Were you being facetious? Unless you are sending to or from a country that restricts alcohol consumption, you can both import and export booze. US Customs has a whole chapter for “Beverages, Spirits and Vinegar”.
That PCL/PDF workgroup? Today started the expansion to bring others into the trial.
Alas, one of the new guinea pigs is a person I cannot tolerate. During the meeting they made it clear that my spreadsheet was silly, they could devise a much more informative and useful spreadsheet. Fine, you work with the team lead on that, but I don’t know if spending time on devising a new spreadsheet for a temporary group is necessary.
I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve been doing this every day for a few months. I think I do. Even the team lead said “Direct all questions to [MissTake]”. They had the gall to respond they would think about it.
Someone else had absolutely no idea what was going on and frequently tangented with examples that had nothing to do with anything. When the lead would try to rein them in, they just kept going or went off on another tangent.
We couldn’t even get to the practicalities of the trial due to all the cross yammering. The lead kept trying. Then, the project head decided to step in and start talking about stuff completely outside the realm of what we’re to be doing.
This is going to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
The hospital system I work for has decided that now, in the middle of a pandemic with flu season looming ahead, is the best time to close down two primary care offices in the city at the end of October. Without telling anyone until yesterday. We, the people who work for the company, found out hours before it was broadcast on the local news.
I’m stocking up on popcorn and dusting off my lawn chair. This is going to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
That happened to the primary care office I had been going to for labs. The employees were given one week notice; they could either move to a different clinic 10 miles (and in rush hour over 30 minutes) away or apply for unemployment.
Doubt it will reopen, too, unfortunately.
A little pit for my coworker (I’ve mentioned him here before). He sent me a message this morning that something needs to be updated. Other people have been doing these updates, not me. He could have posted this on the team site so everyone could see it. So now I have the choice of posting it to the team site, which he could have done, or ignoring it. I hate when people do this. 
“Was this sent to me in error? Bob in Accounting normally handles this task, or of course, you might post it to TeamSite as usual.”
Bonus passive-aggressive points if you CC Bob on your reply.
Doubleplus p.a. bonus points if you CC Bob’s boss!
I’m working on an invoice for a grant. Turns out our accounting system cannot output what is required by the grantor. So I’ve had to make up my own invoice to match the requirements.
The grant is $160,000 and has receipts from 30 trips across our service area. All of which I had to enter by hand. Also, the grantor won’t reimburse for sales tax so I had to remove all of that by hand. And document it. (i.e. Note: removed $0.14 sales tax)
The number of issues I’ve had to deal with could fill a book. The number of errors I’ve made could fill a second book.
What is their rationale for not reimbursing for sales tax? After all, that is an expense incurred.
Maybe the grantor has a reason to expect to be immune from them.
Of course, if that were the case, perhaps Kelevra’s organization would have grounds to apply them to a state tax credit next year.
It’s a Federal government grant passed through a State gov’t. My organization also doesn’t pay sales tax but when I’m traveling and buying lunch it just isn’t worth the hassle. I’d have to carry letters from every State I travel through. Which is a lot.
Wait, are these taxes you paid on meals? THAT is fucked up. Maybe you should ask your grantors to include a flat per diem in future applications.
Yeah, our school district started giving a flat per diem. They discovered that it took so much time and accounting to save receipts, scan receipts, have a bean counter look at the receipts, compare them to paperwork that teachers had to compile and nitpick. Then accounting had to pick the same nits…
Instead, they started giving $X (or, in the case of big and/or expensive cities, $X+50) for a day’s meals. At a conference in SF, we teachers all starved ourselves during the day so we could afford dinner at the nice little French café near our hotel… totally worth it…
As I once explained to a younger colleague as we walked out of the hotel to go to a very nice (and expensive) restaurant: “Your per diem doesn’t pay for your meals, it subsidizes them.”
New laptop received at 3pm today.
In the past, they’ve been 99% good to go. Sign in, run an update, download a random division specific program and off you went.
It’s 853pm and it’s still trying to figure itself out. Cannot log into anything but Teams, email and Sharepoint.
Earlier I had to call IT about the set up and was told to expect 12 - 18 hours. In the morning will I be able to login and work off my old laptop?
We hope so. It’s mostly working out.
I’m on a 2 day virtual conference. It is amazing to me how little clue supposed professionals have about how much time they are taking. On the other hand the moderator is cutting people off after giving them a 1 minute warning.
In a Zoom meeting. One person was not muted and was talking on her phone (not related to the meeting). We were almost halfway through the meeting before anyone said anything. She’s finally muted, but now some big dogs are barking. I’m pretty sure that’s not on the agenda for this meeting.
I had this coworker, sweetest guy you could ask for, but utterly passive-aggressive. Liked to do things his own way because that was how he was accustomed to doing them. Two days ago he was let go as part of cost-cutting thanks to a projected earnings shortfall due to COVID.
Today I get an email from him that tells me that some of the graphics he was using in documents he was currently working on or had worked on were on HIS HARD DRIVE, not in the cloud storage folder they were supposed to be kept in.
Apparently it took too much time for him to put them where they belonged so sometimes he didn’t. And those graphics are not embedded in the documents, oh, no. They’re linked, so if I open a document that uses them, all I’ll see is a grey box and no idea what the damn thing looked like.
Adding to this, he says that all the raw files he used to create them with are on his hard drive, and just to put a cherry on this shit sundae, he used a personal copy of Corel to create a few of them, which means if I have to make changes I get to start from scratch because (a) I don’t have the program, and (b) I don’t know how to use it even if I did have it.
If I’m lucky, Carbonite backed up all the directories he was using for this shit, but right now I could slap him into the middle of next YEAR I’m so angry at him.
We had more than enough work for both of us, so now I’m looking at dealing with a workload for 2+ people AND at any moment I could get bit in the ass because he couldn’t follow the process he agreed to.
That’s a nightmare. Is there any way he can give you copies of the files on his hard drive? Legally, doesn’t everything he created belong to your company? He could be in legal trouble if he doesn’t give you the files.
The hard drive in question is in a company computer. The problem is that it has, I think, been reimaged already, so anything he had on it is gone unless it was backed up by Carbonite.
I still have to find out if/how I can access the files saved, but strangely, I’m really, really busy now trying to write documents and, now trying to comply with a request from the grandboss about how I’m supposed to help meet the new company culture and direction initiatives that have nothing, but nothing, to do with what I actually do.
I don’t deal with customers, I don’t sell anything, I don’t determine what products to develop or drop, I don’t have anything to do with integrating acquisition products into our offerings … but I’m supposed to come up with priorities and metrics and deadlines for things I can do to support these initiatives.
Fuck it, just let me write! It’s what I do. I’m good at it. You will have to look hard for someone who writes as well as I do for technical documents, and I don’t think you’ll find many, if any, who are better. Just give me the info I need and access to the hardware and leave me out of business strategies and initiatives and shit like that.
I’m not an computer person really, but if I understand the issue correctly getting the files isn’t going to do much towards solving the problem
Because the document is going to be expecting the file to be in a particular folder on a particular drive on a particular machine, and if the path embedded in the document doesn’t lead to that file, it doesn’t matter if the file is located elsewhere in the system.
And even if they get the files from the coworker, the document isn’t going to find them and it may not be apparent which file to insert into each document.
If I’m understanding the cock up correctly, I may not be.
That sounds like a huge clusterfuck, and ex-coworker is probably lucky he isn’t there anymore,