Veep Drinking Game

Dash Trash Tales (Life as a Contracted Employee) vol. 2

As a vendor, Microsoft doesn’t provide an office or seating area for the vendors to sit. The thought process is, they work for another company so that company should provide the office for the person. This can be done by either providing them with a place to sit wherever their office is, or Microsoft will let the company pay for an office on the campus. Most vendor companies don’t do this as it eats into their profit. On my last V- assignment as Microsoft, I usually had to be in the building, this had to do with meetings or just being available as needed.

To find a place to sit, I would usually roam around the three-story building I worked in until I could find an office that was vacant. This is generally accepted practice on the Microsoft campus and the teams who those offices are assigned to don’t mind because they aren’t being used. Usually what happens is when that office is going to be assigned to someone, someone comes by and lets us know that we need to move out. This can be done in person or by leaving a note on the door. It’s also usually done nicely, with the person crashing in that office that day saying “no problem” and finding another empty office the next day.

One day I was crashing in an office when a team’s admin came in along with a couple of other people. She asked me why I was sitting there, I explained, and she said I needed to leave. I was like, “ok, no problem, is someone moving in then?”

Admin – “No, we want this office open.”

Me – “Oh, usually in this building people don’t mind people crashing in empty offices."

Admin – Well, that may be for other groups but this is our office, and we don’t want anyone in it.”

We had a couple more words, but there wasn’t anything I could do, after all, orange badges don’t get much say in things like that, especially when they aren’t even working with that team.

Besides the lady being a total bitch in her attitude, another interesting thing about the experience was that one of the guys came up to me after she left and apologized to me saying, “I sympathize, I was a vendor before. “ I seem to talk to people regularly that were once contractors or vendors, who sympathize with the plight of the orange badge, they don’t really seem to do much about it after that. Apparently, they view it as the college hazing experience that people should go through before receiving the honor of the full-time employment.