to send video e-mail messages: “A woman who was having an affair with a married co-worker decided to send him a spicy message. She performed a striptease and as she shook and shimmied before the camera, she told him of the night of pleasure that awaited him when they met for their illicit rendezvous later at their favorite hotel.
“The problem was that when she sent the message, she clicked on the wrong distribution list. Instead of sending it to her lover as she had intended, she sent it to 480 people throughout the firm.”
Levine loves the funny anecdotes, but what prompted him to start disgruntled.com was his frustration that the publications he worked for paid little attention to the increasing anxieties of typical workers, aiming their stories instead at executives and investors. And he said there are workers who are still ambivalent about the job market.
“There’s this growing number of people who can’t understand the disconnect between the job market that people are reading about and what they are experiencing,” Levine said in an interview.
People who have been laid off after years with a company can be particularly devastated, he said. “It’s unbelievable in some cases how betrayed they feel.”
His book tells about a controller in Wisconsin who was asked to prepare a two-year cash projection, a revised budget and a suggested plan for laying off people and eliminating departments.
“He was told to have it in by Friday at 4 p.m.,” Levine writes. “Forty-five minutes after meeting his deadline he was handed a pink slip and told his services were no longer needed. Among his final duties was to type his own severance agreement.”
The book isn’t made up of just cute or depressing anecdotes. Levine offers statistics, such as this one from the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch project: From 1980 through 1995, factory wages rose 70 percent, corporate profits rose 145 percent and compensation for chief executives soared nearly 500 percent.
He has tales of corporate sabotage, like the computer programmer who designed a company’s databases in the 1970s. The programmer had his own form of unemployment insurance: If his name was deleted from the company’s personnel database, the software would automatically delete the customer database.
It was — and it did.
Levine also offers ways that frustrated workers can help themselves, including an extensive list of agencies and groups. He offers common-sense advice about making the most out of a bad situation, and how people often find they are better off if they reduce spending so they can take a lower-paying job that is more fulfilling.
Readers from the Web site (www.disgruntled.com) also offer tales about why they quit their jobs, sometimes out of anger or frustration, but other times simply because it was the right thing to do. Levine included a letter from an engineer who described an incident that triggered his own career decision.
“One day I was riding down the elevator with an older engineer whom I’ll call Joe,” the engineer wrote. “Joe was retiring after 30 years with the company. This was his last day.
“I asked Joe what the highlight of his career was. He stared at me for a solid minute over the box of personal belongings he carried. He looked away. His face got cloudy. As he walked out the door for the very last time, he shook his head and mumbled, `What a waste, what a waste!’
“I quit the next day.”
