My last job at a unionized industrial plant had Good Friday as a holiday. Third shift started Sunday nights and after many years finally were able to get Good Friday holiday moved to Easter Sunday night.
At one point, I worked for a large computer company as an IT consultant. One year, we received the list of holidays for the next year, including for the offices working on the account from Mexico, Romania and India. I was amused and slightly annoyed to find that the office in India got Good Friday off but we in the US did not.
:smack:
I’m sure there are a lot of Americans who don’t realize that either.
You work in a pharmacy? Yes, we have drugs here. No, you can’t have them unless a doctor prescribes them.
Reading applications for teaching jobs, I was shocked to see how many people think teaching requires no qualifications (despite minimum qualifications, such as a degree related to the major, having been posted in the announcement to which they were responding). I was also stunned how many claimed a license or certificate in the field, but were not to be found in the state’s certification database, or had an expired license, or had substantiated complaints on their record. Did they think we wouldn’t check this?
Not a co-worker situation but work related.
Remember the 2003 blackout? I was at work and we lost regular power in my area. But as a prison, we had emergency generators so we had power. But we wanted to cut down on the amount of power we were using and one of the things we did was shut down all of the washers and dryers.
I later had a prisoner complain about having the washers and dryers shut off without notice. He demanded that in the future everyone should be given an hour’s advance notice.
I told him, “If I had known there was going to be a blackout an hour before it happened, I would have told the governor not you.”
This reminds me of another work related story that involves a co-worker (actually my boss). We had been issued digital cameras to use whenever we needed to take pictures of anything at work. But we still had the older film cameras and a finite inventory of film.
My boss decided that pictures on film were better than pictures on a memory card because they were more admissible as evidence in court. But he didn’t want to use up all of our film. So he set a policy; we were supposed to use the film camera for important things but not use it for unimportant things. I wasn’t going to let that slide so I pushed him for a more definitive standard (otherwise he would have followed his usual practice of second-guessing my decisions weeks after I had made them). He kept trying to avoid committing himself but he finally issued a standard; we were supposed to take film pictures anytime we would need them as evidence later in court.
I asked him if he understood how time worked.
Yes sounds interesting.
Reminds me of all my friends who graduated high school in 2002 and proceeded to get all sorts of “out-there” college degrees and then expected immediate 6 figure jobs for them. My friend got a Music Theory Bachelors Degree and then spent two years with his band thinking getting a degree somehow made him more “desirable” to hire for social events and what not. Then the 2008 US recession hit and suddenly even whatever small job opportunity they had evaporated.
At one place we had a nice part-time person teaching some of the Computer Literacy sections. Better them then me.
When we had a regular tenure-track positions open up, she’d apply. But no PhD, no consideration.
Suddenly had a PhD one year. Checking: Yep, an online diploma mill. No, that doesn’t count. We check these things. (Sadly, others still wanted to move the application forward despite the fraud. Others wanted a termination for fraud. It was an unexpected battle. You lie on your vita? Goodbye!)
A partner in our pathology practice was on call one weekend. He was paged to cover a problem, and called back saying he was at the airport about to leave on a trip. Sorry fellas, can’t help you, gotta go, g’bye. :rolleyes:
20 years ago I worked - briefly - with an entry level sys admin with no college degree. He thought that eventually he’d work his way up to CIO - that there was a career progression from low level sys admin with no college degree to upper management at Fortune 100.
He got fired when he spoke to the IT press (this was back when Computer World subscriptions were a thing) for telling them what IT strategy was - i.e. what we were going to do with our networks. Of course, he had no idea what IT strategy was, no exposure to long term corporate planning or budgets. That sort of thing has stock implications - when you imply that the company will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to change directions - for no reason.
My brother is a company president, and over his career, he’s been a CPA, CFO, VP, and CEO at various companies for 40+ years. In that time, he got his MBA, and he’s taught some business classes at a local university. He’s had articles written about him and he’s been headhunted many times - he’s good at what he does.
A few years back, one of his younger employees came to him to be mentored, and my bro decided to discuss it with him. My brother asked him: “What’s your 5-year plan?” The lad said “I see myself in your job.” Yep, this kid a couple of years out of college thought it was realistic for him to become the president of a major company before he was 30. Bro explained to him what it took to get to that position, and the kid didn’t like the answer. He quit a few months later.
It’s nice to have goals, but dang!!!
I understand this is a different topic than the OP, but I thought I would chime in with my experience.
I work with lots of people who (supposedly) have engineering degrees. But I would call less than 50% of them “engineers.” I worked with someone for many years who had a degree in mechanical engineering. He couldn’t do the simplest math. He had no understanding of F = ma. I currently work with people w/ EE degrees who would not be able to solve for the voltages in a voltage divider.
I have no idea how these people got the degrees.
This would be an excellent topic for a new thread, IMO.
Oh god, we were hiring a guidance counselor once upon a time. The applications were horrendous. Under “experience” they would have “Counselor at X School district” and then a 40-item list of every routine, mundane job responsibility that literally every counselor had. What they wouldn’t list was the name of the school (probably because the non-education specific template didn’t tell them to) and that would literally be the only thing we needed to know. They would list “Proficient in Word and Excel”, I assume because that same template was from 2004. They would be typo-ridden–and I really don’t care about a few typos in resumes and cover letters; IMHO that’s a dumb way to filter. But these would be on-going and egregious. Under skills, people listed “professional in appearance and dress”; under certifications, they listed “Wedding planner”. They would put inspirational quotes and testimonials from their references in sidebars, sometimes in “cursive” fonts.
It’s like they had no idea what a resume was FOR or who would be reading it or what that person might want to know.
Yup.
There was a girl who worked at the shelter who was very sweet and very keen and always really wanted to chat with me while I was trying to work.
Anyway, at some point, she decided that she wanted to be a vet tech, too, just like me! (ok great plz go back to your section and leave me alone) And she’d yammer on and on about how she wanted to go to vet tech school and how she figured she’d need letters of recommendation and blah blah blah blah. So one day, they let her shadow the other tech during surgery. She was, naturally, over the moon excited.
The day after, she came bubbling up to me all, “Have you ever done a cat spay? Ohmigod, I almost passed out! I can’t stand the sight of blood! It was so gross!” … It… It’s surgery.
Not only that, but like… okay, you might be thinking, “maybe Dorothy is just being mean and cat spays are especially traumatic blood baths! Maybe she was prepared for surgery, but they threw her into a horror show!” They’re not. Standard cat spays are pretty tidy. There’s some blood involved because it’s… you know… surgery. But really very little and it mostly stays in the cat. Even dog spays are worse.
She stopped talking about wanting to be a vet tech (although she still talked constantly about everything else under the sun) after that. I truly am not sure what she thought was involved with surgery if not a little blood and guts, but… apparently, it wasn’t for her.
I did a major career change at 27, and then a career adjustment a couple of years later. Both times, I was starting near the bottom, but I had years more experience in the work world than my fellow bottom-feeders. Some things I had already learned that they were shocked by:
If you take time off, either for illness or vacation, your work does not automatically do itself. In fact, you’ll find even more work waiting for you when you return.
It doesn’t matter if you were on your way to an important meeting, the company will not pay for your speeding or parking tickets.
Save your receipts and fill out your expense report right after you incur the expense. Don’t wait until the end of the month.
Maybe your supervisor isn’t always right, but when your supervisor also is the person signing your paycheck, they’re the closest thing to infallible this side of the Pope.
Heh, I’m so old I can remember working with copy machines that didn’t collate automatically. There were these expandable metal contraptions that you used to do the manual concatenation. Pain in the butt!!!
I remember a guy that was hired as a software engineer (back in the heyday of the big IBM mainframes). He apparently interviewed really well. I thought he was a bit of a blowhard. Over the months, they started moving him around. And every move was to a lower level job. Finally, he was almost exclusively assigned as coordinator of our United Way/Employee Contributions project (a BIG deal at my company). That year I got assigned as his assistant – on top of my regular job – and I did 90% of the work. He was such an ass. What made it worse was that management was so chickensh*t that with all the downward moves, they never adjusted his salary downward to match. :mad:
It’s nothing new. I’m 20 years older than you and saw plenty of that back in the day? You’re majoring in art history, religion, etc. and you have no plans to teach or preach? Good luck paying back your $7,000 in loans. 
OTOH, another change in pharmacy practice that prompted me to take a hike was the recent, not-uncommon practice of hiring new graduates as a pharmacist-in-charge. It sounds like yet another way to get somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing into a job that nobody who would know would want anyway.
Straight out of high school in the 1970s, I worked for a while as the night baker at the local Dunkin’ Donuts. They hired a student at the local university for the graveyard shift on the counter. His duties included finishing the doughnuts I baked. Now, this was not a stupid man. From Pakistan, he was a scholarship student in mechanical engineering. And a really nice guy to boot. But every night for a week – every, single, night – we had to show him how to a) pick up doughnut; b) dip doughnut in flavored icing; c) place doughnut on tray. Every, single, night. After a week, they let him go.
Everybody in The Basque Team had STEM degrees; Sheboss was supposedly a mechanical engineer. Supposedly. She had been given that specific assignment because it made a belt-notch that HR reckoned she needed, before sending her back to taking care of wet-behind-the-ears people: managing self-starters wasn’t something she was suited for. Or doing any kind of process design: she’d see us working on the process diagrams and ask “what the heck are you doing, you should be working!” and “what’s that picture? Why aren’t you working?”
Some people seem to get their degree not so much on account of having proven that they understand the subject matter as on account of having memorized enough of each individual course to collect a bunch of bare-passes. A bunch of bare-passes may get you the pretty paper, but it doesn’t mean you’re capable of doing the job.
A lot of people don’t seem to understand just how much goes in to professional social media.
I had to hire a social media manager and I received hundreds of applications ranging anywhere from babysitters to cooks and everything in between. Not one of them had any kind of previous job experience in social media, but would always list “Active on Twitter and Instagram” under “skills”.
There is so much more to social media than just seeing something and retweeting or commenting on it or just posting stuff. Just because it’s easy as a hobby doesn’t mean it’s easy as a job.
On a bit of a side note: It’s kinda sad seeing the state of some of the resumes I got. This was an entry-level job that, by all accounts, wasn’t the most prestigious in the world, and I still got some really bad resumes from people. I felt so sorry for them because I can tell they’re trying to make a change in their life, but they’re just firing their resume at anything they can…