We have five ice trays. We might use two trays of ice in a day, so there’s plenty of time for it to freeze.
Whoever it was didn’t need a full tray of ice in their drink, but didn’t want to leave a half empty tray in the freezer (and yes, I’ve heard people bitch about that, too) so they refilled it knowing that the water would freeze before all the other trays were used up.
Yes I know that. Doesn’t make it any less wrong. 
I am convinced that my co-worker, Linda, begins yammering the second her eyes open in the morning. She is loud, she is non-stop, and she could not be more annoying. I don’t know how she does not run out of breath.
She works four days a week, so she is not there every day. I know the minute my elevator door bings open whether Linda is working that day. Mind you, the elevator is a good distance and a couple of hallway turns away from her desk.
She goes all goddamned day long, telling the same inane stories to person after person throughout the shift. It is not unusual for me - based on my location - to hear 3 or 4 10-minute accounts of how her cat jumped up on the kitchen counter last night.
Linda-less days are a rare, peaceful blessing.
mmm
I feel for ya. I have a couple of talky coworkers, chief among them is the Pop Into My Office one.
No matter how quietly I approach, the second I silently sit down, she’s IN my office. Not at the door, inside, inches from my elbow. And blathering non-stop. How her weekend was (even if it’s Wednesday by now), and how was my weekend? It was such perrrrfect weather…“Fine. I’m really busy, sorry.” *So what did you do? On the weekend? Did you leave town, like my husband and I did and we found the cutest apple orchard… *All drivel delivered to my ear, because for the last year I haven’t made eye contact.
And in that last year, I have entered my office FIVE times during normal hours. I’ll hit my office after six, when she’s gone. During the day I’ve been keeping everything I need in my bike bag and logging onto a computer in random classrooms to get stuff done. *So how come you never swing by these days? We never chit-chat! *
Swing by? I honestly think she looks at it as my coming to visit, so we can “chit-chat”. And she’s fragile, if I tried to talk to her about any of this, she would Never. Stop. Crying.
I swear, it’s not quite a reason I’m retiring, but it’s on the list of “Shit I Won’t Miss”.
My “Linda” doesn’t bother coming to me to chat; she learned long ago that I have ZERO interest in how she and her mom spent the night at the casino, played the penny slots, hit the buffet, went into the hot tub, then fell asleep watching 90-Day Fiance in the room.
But I still get to hear her tell everyone else - one by one - about it.
I know exactly what you mean about retirement. These scenes always pop into my head whenever I daydream about The Day.
mmm
Knock knock knock
[through the keyhole] Coooee! I just thought I’d drop by to see how the retirement’s going? You’ve got plenty of time to chat now, isn’t it lovely?! Maybe you should get a cat to keep yourself busy now; Mr Tiddles certainly keeps me busy, he’s such a scamp! He was up on the kitchen counter five times yesterday, imagine! I’m taking him to the vet later though, every time he gets up there he heads straight for the knives, and I know this sounds silly, but he’s rubbing his head on them, it almost looks like he’s trying to cut his ears off…[/through the keyhole]
I’m hearing this in the voice of Mrs. Flack, a (brief) character on the series As Time Goes By.
I think you should bring over that nice casserole, the one he’s allergic to.
The current project started in January. Two of the four factories still haven’t decided if they want to use certain parts of it (including the one I install). And the bad part is: when I look at the setup and at the corporate culture, I actually understand where they come from. Doesn’t make me any happier to be here, though. Oh, and, since I can’t do jack shit until someone makes up their collective mind: will it look bad if I bring a few packs from Heraclio Fournier and start teaching my coworkers some Spanish card games?
Wow. I don’t speak Spanish, but that deck of cards… something about celebrating Father’s Day? … with ‘adorable’ racist stereotypes?
Yeah. No.
I don’t know which one you got, it changes by location. For some reason, when I am at home it knows I’m in France but right now it thinks I’m in Argentina. I didn’t know you could walk from France to Argentina!
If you got the same background I have right now it’s an old game called “families”, originally published in 1965. Each of the seven families is formed by six people (2 genders, 3 generations) and you’re supposed to combine them into matching sets.
For me, it was showing a bunch of screens in rotation, faster than I could really taken in given my not speaking the language and my impaired eyesight. When I randomly clicked on something, I ended up here: 5 Regalos Perfectos para el Día del Padre
with caricatures labeled Swiss(?), Indian, Arab, Eskimo, Mexican, and Chinese. Anyway, NOT the sort of thing I’d bring in to most modern workplaces.
Tirol. I didn’t mean that one anyway, I meant normal Spanish cards: every single other deck on that exact same page. Also, while I usually wouldn’t bring a children’s game to work (in fact, I wouldn’t bring cards to work) remember that most modern workplaces aren’t in the US; some of us don’t have a history of finding every caricature automatically offensive.
My current situation isn’t nearly as bad/toxic/frustrating as the last place was, but it has it’s own… interesting… quirks. So far I’m keeping myself sane by ignoring it all, but I do notice. (I’m also encouraging myself with the knowledge that I’m not going to be here long as I plan to downgrade my career to part time, likely by freelancing because corporate america has some aversion to part time professionals (who aren’t contractors or consultants). Some of the things that I would rant about if I allow myself to:
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The client’s rep is always pushing work back over to us whenever we ask him to do small tasks like submitting change requests. He’s always oh I’m too busy, I’m going on vacation tomorrow, your team knows more about it than I do, whatever excuses.
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The first one also extends to some of the detailed software requirements I’m supposed to get out of it. For example, they’ll ask for different documents to be attached to specific system codes. It’s their data and their documents, we just support the system with development, so they’re supposed to provide the documents and the list of system codes that each one attaches to. Nope, he pushed back and said that our team had a list last time we did this change so just start with that list and update it. Isn’t it strange how the list was WRONG, so we spent a few weeks of development time trying to get it all figured out without their help?
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They keep submitting new requests for changes that overlap or usurp the last thing they requested only a few weeks ago. Very much a “moving target” combined with a “snowball rolling downhill” situation. We’re all having trouble keeping all the changes straight in our heads, because they’re all so similar that even in the issue tracking system they have similar names. A mocked up example is that we have some retention bonuses in production. Last December they requested some new bonuses to be set up as a pilot. January they asked for a new set of retention bonuses to be added to the system. March, they requested that the retention bonuses currently in production be changed. We’re currently working on that development, and last week they requested some new urgent bonuses be added to the system modeled after the ones in production (not the ones we’re currently working on!). Because that’s urgent, it will be deployed before the currently-in-development ones meaning that those currently in development will have to be revised before we can test and deploy them. And there are two other new sets of bonuses that we’re currently gathering requirements for, unrelated to all the others. Who the eff knows what we’ll deploy at this point?
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Oh, and the client rep who I mentioned in #1 above seems to have a habit of pre-emptive offensive escalation. For example, he wanted to know the status of that urgent request they sent us last week. In his email he mentioned that they discussed it last Friday but they need to know the status again today and if he doesn’t hear from us promptly his next email will include the entire management chains from both sides. The urgency isn’t an issue - that happens. What I kind of resent is that he made it sound like we’re not responsive, when we totally have been.
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So yeah, my management told everybody that we have a great relationship with the client. I really don’t think so, as I am picking up a LOT of friction in things like #4.
Today one of my main contacts asked “but, why do we have all these conflicting stuff?”
Well… someone asked for bespoke functionality A. Which makes sense, so it was approved.
And someone asked for bespoke functionality B. Which makes sense from a different point of view, and it was approved, but it conflicts directly with A.
And another person asked for functionality C. Which kind of makes sense, but only kind of because it’s actually not very well designed since it assumes everybody needs it when actually only about a quarter of the company does, but it was approved so now everybody has to use it. It conflicts with both A and B.
And each functionality was the responsibility of a different team. So, take three things which each of them makes sense, or at least more-or-less sense, and…
Contact: “Ah. And we end up with Paris traffic jam. On first day of vacation. I see.”
I’m SO copying that description.
My current workplace rant is with Marriott.com. I try to book rooms close to where I’m working and the closest Marriott to this month’s host is reported as 20 miles away to get my corporate rate. Further than I like, but I can work with it. Marriott apparently thinks I have a helicopter at my disposal. 20 miles is a straight line. Actually driving to work is more like 35 miles and and hour of transit time. Yes, I’m changing hotels tomorrow even if I have to eat the difference in room rates.
Explain why to the new hotel. Often, they will offer to match the rte you had. Or at least give you some discount.
Especially if you offer to complain to your employer about only having a discounted rate at Marriott, and not at [new hotel] chain.
This job is making me appreciate the meetings I had in other jobs. Maybe I’ve been terribly lucky, but it’s the first time I’m in a project in which meetings routinely quadruple or more their official expected duration. A few times I’d had meetings which lasted longer than originally intended but the appendix had always been much less than the original duration, and it had been agreed upon because “we’re inspired, let’s wrap this thing up completely and save us several other meetings”.
So the local paper ran a story yesterday about an impending road construction project that will, among other things, expand the road alongside my workplace to four lanes and add many, many traffic circles. This has been public knowledge for quite some time, as the project keeps getting delayed.
One employee took it upon himself to scan the article and individually email it to a handful of people as if it was some sort of super-secret knowledge. Some of those people forwarded his email on until the entire company had been notified…and people proceeded to lose their frickin’ minds. Apparently, traffic circles are evidence of a bloated government with too much money, and they don’t work, and simple folk don’t know how to use them, and we don’t need none of that fancy urban crap around here. (Although I do wonder why they’re adding an interchange to the interstate…industry is dead in this area, and despite what a recent ad campaign wants you to think, people aren’t exactly flocking to this city.)
Apparently I didn’t show the appropriate amount of emotion in response to the news; one lady took it upon herself to make direct eye contact and repeatedly tell me “There’s gonna be CONSTRUCTION! There’s gonna be so much CONSTRUCTION!!” :rolleyes: Come on, you’ve lived in the state of North Carolina for how long and never had to deal with a work zone? I don’t remember anyone complaining this much when they repaved that same road years ago.
Here’s the thing.
We had four people on our shift today. One doesn’t want to do anything, takes frequent breaks and wanders off where you don’t know where the fuck he is most of the time. Two are assistant managers.
One of the assistant managers and myself asked, several times, where the first guy was and what he was supposed to be doing, because in his first three hours on the job, he did about 15 minutes of work and kept disappearing. The senior assistant manager, who kept getting asked this, then spent over an hour shooting the shit with that person in the cooler, out of sight of everyone and NOT working. Fuck you two and the horses you rode in on. Do the job or fucking go home.
My issue with this? I resent having to work harder because half the people on the shift aren’t fucking doing anything.
The assistant manager is one of two assistants who spend far too much time disappearing, wandering around and taking frequent breaks. While leaving me to do the heavy lifting. Last time I worked with this guy, he disappeared so completely for the last hour and a half of our shift that I wasn’t 100% sure that he was even still there. That after refusing to answer calls for help and making a crack about how he doesn’t like to be called up to the front because he gets stuck working there for an hour. Oh boo hoo. It’s your fucking job. You’re getting paid to be a leader. Act like it.
Tomorrow I talk to the store manager and potentially, the district manager. Being an assistant manager doesn’t mean you get to stand around on your shift socializing with everyone, wandering aimlessly and taking frequent breaks because you’re the boss. And facilitating the screw off doing more screwing off? No. Just NO.