I still tease one of my coworkers about the time I called him at ~3am to tell him that there was a problem with one of the processes in a unit he managed. As I was explaining what I knew and what I needed to look up, he said “Pull up the trends on (reactor) 900 and tell me what the temperature and pressure are.”
To which I replied “I just said I was starting my trends.”
And then he said “No, not you; I meant my wife.”
So apparently he woke his wife at 3am to look at work trends for him. She doesn’t work for our company. She’s not an engineer, but apparently he’d “trained” her to read engineering process trends.
Big pressure cookers, basically. Depending on what’s inside they can be extremely pacific or pretty nasty, but in any case it does take a special person to accept being awakened at 3am by your SO saying “love of my life: open my laptop, use my password, open a program you’re not supposed to have access to and give me the readings. Thank you, dear.”
They are indeed chemical reactors. That particular reactor could potentially overpressure and release flammable gasses, which would of course be required reporting to the EPA and Very Bad. But for the incident here it was merely off-specification product that had to be disposed of.
Although I must note that password requirements for our laptops are… somewhat lax. So it’s possible that all that was needed was to nudge the mouse and “wake up” the laptop. Still should not have spouses, children (… I suspect), or others looking at it, though.
Dude. I updated the drawing you asked for. Just because it’s rotated in the viewer doesn’t mean I changed the format from portrait to landscape. Just rotate it in the viewer! It’s the way it comes from Autocad. It will print just fine! You turn the paper from landscape to portrait, and voila! You can read it!
Nah, the ‘witchcraft!’ accusation will happen the next time I blurt out some science in response to the pandemic-related ramblings of certain coworkers. (I thought they were going to run me out of the county when I responded to the receptionist’s concerns that attending a women’s college would turn her daughter into a lesbian with “It’s not contagious!”)
I had a meeting today with one my lovely coworkers. I hate having meetings with him as he always has to be in control. He also does this thing where he asks you to call the meeting but then completely runs the meeting. So why doesn’t he just call the meeting himself? Regardless, today I walked all the way across the campus to the meeting room close to his office out of respect for his time. I got there on time and ready to go and he made me wait 15 minutes. Then he steamrolled over me the whole meeting and ignored when I said I understood and instead explained his spreadsheet yet again. He can be insufferable sometimes.
Haven’t posted in here a while, as everything was going fairly well, as well as it could be due to The Rona.
We’re still working from home. There remains a contingent of 10 in office everyday, handling mail and emergency type situations. Our actual office is closed to clients. The courts remain open, hearings are held over the phone. Civil filing opened Monday with one open desk. Last we’ve been told is if we’re working from home now and are considered ‘vulnerable’ (I hate that word), figure we’ll stay at home through the end of the year. I have an appointment to go later this month to pick up my monitor, keyboard and docking station.
I understood when they removed 25% of my daily duties (filing court actions) as it was decided we would not be pursuing these actions for a while. As of today, I still have no idea when we will start again, last I heard maybe sometime next year. I don’t agree, but I don’t call the shots.
Now the rant. To replace the 25% reduction, I was asked for ideas. I suggested a wide variety of tasks I was more than willing to do, which would help the clients, benefit us financially, help my coworkers. All I asked was not to get dumped with cases.
Guess what management decided to do?
Last Friday I received a lot cases. Dammit. I’ve been trying to check these cases in while still handling my other daily case work and the remnants of the court processes still pending. Good lord I really do work with idiots. If these cases are indicative of their previous workers daily work, I feel horrible for the clients. Suggestion: If a client is dead, calling them asking for money is pointless. Suggestion: Don’t break statutes just because you were too lazy to send a legal document. Suggestion: If there 20 court orders listed in the district court file, there needs to be 20 court orders in our system. Just noting them is insufficient. Suggestion: If any of these 20 orders change charging, it needs to be changed. Suggestion: If you’re not sure where a child is, just stopping support is not the correct action. Suggestion: If the state says “If X, WE will do Y”, do not take it upon yourself to do Y. Suggestion: If a case was returned to you last August with a note of what needs to be cleaned up, clean it up.
This last suggestion has taken 4 hours of my day today. It included apologies to various professional boards, chains of emails to attorneys, and correcting everything that should have been done 10 months ago. Supe’s response to everything? Just send it back. Not after spending half my fucking day fixing it, knowing it’d just be ignored for another 10 months.
(FWIW: This is on the six cases I have checked in so far)
I’m working on a grant that ends in September. All the work is done, just needs to be reported out and invoiced. Our deputy director is the signatory to the grant and gets all the notifications. Apparently the grantor sent our DD an email saying that since it was complete we should deliver them the final report by June 12. Which he eventually forwarded to my boss. Who forwarded it to me at 3:30 pm on June 9.:smack:
Oh, and by the way, we have 8 hours of mandatory (virtual) meetings over the next two days.:smack:
We thought we’d call the grant administrator to clarify what they want as the language was a little screwy. She’s not available until 2:00 on June 11.:smack:
So I’m feverishly working on the final report. The primary task was to collect data from a number of water utilities and put it into an online database hosted by an academic organization called CUAHSI, then demonstrate using it in some water quality model development. I figured I’d link to the database and show some examples of how the data is uploaded and formatted and all that. So I go the website and what do I see? A black screen with #BlackLivesMatter#ShutDownAcademia. Yep, the data is not available.
At this point I’m just laughing. I happen to agree and it’s not my ass that has to 'splain why our report will be late.
So Dude redid the PDF so it would be oriented portrait. Whatever. And the Autocad drawing which contained both sheets? He split it out to be two separate pages. THEN he released it. This guy is a piece of work.
So not a complaint per se since I’m quite happy to still have a job, and the company is trying really hard to balance employee safety with getting work done, which as a news gathering organization that can be very difficult to balance. About 95% of the staff is working from home or in the field. All the photogs and many of the reporters were issued the company cars as take home, so we manage.
One difficulty is that there still has to be a place to interact at the station to obtain gear (such as live transmitters) that we don’t have in enough volume to issue permanently to each individual. Thus we have been operating out of auxiliary garage where our bigger trucks are kept. Field staff is allowed in the garage but not past the magical door into the building.
It’s all well and good but simple things such as where to take a leak became an issue when we’re not allowed in the building and most businesses closed down. The solution was a pair of Porta Potties placed in the front circle of the station.
It was a good solution until the local homeless population and the construction workers down the street began frequenting the potties, quite destroying them. The solution, reasonably, was to move them into said auxiliary garage.
This has worked well until recently when the weather turned hot. The garage suffers from some ventilation issues which makes it very warm inside. Combining the temperature with low airflow and the garage has become a tad aromatic, and the insides of said potties downright disrespectful.
Fortunately for us we were issued gasmasks for the unrest of the past two weeks, and we have since discovered that said respiration protection is excellent when used in stifling plastic shitters.
So that’s my life now - I wear a gasmask to take a dump at work.
I am still working on the mass of cases I received. They suck.
But wait! There’s more!
Because of that court process I used to do, I was put on a workgroup to do something about defining my “group’s” impact on a specific part of the process. The “group” consists of me. I guess I still am not sure what we’re doing, as my “group” was put to the last and clear explanation has not been forthcoming. The only thing I really understand is we’re going to be going step-by-step over Process of Service. That should take maybe an hour, tops.
So why do I have two two-hour meetings scheduled for it?
Also, when the court process was taken from me, I was volunteered to be on a group testing the new electronic filing system. Note the ‘was volunteered’ part. Was told it would be 8 of us basically being guinea pigs in the new system. No problem. Oh, and BTW, there will be two hours meetings once a week. I still do not have access to the new system, but have a two hour meeting this Friday from 1-3pm. Idiots.
(I’m usually done for the day every Friday before 1pm, if not earlier)
Being part of the guinea pigs, I was again volunteered to see if mandating PCL to PDF would be viable for the entire division. Currently, some mail prints locally and there are still 10 people in office daily mailing documents. The idea is to have everyone’s mail to print to a network folder, we then upload to the electronic file and mail. No humans involved. I can deal with the one hour Friday 1130-1230 meetings ( ), but every morning when I sign on I spend anywhere from 15 minutes to 90 minutes uploading docs from the network to the file system and mailing them. Plus tracking every single document both when I generate and when I upload.
So when, exactly, am I supposed to get MY work done?
Miss Take, I wonder if you could do what I used to do. I’d say “I can do eight projects a day if we need them done well. I have fourteen today. Prioritize them in the order you want them done, and I’ll try to get all eight done in order.”
Then when I got ten done, I was a hero… and got to leave at five. Well, five -ish… And only if I could sneak out before Biggly Boss saw me packing up*.
…
*He’d catch sight of you leaving, and you could see the wheels creaking in his head as he realized “I’m about to lose an extra hour of work out of this minion if I don’t quick come up with a task that HAS to be done today by 6…”
I’d love to. Unfortunately, I was told basically if doing all of this slows me down to my coworkers speed, it’s okay. It’s not okay for me, but that’s irrelevant.
That PCL to PDF trial I noted? Completely blew up this morning. I logged in expecting to see minimum 8 documents ready for me to upload and mail through the electronic file system.
It was empty.
Did the program reset my default printer and ship everything locally?
Nope.
Did I note which specific cases two highly important documents were for?
Nope.
In the program is there a screen which will tell me what all documents I printed?
Yes! From when the system started 11/07/1997.
Is there a way to pull by date? Nope.
I scrolled through almost 23 years of document generation to get to 07/17/20 - today.
Those two highly important documents were not listed. I know I manually generated one, I know the other was to have automatically generated overnight.
Does management have any solution to this?
Nope.
), but every morning when I sign on I spend anywhere from 15 minutes to 90 minutes uploading docs from the network to the file system and mailing them. Plus tracking every single document both when I generate and when I upload.