I remember seeing a couple hundred messages in one such incident. I think my current employer has restrictions on who can use reply all.
Wish me luck, please. I tossed my hat in for a different position in my division. After 22 years of case management, of ridiculous unattainable metrics, of horrible court orders and clients, of job duties changing at the whim of management, of relentless phone calls, I’m stepping out of my comfort zone.
I would basically be the liaison between all of our divisions, the county attorney’s office, the courts, and personal service providers.
The current person in the job approached me today, suggesting I contact her supervisor, stating she believes my organizational skills and unwillingness to accept bullshit make me a great fit for the job.
Doubt I’ll get it, as there are three current back ups who already know the job, but I can at least say I tried.
Rant about it (of course I have to bitch about something): As a standard courtesy, I let my supe know. Do you really think it’s a good idea to change positions at this point? You’ll be taking a wealth of knowledge with you, which really is unfair to your teammates. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m sorry you don’t feel you can handle the current caseload.
What actually prompted me to do it is the legal process I was responsible for, that was partially suspended when the pandemic hit? Everything, even open court actions, are now suspended until 2022. Basically, in my county, if someone chooses not to support their child as they’ve been court ordered to do, there is fuck all we can do to. Our hands are completely tied. Managements opinion? Call and nag.
I worked for the IT Division of a company with 12,000 employees before I retired this year. We had these problems in the early days. We thought it was hilarious at the time but the powers that be got tired of it. Our solution was to instruct people to blind copy the recipients of the original email so they could only respond to the sender. And to limit the number of people who could send emails to groups. If you did not follow this protocol, you received a stern talking-to.
Was the stern talking-to delivered by the blunt end of a clue-by-four?
The biggest offenders were always the big wigs who didn’t pay attention to the rules and would send everyone in the company an email announcing someone’s promotion or retirement. You would get hundreds of replies of “congratulations!” for days. Much to the delight of us peons in the cube farm who would start laughing and saying “did you see what that dumbass did!”. Eventually, sending these types of emails had to be relegated to their assistants who could be trained to do it properly.
Technically, Exchange Server can be configured to disable Reply All, but RA is needed on a very significant percentage of our email so disabling isn’t viable. I have also used RA and been notified that that my email will be going to several hundred people but that threshold either wasn’t met or was just automatically clicked through.
My firm (large organization, one of the ten biggest law firms in the world, but not a General Motors-sized entity) has disabled Reply All. Well, not quite disabled – you have to press a peculiar combination of keys to reply to all. There’s no way whatsoever you could do it unintentionally.
Somehow, though, people still manage to misuse Reply All. Amazing.
I consider myself fortunate that I virtually never have to reply to work emails. The vast majority of the time I don’t even read them.
Today in our standup meeting (which had already gone over 15 minutes) our scrum master reminded us that we should let him know any time something takes up more than 15 minutes of our time away from completing sprint work. I was very tempted to say that I was currently doing something that had taken more than 15 minutes of my time and wasn’t helping me complete sprint work.
I’ve almost done this a few times during safety meetings when they drag on past 15 minutes or so. I’m all for workplace safety, but what has been gained when I’ve spent an hour being lectured about the importance of not dropping cargo or people off of barges when my facility has absolutely nothing to do with the shipping or marine divisions of the company?
We have a new person in the department- in a college. It’s a group of something like 8 campuses, and she just so happens to be married to the CEO.
Now, if that was me, I think I’d be taking extra effort to not step on people’s toes- there’s bound to be a level of suspicion when Mrs CEO suddenly joins the team, especially when she has the minimum qualifications and no experience.
Since she started she’s been kinda throwing her weight around like a Sumo wrestler.
We don’t actually work together at all, so she first came to my attention by sending me a ludicrous email request, on Friday afternoon, about 10 minutes before I left for the day, for a highly specific item -that a quick check showed was actually illegal- for Monday morning. I actually called in to a shop on the way home (I was planning on going anyway, or I wouldn’t bother) and got the closest legal equivalent, and she still complained and attempted to argue that the laws shouldn’t apply to us next time I saw her.
Since then, she’s pissed off literally everyone.
Highlights include talking to the adult students like naughty kids, like trying to make them explain why they arrived late in front of the class (to a student who’s the carer of two disabled parents and this is her one fun thing in the week).
She’s thrown out time-sensitive project work half finished by other classes, because she wanted the space for her students, even though one of the students actually pointed out to her that it clearly was in use.
She’s obviously whinged to hubby about the lack of equipment- which we wouldn’t mind so much, if she’d talked to other staff members, because we really are short of some expensive stuff we can’t afford, but we weren’t actually short of what she said, it was just in use by another class, because, y’know, hers isn’t the only one we have. We didn’t, incidentally, get any more help or budget, we just got mentioned as disorganised and probably affecting students in an all staff memo, for not having enough of something we actually had.
So yeah.
We’re having enough drama without her anyway. The company’s clearly trying to get rid of the grounds maintenance guy, who works very closely with our department and has been there for my entire lifespan- to the point of advertising his job on the internal site two days before ‘the talk about how they could make it work for him with his current health issues’ that he was supposed to be having. In this country, that’s a massive no-no.
Every member of the department (except Mrs CEO, I guess) has already threatened to quit in front of me this semester. I think I can even hear the rats in the animal care department squeaking ‘Sod this’ and running away before the site sinks.
Asking you to buy “illegal” items? Now you’ve got me curious!
She sounds like a total…prize. Ugh.
Nothing that exciting, just stuff treated with a chemical that was banned a year back. Anything treated with it should have been used up or destroyed at the start of the year.
This happened again today and I’m apparently cranky, so it’s top of mind. One thing that really pisses me off is when my manager disrupts my personal task organization, for example asking me to do a list of tasks in a different order than I’d practiced/planned, or asking to review a document that’s not fucking finished yet.
That last one is what happened today. As a business analyst, it’s my job to keep track of document changes, and ensure that only completed, polished versions get back to the external client. This means that while we wait for client feedback, which often trickles in as they discuss amongst themselves, I have set up a method for keeping things straight. When my method gets disrupted, it increases the chances of some changes being overlooked. Plus at the best of times it gets really hard to keep track of everything - I have spreadsheet lists and todo lists out the kazoo.
Specific to today, we only send the client completed/polished versions, with an interior page that lists the revisions, the date they were completed and a version number on the title and in the filename. Manager just had me send an incomplete version (still had the client’s comments in it, and only one change that she requested, and track changes turned on) back to the client revisioned to -v2. I didn’t mind sending her the document but versioning it as -v2 fucks up our system. Not to mention how much he’s been beating up on me to make damn sure that anything going out to the client is polished, professional and perfect.
It also reminds me of many years back when I was an engineer. We were on a client’s site upgrading their system. I had written out the steps for the upgrade and practiced it on our test system, so I had it handled. Manager got impatient with a backup taking too long and told me to forget it and skip ahead. I did (although he pissed me off by asking accusingly if I did not practice it and get the timings down). About a week later they reported an issue with their system and investigation led to the revelation that a critical file didn’t get updated. Manager kind of blamed me because I did the upgrade, but I wasn’t punished. When I went back to see if the file was mentioned in my list, I found that it was… right after the backup that he made me skip. Likely I got confused and accidentally skipped an extra step (in a 25-step process). (This was a 911 dispatch system, so I would not have done that deliberately to “get back at him”.)
Managers, when your people are trying to keep fifteen plates spinning don’t ask them if you can hand them one to inspect and then give back and expect it to easily slip back into the spinning rotation. And if you do, don’t be surprised to find some broken plates landing at your feet!
The reply-all tsunami that overwhelmed my mailbox was the opposite. A couple mid-level idiots started it and snowballed. But no one noticed there was an O-9 (forget which service) on the list, wow was he pissed off when he couldn’t check his email that afternoon. He replied-all that the next person to reply-all would be black-listed if a contractor or if under his command would soon not be. That shut up the yahoos right quick.
I haven’t posted here in forever, but I’ve got a bone to pick with my department. So, I’m on some sort of senior leader meeting yesterday listening to plans for the upcoming year. Part of those plans include a guidebook for other departments. On how to do their jobs.
Now, I get it - I’m in research & product development and some amount of guidance is typically expected in new products. Teams need to know what the products do, why their clients should buy them, etc. But for fuck’s sake, they want me to make a handbook on “how to speak to your client” for our sales and account teams, then do a case study/demonstration on how we would do it and what success looks like. Why the hell do we have a whole department of account managers and sales people if my team has to speak with their clients and demonstrate how products are sold? Seriously, my mind is fucking blown.
jay feckin zuz
So a recruiter contacted me , job was interesting and was pretty much my resume but opportunities to develop some skills relevant outside my industry, noticeably more cash, and a smaller company ( I work for a big multi national which brought the smaller start up I worked for a couple of years ago) which is appealing as I really don’t like the glacial progress and politics in a larger company.
Anyway the VP who the new position would report to used to work for the big multinational I work for so he called the VP of the section that owns my ass and asked about me, so then that VP talks to my boss who then calls me for a very awkward conversation. The new opportunity wasn’t a slam dunk and the conversation with current boss was a positive one, but given the state of our industry which is shedding jobs getting a potentially disloyal’ tag is not a great thing.
I know I am lucky I have a job let alone an option to get a better one, just fecking hell why would they contact the company I work for, agggg
Anyway I guess I know I don’t want to work for that VP guy now if he is so clueless as do that, so that solves one problem.
Same thing happened to me. 24 hours after a job interview, I got called in for a meeting with the top dogs at my work that went beyond awkward to accusatory. Luckily, I could assure my big bosses that I was NOT taking the job possibility seriously (due to Potential Boss acting so unprofessionally, but “Loyalty To My Coworkers” sounded like a better reason).
Occasionally someone reports this type of thing happening on the RecruitingHell subreddit and the typical advice is to Glassdoor the hell out of them. It is very NOT COOL to contact a candidate’s current employer without permission. If your employer fired you because of that… well I don’t think there’s much that can be done here on earth, but the culpable figure would surely burn somewhere not nice. But it might help to warn other candidates so they can steer clear.
I work (in IT) at one of the mega-law firms, of which there aren’t that many, and they’re almost all headquartered in the same place, and lots of staff (not so much lawyers) have worked at more than one of them.
There’s absolutely a whisper-net. No way around it.
If you’re hunting around for a new job in the same field, it will become known.
Very slightly tangentially, there is absolutely a blacklist, although no one will ever be able to prove it.