I’m sorry, Filbert. That sounds like a cluster of epic proportions.
…and a lot like our tech school. One of my fellow teachers and I came up with a theory: If it’s going to be chaos no matter what you do, make the chaos work for you.
F’rinstance, don’t want to attend that stupid meeting that there was no official proclamation of? Just don’t show up.
We had a teacher who’d slip in right at the end of a meeting, ask an innocous question (so people would remember him being there, I assume) and bingo! He’d get notes from someone else, but soon realized nothing said in the meeting had any long-term repurcussions anyhow.
Missed the edit to say that I’ve done the just don’t show up thing.
And if someone asks (though this only happened twice in twenty years) you can truthfully say “I checked my email and the board, and didn’t see anything…” OR just say “Oh, yeah, I was there… those guys in the back that laughed at that joke? I was sitting with them. But, God, what a waste of an afternoon, hey? Say, do you think Maria and Brett are dating?”
They sent an official notice of the meeting the day before- and sadly I’m getting so few hours that I can’t afford to turn down a full day right now, even if I do feel my brain dripping out my ears by hour 2. My manager would definitely have noticed if I didn’t show, as they’d at least made the token gesture towards the bubble idea by sitting departments together in the room, and there’s only 7 of us. The CEO talk was actually pretty decent- mostly to the point and a fair bit of actual news, though the hours of waffle afterwards by the day’s organiser was as patronising and useless as expected.
The one bit I forgot in the previous rant was that I’d also been enrolled on a training course in another campus (with people from at least 4 different sites, in person- they really, really do not get this ‘bubble’ concept). I’d initially agreed to this last year, pre-Covid, when the college realised that half the staff had no official teacher training, so declared enrolment was a requirement to start teaching.
The week before I started, I found out that the course I was being put on wasn’t the 12 week course I’d expected, I’d instead been signed up for the next level up, a 2 year long one, which would result in me having an 11.5 hour day at work, with an hour’s drive at each end. I’ve done a few weeks of it, and it was mindbogglingly boring, just sitting in a warm room at the end of a busy day and listening to someone drone on. I was falling asleep at the wheel on the way back.
The good news is, my manager has agreed that I don’t have to do that course given how much teaching work I’m actually doing, and I’ll instead be enrolled on the 12 week one in January. It’s being run earlier in the day and I’ve heard it’s much more useful. I have a chance I’ll actually finish the 12 week one, so at least have an actual qualification to take away- no way I would have completed the 2 year one.
At work we subscribe to an industry-relevant commercial news e-mail publication. Every day it arrives in my inbox and I distribute it to an e-mail list.
That is the extent of my involvement – I am a private contractor at the government agency. The agency itself has a contracting officer who approved the contract for the license and manages it. A new person just got hired into that role.
So the representative of the publisher of the newsletter recently e-mailed me that the subscription will expire “soon” (no date given) and asking if we would like to renew it. She offered to send the documentation if we’d like. I passed that on to the person whose job it is – the agency’s contracting officer.
Cue the contracting officer grilling me – not the publisher’s representative – for details: How much, when expires, what is the contract number, where is the information kept.
WHY WOULD I KNOW THAT? If you don’t know it, if your predecessor didn’t leave you any information, it’s certainly in the files (electronic or paper) from last year – this is the government.
But I have to be nice to the contracting officer…I am a contractor. So I politely explain that I don’t (am not allowed to) have that data, but maybe the publisher’s rep can shed some light by sending the offered documentation. So I write back and ask for “all the info you can send” on the contract renewal and mention we have a new person in charge of the contract, hoping this implies we need our hand held a bit to get going on this.
Here’s the reply:
“thanks for your note. Could you let me know what other information you would need?
The renewal would be the same as what you have had till now.
Let me know if you would like the renewal document prepared and I will see that it is and sent to you.”
Seriously? Neither one of these people is going to do their jobs?
Follow up to the story: Apparently the coworker from that last sentence shared that bit with the mule operator, and SHE got the idea that my supervisor had told me that she was the “plant manager-in-law”, and had tried to pressure me into changing my statement to extend some of the fault to her (at least, that’s the gist of what she apparently said in HER official statement, which was a LOT longer than my written statement, from the glimpse I had of it). So he was tasked with conducting an official investigative interview with me.
The interview produced a reiteration of what I had already written in my statement. No biggie, AFAIAC. But when the official on-the-record part was over, he started complaining that it was hurting his personal relationship with Dennis and Angie (as in, they’ve stopped speaking to him). He then asked me if I had said anything to Kari that would justify Angie coming to that conclusion. Well, I hadn’t, and I told him that I hadn’t said anything to ANYONE that would justify that leap. Since I had just gotten a pretty vivid illustration of what can go wrong when I talk about my conversations with people who weren’t in them, I clammed up and did not speak about having spoken with Kari at all.
A week later, the supervisor calls me into his office and presents me with my first letter of warning since I started working there twelve years ago (for violating safety standards). Again, no biggie, AFAIAC. After I signed it, he started complaining AGAIN, about how this was making HIS work life miserable, to be accused of sandbagging the manager’s wife, when all he was doing in the first place was conducting an investigation into the incident in order to protect the interests of the guy on his team (Oh, yeah? That’s not how I remember it. Oh, and if that was intended to be an investigation, it was pretty ad hoc. When you conducted an actual investigation, you had a pen and paper; for this you damned well DID pressure me to change my narrative to shift some blame away from myself. I just never told anybody that out loud).
Personally I have no ambitions to advance to any position of authority, and the plant manager not speaking to me on a personal basis, is more of a feature than a bug. But it seemed to be causing him some distress, so I pointed out to him that he only had to stick it out for four more months, then Dennis and Angie would both be retired. He didn’t seem to be terribly comforted by this.
One week later, he came to me with a list of safety precautions he had been tasked with writing about the operation of human-powered wheeled vehicles, and he wanted me to review it and make suggestions for how it could be as comprehensive as possible. I added a few suggestions, then asked him if this was a prelude to our department being given back access to the trikes.
“Nope.”
NOPE?
Okay then, do you want I should help you write safety guidelines for operating a helicopter?
I suppose a manual regarding the operation of mules is needed.
Be sure to include housing & feeding, veterinary care, etc.
Hmmm. The custodial crew probably won’t be too happy about the housing but.
On the bright side, we’re not terribly far from the horsey part of Fullerton. We might be able to arrange boarding.
I just joined a new team at work. Among the reason I was brought on is because things aren’t working and they claim they want to make changes. Except, they don’t. They cling desperately to the things that aren’t working and actively resist making changes.
For example - blocking issues aren’t being addressed quickly enough. The team’s standups basically consisted of “Adam” (not his real name) figuratively whipping it out and making sure that everyone knew that his was bigger. He’d spend 30-45 minutes telling most of the people on the team what he thought they should do and how he thought they should do it, with the occasional break while he berated someone or while he and “Bill” (also not his real name) would argue with each other. (These arguments were amazing in that they still managed to argue loudly and vociferously even when they agreed. But neither could let the other get the last word in.) This would last between 30 & 45 minutes - until Adam ran out of people to yell at either because they dropped out to go other meetings or because he’d worked through his issues.
I changed to “traditional” standup structure: (“what did you do yesterday?” “what are you doing today?” “do you have any impediments?”) Adam, of course, whined “standup is when I usually talk about things.” But everyone else went along. Most days we’re done within 15 minutes. The occasional blocking issue takes a little longer - never more than 30. Better meetings, more participation, blockers resolved. And then I get the feedback that we shouldn’t take turns and that no one should be asked about blocking issues, they should just bring them up themselves.
Or, we should go back to Adam’s daily dick size reassurance.
It’s like this for every process and every problem - they want them fixed, but they don’t want to do any of the things that it would take to fix them.
How do you get different results by doing the same thing? You don’t.
Hey, coworker? I get it that this mapping the process thing is dumb. It’s on a process we have not done since March and have no idea when it will be reinstated.
Guess what?
Management is paying this dude to do it, management wants it done; ergo, we do it.
You skipped the last two meetings, so today was all about you. Prefacing almost every comment with your opinion on how pointless this all is, how the process will end up changing once we can file again due to not being in office, how we’re wasting your time - not helpful.
You wasted all our time with your snippy remarks.
I’m still working on this InDesign document that’s a huge mess. I’ve just discovered that the page numbers don’t update automatically, which is a really easy and basic thing to do in InDesign, and they didn’t use styles to create the table of contents. I thought this was going to be a quick and easy job, but it has turned into a lot of work. I also have to update some charts, and pasting Excel charts into Illustrator doesn’t work as well as it used to. I may be working on this forever.
Gah!!!
Save me from “annual refresher” meetings where the presenter just reads the audience what’s on his/her page. That’s almost as bad as reading me the PowerPoint slides.
Just send me the fucking document and I’ll read it in a tenth of the time and be far less stabby when I’m done.
The only saving grace is that it’s virtual and I have good scotch.
Ha, I have an MSHA refresher coming soon. They are eight hours long, by statute.
Actual time it would take to cover the material on my own? 45 minutes, easy. And it is eight hours of powerpoint presentations.
Is it in person, or can you Zoom it?
I just can’t even, with this place. A few months ago we implemented a new email feature into our software that allows the end users to define a an email template, we import the template into the system and they can click a button to send it out to batches of agencies. The template contains tokenized information along with body text. Our QA team tested it prior to implementation with the tokens being identiied like [CUSTOMER_NAME]. I drafted some documentation for the end users that explains how it work, explains how tokens work, and gives the list of all possible tokens they can use. I was tasked with demo’ing this to the end users as soon as possible.
The developer included an odd token in his list of all possible tokens that was something like this: LAST INVOICE (PREVIOUSLY BILLED) TOTAL, so I asked him what we do with the parenthesis. Cue several emails back and forth of him explaining to me what tokens are and how they work, saying that the text between the brackets don’t matter and could be anything and it’s up to the developer, and me getting more confused as to how this is going to work.
Note I just said how it’s “going to” work, when it already worked one way for the QA team. Now post-implementation, we’re changing things? So anyway, we end up in a Skype call with our two managers, whereupon it’s revealed that when the developer made a reference to “up to the developer”, he meant himself. Next, after much discussion, his manager completely changed everything and now tokens will be common English words. No underlines or brackets. The way we’ll identify them as tokens apart from body text is that they should be highlighted in green.
His reasoning for this decision is that we’re on a very short timeline and we want to get the users using this asap. So throwing away our previous tokenization method that we used in QA, changing my documentation, and engaging in a discussion with the users when they inevitably get confused about how the tokens work and make up their own tokens by highlighting random words in the template is more expeditious. Right.
Still working on this InDesign document that’s a huge mess. I’m trying to edit text in a table, but it’s like nothing is there. It’s not on a locked layer, it’s not on a master…I have no idea how they did this. I would like to think I’ll be done with it soon, but I’m sure it will come back later, when I least expect it. 
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve called up a client and said "Look, can you just send me the final edit of the text?..
(Yes, before the son-in-law of Ed in Shipping dumped it all into InDesign)
And if they asked, I’d be honest: “Yep, I’m starting over. I can guarantee it’ll be faster than fixing everything.”
Can you imagine how much faster future edits would be on a document where Master Pages, Style Sheets and Layers were set up right? Ahh, bliss…
Samantha Cat has the runs. AGAIN.
I had to take a poop sample to the vet. AGAIN. (Haven’t gotten the results yet.)
I had to clean the bathroom floor 500 times. AGAIN.
And then Murphy started throwing up all day. Eventually he horked up a piece of cord that he ate.
I would like a cat without digestive issues, please.
Have you tried the InDesign forum on the Adobe “Community” website? No guarantees, particularly since I’m seeing this on Friday night, but there are some clever people there who might be able to help.
Great idea, I love Adobe’s forums… but I’d bet MagicEyes is dealing with such a mess that he’ll just be asking “What the ƒuhhhhhk?!?”