Thank you for the advice but the speaker didn’t even hear me. I was on a conference call with about 50 or so people on the line. Our group met in a conference room and our phone was muted when I said that.
I probably won’t do anything about it because I’ve already been told in this specific workplace that I need to grow thicker skin. This won’t matter to them. Which is why I told you all. So I could at least feel a little better about telling someone instead of internalizing everything.
So many people at my job are working very hard to win the coveted title of “Worst Coworker.” I usually have a few people that I don’t like working with (to put that in perspective, we have more than 500 employees, so a very small percentage). The balance has changed, and dealing with these people is wearing me out. I’m glad it’s Friday, and I can hide in my office this afternoon, until I can go home and be completely alone. That’s going to feel really good tonight.
At the top of the list right now are:
My coworker who kept interrupting me in a meeting today;
My supervisor, who kept listening to her instead of listening to me; and
The coworker who kept getting snippy with me when I tried to keep our meeting moving quickly so we could get through the whole agenda.
I hate all of these people, plus a few more. Work sucks, and they’re not making it any better.
We want Step One to happen automatically and to be able to read all necessary data automatically but we want it to happen at a time which is not the usual time* and we want to not need to prepare any master data for it.
And I want a flying pint-size unicorn which pees cologne. And users whose head is only partially inserted into their colons.
Not a rant, just an I Had To Share.
I’m on sick leave, so I just had a remote meeting (makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?). Our room has all these big posters on the wall with pictures of the processes and of other key information. My meeting was with Jeanne and Paul (not their real names); Jeanne is one of my officemates and Paul is from one of the factories. At several points I needed to say “I’m sorry Paul but you’re breaking up…” “sorry Paul can you repeat” “Paul, I’m sorry but I got lost at ‘inspection’, the rest was really faint…”
At one point Jean just got the giggles. Lots of giggles. And when she finally got her breath back she said “you know Paul, if you want Nava to hear you need to talk to the computer, not keep standing up and walking to the posters! She can’t hear you through the posters, bring yourself back to the chair!”
Maybe we need posters with microphones 
One of my bosses has, in her office, a vase containing sticks of some kind of air perfume thingys. They look like incense sticks, but they are in a bud vase with water.
The smell from them nauseates me. It’s a kind of Holly Hobby pumpkin pie spice smell, and when the office is closed overnight, it builds up in there and becomes a big cloud of gag. I just had to go in there to put something on her chair and I think my eyes are still watering from it.
My office is 2 doors down from the Deputy Director. Here’s a what he was just saying to himself in his office.
“It’s not one of those fucking things is it? Fuck. God dammit. Mother fucker. I can’t fucking believe it. Son of a bitch. Fuck.”
It was spread out a bit. Probably took him 20 seconds to say it all. Not yelling, almost conversational.
Not sure what it was about as I declined to ask.
I hear you. My boss smokes.
Mind you, he smokes outside, well away from the building, but it clings to him and his office REEKS.
I’m extremely sensitive to tobacco smoke, to the point of being nauseated, so I hate going in there. Luckily I don’t have to do it too often, but even so.
How do you tell your boss, who you like and respect and who always takes the time to explain things to you very, very thoroughly, that you don’t like being near him or in his office because he and it smell strongly of tobacco smoke and it’s turning your stomach?
I’m being forced to beta-test a bullshit program at work. It’s supposed to integrate several other programs and spreadsheets that we use all the time.
You’re all smart people. Many of you work in IT. I’m sure you can imagine how well it’s going. I was so happy when the internet went down yesterday; it gave me an excuse to go back and use the old programs that work correctly and more quickly than New! Shiny! Integration!
Sounds like it’s a “reed diffuser”; that stuff in the vase should be oil. Have you tried holding a flame to it? 
One of the ladies in the department next to mine had marinated in some kind of vanilla stank before heading into work this morning. My nose started dripping uncontrollably after stopping to talk to her in the hall, and one of the managers had a violent sneezing attack just from walking by her cube.
Since landing my new job last November I haven’t been regaling you guys with tales of my workplace woes. It’s been genuinely SO much better than the old toxic company. But there is one thing that’s been bothering me since the beginning and now I want to whinge about it.
On my first day I was introduced to a woman and told that she started the week before I did and she was my manager. Oh, I thought I’d be reporting to the man who interviewed me, but okay. These things happen. Strangely her email signature said she was a lead developer, but over the following couple of weeks she kept introducing herself to people as the Requirements Manager. When I asked her about the discrepancy she said that she was hired as a dev lead but on her second day they told her she was going to be the requirements manager instead. She told me she thought it was strange since she had no management experience, but apparently she was fine with that odd bait and switch.
I admit I felt a little bit of sour grapes because I’m the same experience level as her, also with no management experience although I’ve mentored and supervised people, so if they were going to just pick someone at random to be the manager they could have picked the new requirements analyst they hired (me) instead of someone they hired for a completely different field. But I kept that to myself.
So over the past 6 months this still bothers me because… well I don’t want it to sound like I have it out for her because I don’t. She’s very hands off and I don’t really have a problem with her. But in this time I’ve seen that her administrative skills (keeping things on task, facilitating meetings, staying organized with ticket systems, etc.) are poor. She’s also a poor communicator and has a habit of saying inappropriate things, like commenting that someone is off on Tuesdays when they’re really teleworking. In front of the management team she’ll say “I’m off Wednesdays” or “Bob can’t attend the meeting on Friday because he’s off.” No, they’re teleworking. She doesn’t seem to realize that she’s giving a bad impression.
There are a lot of new people here, and they’ve built a new bottom-level management team of new people including her. They’re building new business processes from scratch. I would be so excellent at that, given my administrative skills, organization and ability to communicate tactfully and stay on task. It’s making me want to job-hunt again to try to find a job like what she lucked into.
Ugh, anybody know how to get an entry level management job?
Not management, but there may be a customer service opening at my workplace soon.
Long story short, my company serves the nuclear industry, and purchases many parts with customizations as a result. Last month, some parts were ordered from a long-time vendor; unfortunately, the customer service rep (let’s call him Asshat) insisted on dealing with a new vendor rep instead of the guy we’ve been dealing with for nearly a decade. New Vendor Guy, not being familiar with our company, only read part of our purchase specification, and cheerfully pointed out that we could get the part we wanted much faster by purchasing the standard catalog part number, then sending it out for modification. (This vendor typically works with the factory to ensure the part is entirely custom-made; we get exactly what we want, but with a very long lead time.) Asshat saw nothing wrong with this; naturally, when the parts arrived, the engineer in charge of the job saw that the part was not exactly as he had specified, and rejected it. This prompted our original vendor rep to contact me (I think I’m the only engineer at our location that he deals with on a regular basis).
Original Vendor Rep explained the entire situation to me, and was very apologetic; I accepted this apology, and noted that I could improve our purchase specification for future orders by eliminating any reference to the standard catalog part. I thought all was well, and I worked with the engineer in charge of the job to explain to Asshat that the customer would not be receiving their part on time due to what I thought was an understandably long lead time. Asshat was having none of this; he insisted that he would “make” the vendor and the factory understand that they needed to drop everything to make the part. Yeah, sure.
I found out today that asshat has basically been harassing Original Vendor Rep by phone. :smack: The exchange carried over to email this morning; Asshat’s emails were excessively harsh, and borderline abusive. Again, there were failures on both my company’s side and the vendor’s side; nothing is being gained by repeatedly telling Original Vendor Rep – who didn’t even process the order – that everything is his fault. After consulting with our purchasing department, I called Original Vendor Rep to apologize for Asshat’s behavior, and a couple of our purchasing agents went to their supervisor regarding Asshat’s behavior. This prompted a flurry of emails in which Asshat was told to not contact Original Vendor Rep again; by lunchtime, the job had been taken away from Asshat entirely. More apologies were sent to Original Vendor Rep as well; amazingly, this incident doesn’t seem to have hurt my company’s relationship with this person.
Nobody gets a management job out of the blue. She knew full well she was going to be in her current position. Now, being qualified for it and being capable of doing it are both separate issues from having it. Whatever calculus the boss used to put her there is likely the same caliber of calculus they’ll use for determining your future at the place.
Oh, and mentoring and supervising, especially supervising, are management experience.
Interestingly, the man who “promoted” her on her second day has already left the company and his replacement is a very different kind of manager. One thing I quickly noticed about this place is that nothing stays the same for very long.
I put a bug in the new deputy director’s ear that I’m interested in a management role. So now I’m just doing my analyst job to the best of my ability while keeping my eyes and ears open. We’ll see what happens.
Oh, they did at my last job!
If you walked into a boss’s office with a one page plan for heading a whole new department, especially at 5 pm if said boss wanted to get home asap, there’s a good chance you’d walk out with a new job. Which you’d come to hate, but it’d be new, and look great on your CV. Same scenario if you walked in off the street with a good story – we got a lot of greenhorns suddenly in charge of people with twice their experience. We came to call it “Mood of the Moment Management”.
See, I worked at a Mom ‘n’ Pop Shop (a company that was started by two entrepreneurs) which had grown exponentially in a few years. That meant that the two bosses (very much Mom and Pop) who were great in their field had to suddenly become supervisors of dozens of people.
Which was not their strong suit…
They once accidentally hired two separate people to head our Media Department. Neither had supervisory experience and they were given obscure job titles, so no one (esp. not the bosses) realized they were both supposed to run the same department for a few days. That’s when Mom ‘n’ Pop discovered their mistake. “Well, cream will rise to the top!” said Pop. They left them both in charge to “see how it all shook out”.
WTFFFFFF?
Not a rant, so much as good news… but it was a rant, so… confusing, I know.
A week after I joined the new firm, the boss signed with a marketing firm which, frankly, sucks. After 6 months into this agreement, I made the argument that we ought to just fire their asses for breech of contract, showing that of the 69 items/projects listed as what they are working on, only 17 have been started. Memos were written, spreadsheets were formed, meetings are going to be held - we’re getting our $7k back.
But then this marketing agency decided to give our case a big boost:
Friday, while working on this case, they sent me a blog post for one of our agencies websites. I did 20 seconds of research and found: THIS WAS COMPLETELY STOLEN CONTENT:
https://www.gardenersedge.com/spring-checklist/a/100_14/
I mean… THANKS!
Anyway, I sent their posting to the people who run our website, asking them for their opinion. They told me in no uncertain terms that our contract forbids us from knowingly posting unattributed content and to post this might put us in breech of their contract. They also said they were going to conduct an internal review as this agency works with a number of their clients, posting information to their sites as well. Which, frankly, was what I was hoping they would say.
To be honest, I’m kinda fucking giddy right now. I’m so happy they tried to do this, because it really just made our case that much stronger.
DO get back to us on this. I really hope this is the straw that breaks them!
We have a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of plagiarism. And they’re serious; a woman was let go last year. Hours after it was discovered that she’d co-opted a photo she’d found online, she was called into a very tiny conference room where she admitted “I was burned-out and just couldn’t come up with any new ideas, so I just gave up and grabbed the first thing I could find.” She said she understood, that it felt like it was time for her to leave, and she was escorted out.
We’re getting new phone numbers at work. I’m a little upset about this, since I’ve had the same phone number since I started working here in '95. But that’s not actually what I’m posting about.
To provide a little background… last year a large chunk of the business got sold off to a different company. Roughly 10% of the folks here on-site (including myself) remained with the old company. We’re going through about a 9 month transition phase, trying to separate networks, email, phone systems, etc. Hence the new phone numbers.
So a couple weeks ago they sent out an email with everyone’s new phone numbers and the target date for the transition, which was scheduled for early next week. Then late last Friday there was another email announcing that the schedule has been moved up – it’s happening this week, not next! Local IT is supposed to be coming around with the new phones, headsets, etc, taking away our old phones and getting us switched over to the new phone system.
One small roadblock: IT has not received any of the new equipment yet, and has no idea when it is supposed to show up. Why the hell would you move up the schedule when you don’t even have all the pieces in place yet?
At least the old phones and numbers are still working… for now…
Pfft. Who uses phones for anything anymore? Betcha this starts pushing a lot of processes into email (assuming that your email survives the transition better).
Yeah, I’d hate to be concentrating on a project and have a phone start ringing right next to me. A landline you can’t put on vibrate or read a text off of, to see if you have to deal with it immediately…
No, I’m not a Millenial (though I did father two of them :~), I’ve just gotten pretty spoiled by smartphones.
Hmmm, we put up with communicating everything with desk phones for decades (because we couldn’t even conceive of an alternative). Same with working by sitting in the same cubicle for 40+ hrs/wk, “cabbing” stuff (sending sketches and artwork across town to a client, in a cab) and long* face-to-face meetings.
*I still have a manager who’ll call a routine “touch base” meeting with everyone for 11am-2pm. THREE hours? Do you know how much I could get done if I were uninterrupted for that long?
Ooo, that reminds me of the project manager who was working at my company when I started there. He would hold a weekly meeting (he had given this meeting a name, but I can’t remember it at the moment) in which he gathered every engineer and supervisor who was engaged in a project; each person would then present a status update of their project. These meetings could last up to four hours. It was rare that everyone (other than the project manager) benefited from sitting through the whole thing – for instance, one time I learned from one of the electrical engineers that he would check the schedule to see who was on-call for weekend work in the electrical shop before he gave an estimate of time to completion, as he knew that certain people were so error-prone that their work would essentially need to be thrown out or otherwise corrected. Oh, I also learned about parallel path activities. But most of the time it was just all of us sitting around and watching the supervisors scream and argue.