I have reached the end of my patience today. I’m so tired of having to email people twice before they’ll respond. I don’t have time for this nonsense. I’m tired and cranky, and I have other emails to write, and I’m not staying late on Friday because someone can’t send me an email. I’m not feeling a lot of love for my coworkers right now.
Only twice? Daaaamn. I feel for you: I come from a culture where needing to say things twice is considered Very Bad Double Ungood. People that you need to pursue, specially when you’re trying to do something that they need you to do, make my fingernails wish they could become claws.
Not-so-dear coworkers:
When filling the steps for a complicated, multi-department test, it is a good idea to write something along the lines of “Incoming here”, “Accounting steps” or “Production Planning” in the appropriate spots. It is NOT a good idea to try and fill up the details, since you have an unfortunate tendency to screw them up in amazingly inaccurate ways. Y’all keep your grubby fingers off my Production Orders and Quality Inspections, I’ll keep mine off the General Ledger and the Stocks Listings, mk?
Wait - it’s not normal to need to send 3-4 reminders to a superior before he deals with a simple task that only he is legally allowed to do and that needs doing? And that’s a substantial part of what you do, sending him reminders in the hopes he finally deals with it while users complain to you that it’s not getting done?
Jeez no wonder I hate my job so much.
One of the reasons I’m leaving my current customer is that they’re not a team at all and they have the same general response to anybody asking questions:
Person: asks question.
No response.
Person: asks question again.
No response.
Person: re-asks the question.
“Oh, that’s not me.”
Person: oh ok, do you know who is?
“No idea.”
If you randomly and miraculously manage to find the individual who does know whatever, they begin by expressing their surprise that you didn’t ask them earlier. I’m not sure what is the point of someone knowing something if nobody else knows they know it. Reminds me of my Orgo teacher claiming that, while other humans clearly had reached America before Columbus did, the reason we say he discovered it is that he published it.
Okay seriously fuck this job.
First-level IT support always feels kind of like a bullshit grind, but this is just… hell.
We, as support users, have extremely few rights. If we want to do things like install software, or allow users access to a website, we need to ask permission from the higher-ups. We exist as a “single point of contact”, meaning basically if something needs doing people come to us and we delegate. The only things we can do without passing it on to someone else or asking permission is help users figure out how to use software they should absolutely already know how to use because they work with it every fucking day. It’s absolutely a bullshit job.
But it wouldn’t suck quite so much if almost every person we have to delegate to didn’t, y’know, suck ass.
Most of the delegation goes to our direct superior or our parent company’s IT department. They both suck.
The direct superior is a terribly competent IT guy who happens to be doing the job of three people, and one of those jobs is “approve most requests we get”. I guess it only makes sense that he prioritizes the jobs that aren’t complete bullshit, but the end result is that nothing gets done. Getting even basic approval for simple things can take weeks and 3-4 reminders, regardless of how “urgent” it is. I have absolutely no idea how this company is able to function, given the number of “urgent” requests that apparently can wait weeks or months.
The parent company’s IT department runs our emails. They have outsourced all of their IT work to an indian company which is completely and utterly incompetent. I have had to learn how systems I have no access to work so that I can explain it to the people who actually run those systems, because otherwise they will not be able to fix the problem. We’ve done everything possible to idiot-proof our requests, and they still get it wrong half the time. The number of times we’ve had to write back and say, “No, you did this wrong, please correct it” is staggering - the failure rate is something like 50% for simple shit like “adding a user to a distribution list” or “create a new mailbox for a user with the following attributes” - shit that, in my last job, I would do in about 30 seconds and would get screamed at by my boss if it wasn’t perfect.
The end result is that we are absolutely clogged with tickets where the main action is “send reminder, put back on hold”. This is most of what I do at my job. The delegation beyond that is just a matter of remembering who runs what service. It’s totally arbitrary and extremely unclear - no central IT management here, oh no.
It is utterly soul-crushing and I hate every second of it. I’m actively searching for a new job; I have an interview tomorrow and I pray it goes well. My main problem now is that I cannot even pretend to care. I cannot even pretend to give a shit. I can’t even pretend to hide my deep, burning contempt for nearly everyone I work with for their fucking incompetent bullshit.
Anyways.
How’s everyone else doing?
Hoping that the interview goes well and your next job is better. Remember: there is no internet in prison…
I reead “miraculously” as “maliciously”, oddly enough. I guess that’s their viewpoint of what you did anyway!
Hah! And he provided support for his claims. I would’ve said independent support, but you know that whole enslavement thing he pulled.
In further news from the same delicious people:
Months ago I extracted some data from their old system, for them to clean up and prep for loads into the new system. After three months they’ve come saying “I do not understand! There is data missing!”. It’s taken some prodding but eventually they provided examples showing that yes, there was data missing.
One of the things I’d filtered out was items flagged for deletion or with “DNU” in the description. Right now there is nothing flagged for deletion and nothing says “DNU”. There is an interesting amount of recent modification dates.
Apparently they preferred to do the manual work required to eliminate all those DNUs and flags, rather than say “uh, can you extract these as well please?” I’m not sure how the hell did they get to this point, but it sure can’t be healthy. I’ll be so happy to never see them again.
I’m going to take a moment to talk about the world’s stupidest company smoking policy. We have a designated smoking area, with a smoke shack. Years ago, they also used to have these outdoor ashtray things – basically sand-filled bollards with a long neck and a hole at the top for dropping your butts in – positioned near each entrance. Then at some point the state passed a law that there was no smoking within 20 feet of building entrances, so the bollards got moved to the corners of the building. After a while, someone in HR thought it looked tacky to have smokers hanging around the corners of the building, so the policy got changed to what it is now. Which is: smoking is allowed in the designated smoking area, or in your car.
I’d guess that only about 25% of the smokers at work use the smoking area. The rest sit in their cars, with their doors or windows open. This means that not only is the parking lot littered with cigarette butts (because smokers think the world is their ashtray) but that non-smokers regularly have to walk through clouds of smoke at multiple points on their way from their car to the building. Which completely nullifies the point of the “no smoking within 20 feet of the entrances” law. :smack:
I retired week before last, but I’m still on the email list for faculty. Hope they don’t purge me off, because the latest batch is making me so glad I won’t be there this semester.
First, there’s an “URGENT!!!”; one of our teachers has called a four hour meeting to discuss long-term planning. The week before classes start, when everyone’s scrambling with a new class, or an updated curriculum, and the school’s backed up with copying so teachers are running to copy shops to try to get five classes’ worth of handouts and readings run off…
And this wasn’t the Dean, it was just a fellow teacher, yet no one says “Hell, no!” or “Can we do this another time?” or “FOUR hours? To do twenty minutes’ worth of business?”
Today’s is a classic. “All employees who’ve spent years inputting their Professional QIUS timekeeping into the UQIUS system, need to retrieve all that info before September first and re-input, it in the new NVA format, into our brand new SYSQIUS system”. Apparently, you won’t get credit for any class or conference you’ve attended that doesn’t get re-inputted by 9/1 and “will therefore need to be repeated”. How do you repeat a conference you spoke at three years ago?
(I’d be screwed because I never jumped through the UQIUS hoops… just ignored the whole system and no one ever noticed)(though maybe I could ignore SYSQIUS too, but if not… well, I’m so glad I got out when I did).
The office manager tried to ding me on a safety violation for one of my crew.
I told him it was not a violation as I have read the safety plan and am very serious about personal safety.
His response was, “Well we are working on revising our safety plan and I want to make sure everyone is safe.”
OK, so can I have a copy of the new safety plan? “Well it’s still very draft so we’re not releasing it yet.”
So to be clear, you are trying to give me a safety violation of a policy that I’m not allowed to see?
Off to the boss to tell him what a dip-shit the office manager is and how I categorically reject this violation and it damn well better not show up on my performance evaluation!
We have one specific piece workplace software that is, to me, confusing as hell.
And I don’t use it every day (about once every month or so) and every time I use it, I use it for a slightly reason, so I have to do a slightly different set of steps. And while we have instructions for certain straightforward tasks, so far, none of my tasks have been straightforward - some have been close, but none entirely.
And so, it makes me feel like an idiot.
I hate feeling like an idiot.
I hate feeling frustrated.
I hate having to call the help desk every single time to figure out what I’m doing, what I’ve done wrong, and how to fix it.
Maybe it’s just Monday, maybe I hate my job, see no future, and want out.
Rant of frustration:
I perform a specific court process for my coworkers, if they send me a referral. I process all the paperwork, coordinate with the County Attorney’s Office, complete sometimes complex accounting and court order management. I manage the process until the first court order is received. What can take weeks for a person to do, I have streamlined to a few days. I can complete all the documents with my eyes closed. I have a determined process within the CA’s Office that wherein my requests are expedited (granted the CA I work with can be an idiot at times, but it has improved).
One coworker had told me twice (!) that this service is stupid, our coworkers should know how to do this process, and anyways her team is so caught up and so smart, they’ll never send me referrals.
Well, heifer, if your team is SO wonderful, why did one of your spectacular coworkers screw up a case so bad, management had to brought in? I know why she sent me the referral in the first place- the court order management was so messed up, I spent a few days just cleaning up the horrendous mess she and previous workers caused (multiple missing orders, incorrect charging, orders not entered…). This particular coworker sends me referrals only on messy cases. I don’t really mind, as I like making cases clean, but then to completely disregard the process and create even more of a mess?
The AP department is at it again. They have a new ticketing system and, well, it seems to sort of work. Except that they don’t seem to understand anything I ask them to do.
So the other day, I put in a ticket to block an invoice that was booked against the wrong PO. Super easy stuff, picked the invoice management -> Block invoice ticket, put in the information and explained in plain English what needed to happen. 5 day later, I get an email that say the invoice was paid, followed immediately by a ticket closure email.
That was the exact opposite of what I asked them to do. So now I get to figure out how the hell to fix this. I wrote a strongly worded email back to them, requesting they re-open the ticket because they didn’t do the thing I needed them to do. I also asked my vendor very nicely to send me all the invoices they sent but I cannot figure out where this rogue invoice came from and I can’t see the invoices from my end. Here’s hoping I can figure this out… because this is totally my job. (it isn’t)
Make sure the time you spend in cleaning up the mess of her team is recorded & charged to her team!
Even if you can’t charge it back to them, make sure your own time record has a category for ‘cleaning up heifers’ teams’ messes’ and you charge to that.
Make sure the time you spend in cleaning up the mess of her team is recorded & charged to her team!
Even if you can’t charge it back to them, make sure your own time record has a category for ‘cleaning up heifers’ teams’ messes’ and you charge to that.
Anything worth saying is worth saying twice, I guess.
In discussing the secondary fuck ups on the case, the pre-referral fuck ups were discussed, too. Sounds like there will be a “From Management” email outlining where my clean up ends. Technically, the case is supposed to be clean when sent to me, but errors happen. It is kind of nice that things I’ve been complaining about for a while are finally being addressed. Why, after 18 months of processing these referrals, management finally told my coworkers that if the case is coded mine, stop entering the court orders. :smack: