Let the Twitter janitors go? Hey, I worked at a company like this!

Let the Twitter janitors go? Hey, I worked in a company like that! 

Elon Musk has been busy. What with the simul-destruction of Twitter and Tesla, when does that bad boy sleep? Among other tasks he's set for himself, he's going insanely deep on cost-cutting at Twitter. Which is something you just gotta do when you buy a non-money making company and saddle it with annual debt of $1B. 

First on the Musk hit parade was savagely cutting the employee ranks. Headcount will roll, he decreed. And it did. 

Then Musk trained his keen focus on non-labor expenses. 

Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. (Source: NY Times) 

The service providers Twitter has put the screws to - screws like skipping payments - included KPMG and Deloitte, which worked on areas like security, tax prep, and compliance. I suspect this isn't going over well with KPMG and Deloitte, or with the organizations Twitter was supposed to be complying with. Like the FTC. 

The company missed payments to and then renegotiated its contract with Carrot, a benefits provider for fertility services including egg and sperm freezing and in vitro fertilization, according to two people close to the company. On Thursday, Carrot notified Twitter employees that the fertility benefit amount would be halved in the new year. A representative for Carrot did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 75% of the employees have been laid off, this may not be impacting all that many folks. But it you were relying on this benefit...Yikes. 

But wait! There's more (or less, depending on the way you look at it.)

The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said... At Twitter's San Francisco HQ has cut its floor space beyond what would be proportional to the draconian layoffs that have occurred. With people packed into more confined

spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

I never had to bring my own toilet paper to work, but I was at Wang for a couple of years while it was spinning into its death spiral, so I know what it's like to work when the cleaning staff has been greatly reduced.

Wang was a frugal company to begin with. Among other things, I stayed at hotels I didn't consider safe. On one trip to Cleveland, I wedged the desk chair up against the door to provide myself with a bit more security.

But when things got really bad, maintenance of the facilities was one of the first and most obvious things to go.

They removed one third of the overhead lights, making a dim and dingy environment even dimmer and dingier. They also removed half the lights in the parking lot.

They stopped picking up the trash from individual cubicles. You had to bring your trash to a large bin on your floor, but these weren't emptied all that regularly, and were often overflowing with coffee grounds and banana peels.

People became more and more careless. I found a discarded tea bag tossed in an aisle. On a staircase, I almost stepped into a gigantic hawked up loogie.

The bathrooms were a disaster. We joked about catching typhus. One of my male colleagues reported that, in a men's room stall, he came across a row of dried boogers lined up over the toilet paper holder.

Ah, what a charming stroll down memory lane. 

And however terrible Wang was, it has to have been a million times better a place than Twitter. At least there was no Elon Musk on the scene