Workplace reviews and discussion: 聚點廣告事業有限公司

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Warning: this is a cautionary post, and it’s long, so please read at your own discretion! This is the darkest of dark companies, located in an alley near the Far Eastern Department Store in Banqiao, New Taipei City: “x點廣告有限公司.”

There are mainly two bosses at the company, referred to here as A and B.

These two bosses are often not at the company. At most, they appear at only three points during the day: “before work in the morning, after the lunch break, and during the half hour before leaving work in the evening.” The first two time slots usually last about half an hour to an hour. During the evening time slot, only A appears, and whenever she does, she suddenly asks you to do a lot of things (revision: you have to keep revising until she is satisfied; sending to print: simple, quick jobs are fine, but for jobs that are troublesome to finalize and require more time, she often provides the printing information only right before the end of the workday and asks you to send them to print). Once, we finalized about 20 files for a single project until nearly 10 p.m., with no overtime pay!

Several times, just as we were about to leave work, Boss A suddenly stopped us and said she still hadn’t seen the revisions for a certain project. We would explain that the client had said on the phone that day that it wasn’t urgent and that providing them the day after tomorrow would be fine, so handling it first thing the next morning would still be in time. She would then respond unreasonably, saying, “I! Want! It! Right! Now!” Fine! We thought perhaps they had later communicated with the client and changed something without our knowing, so we returned to our desks, restarted the computer, and revised it until she was satisfied before actually leaving work (by then it was usually one or two hours after the end of the workday, still with no overtime pay). We all assumed that after seeing her unreasonable demands fulfilled, Boss A would immediately send it to the client. Sure enough, about three days later, the client said they still hadn’t received the revised version! We went to ask Boss A, and only then did she say we should hurry up and send it to the client for proofreading! So what exactly was the point of throwing a fit three days earlier and saying she needed it immediately? (And this didn’t happen just once or twice—it happened very often!)

Because they are typical exploitative bosses and are also very indulgent toward clients, they often make you stay to handle urgent jobs that clients send close to 6 p.m., or that clients call about in advance and send the information for after 6 p.m. Even after finishing the work, you still cannot leave, because it is urgent and you have to wait indefinitely for the client to finish proofreading. Sometimes further revisions continue in the meantime, and by the time it is ready to send to print, it is already more than an hour past the normal end of the workday. The key point: still no overtime pay!

Don’t say we never tried to negotiate, because Boss A believed that urgent jobs received from clients after work, as well as official tasks that they failed to assign within working hours and only ordered near the end of the workday—usually not simple little tasks—were all part of a responsibility-based work arrangement, so she said she couldn’t bring herself to pay overtime for them! Things only improved slightly after we learned to start pressing them from 2 p.m. every day to provide the tasks that had to be completed that day as soon as possible. Even then, we had to remind them three or four times. At best, they provided them two hours before the end of the workday (and that was the best-case scenario)!

Later, they went even further, requiring us to stay after 6 p.m. every day for meetings until 7 p.m. before we could leave. The key point was that they never initially said whether this hour would count as overtime. Only after we brought up the Labor Standards Act did Boss A discuss it with Boss B and decide to pay overtime! During meetings, she loved using emotional blackmail. Sometimes she would choke up during the meeting and say that business was bad and Boss B was always telling her this and that. If business is bad, shouldn’t you be out doing sales? What was the point of telling employees this?

Boss A has long been subjected to verbal abuse from Boss B and then takes out her emotions on employees. We would often receive sudden phone calls from A in a very bad tone, yelling and ordering us around. Once, I reported the current work schedule and progress in the company group chat (all of it arranged according to the clients’ event dates). Simply because it was not in the order Boss A wanted, she called me and told me not to post such things in the group chat, otherwise I should not blame her for failing to warn me that “something would happen!” What exactly could happen just because I reported work progress in the group chat? Was it serious enough to call and threaten me? When I asked her about the call afterward, she completely denied it (I have screenshots as evidence, but I didn’t expect her to threaten me over something like this, so I didn’t record the call at the time).

The company has a total of two full-time employees and about three or four part-time workers. Part-time workers are only hired when there are events, so under normal circumstances there are only two designers in the company. Naturally, the work involves much more than design: general company errands, outside errands, administrative work, and cleaning. Sometimes they do hire part-time workers to help package and deliver promotional materials, but many times, even when we were rushing to finish designs and part-time workers were present, Boss A would insist that we put down our drafts and help with those tasks. We helped without complaint, but about half an hour later, Boss A would suddenly call and ask, “Is that other draft ready yet?” I was genuinely speechless! (And this happened far more than once or twice.)

Boss A is a science graduate and handles the company’s accounting and administration. The funny thing is that the itemized totals on quotations often don’t match the grand total at the bottom, or a quotation clearly concerns Client A’s project while the client information belongs to Client B. Clients would call the company to complain after receiving these quotations. We conveyed this many times, yet it still never improved!

You may be wondering why Bosses A and B are not often at the company, why Boss A only appears at those three fixed times every day, and why there has been no sign of Boss B in any of the situations described above. The answer is: Boss A is a contracted employee at a bureau or department of the New Taipei City Government! What’s outrageous is that Boss A would sometimes suddenly appear at the company at 2 or 3 p.m. to pick something up, stamp a document, or issue an invoice. Yes, all during Boss A’s working hours. Also, the time when she appeared after lunch often extended beyond the lunch break of civil servants, yet she still would not return to her department (there is video evidence). According to previous employees, Boss B apparently said she didn’t know what Boss B was busy with all day either. Someone once saw Boss B at an event, but as soon as B appeared, she was holding and eating cookies (even clients said, “Don’t your boss only know how to eat cookies?”). Moreover, Boss B has serious problems with verbal expression and cannot produce complete, logical sentences. All she can say are things like “Mm,” “Ah,” “Oh,” and “The event was handled pretty well!”—that kind of nonsense!

This is absolutely the most outrageous company I have encountered in nearly 10 years of working. There are many other unbelievable incidents; these are just the tip of the iceberg. By the way, they have recently been recruiting on a job bank whose name consists of four digits. I advise everyone who sees this company to avoid it, because the thing that gets worn down is not your work but your body and mind.!