My company is moving from using Zoom and Box to an all Microsoft Teams thing, and I have no idea when I’m supposed to learn how to use this at all, much less effectively, given my workload.
They sent out something a week or two ago that was supposed to link us to videos explaining the ideas behind it, and at least one of them had been created in CHINESE. Let’s just say that Google Translate did not cover itself in glory.
CT time. They really want to hire you, but they don’t want to pay what you would need to quit your current job. So they try to get you fired to improve their bargaining position.
Seriously though. How unprofessional do you have to be to contact a current employer without clearing it with you first.
Naah, just another case where the proverb fits: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
The Veep that leaked the fact that I interviewed was a clueless Good Ol’ Boy. He was just chatting with his fellow GOBs at the country club bar, and was racking his brain for any common ground with my boss. "Umm, _____ Marketing, huh? Umm, yeah, I met a nice kid from your shop last week. Can’t say any more than that wink wink nudge nudge but it sounds like you folks are growing over there, very exciting sector you’re in, making inroads blah blah blah…"
My boss ain’t no dummy, he figured it out. Even warned me this guy would be an idiot to work with…
Yeah, this was a case where the stupidity resulted in malice…
Tone-deaf co-worker asked me today if I had heard anything about us getting Christmas bonuses. Honey, the fact that we still have jobs and didn’t get our hours or salary cut is a Christmas bonus to me this year. She’s also an anti-masker and an anti-vaxxer and states repeatedly that COVID is no big deal and everyone might as well get it and get over it. And then she wonders why I started working from home again…
3 solid days of online annual training course to get through.
Yeah I should have done them peice meal though the year, but fuck me 40 minutes of GDPR awareness is too much and the annual ‘hey don’t give government officials big bags of cash’ gets old although the antics of GlobeCo can be amusing in a bad movie kind of way.
With those corporate security/diversity/whatever trainings, I usually just do the tests without bothering with the training video/class material and usually pass. If I don’t pass it’s usually only by one point or something and they usually let you have one do-over.
Having said that, when I was working for the defense contractor on the military contract, they required us to do the Army’s security course. It was actually pretty fun. It was a well-designed story-mode type of gamified training where you had to correctly answer the questions to save the world from spies, infiltrators, and other bad guys. If you came close to saving the world it was a passing grade. I actually did it a second time to catch all my missed questions so that I could “save the world”. LOL!
Unfortunately you have to watch the video sections and if you click through reading sections too fast it sends you back or just wont let you click through.
That said the 3 day practical defensive driving course, the slips trips falls and lifting and the 24 hr circadian rhythm course I did 25 years ago were really helpful and have stuck with me so not all the training is pointless.
Me in March to sales teams: Your client’s goals are way higher than we can hit; please let them know that they will either need to alter their expectations or their goals.
Me in June: Did you speak to your client? As noted earlier, their goals are very high and we cannot meet them. Please let them know they need to adjust expectations or goals. We’re happy to speak with them as needed and recommend alternative goals.
Me in August: I hope your summer is going well and that you’re staying safe! Did you speak with your client yet? We can hit X goal; let us know if you need help with additional detail. If we don’t hear from you we’ll assume we’re good. Thanks!
Me in October. And November: How are those conversations going? We are on target to hit X goal, which is Y percentage points away from their original. Please communicate this to your client and let us know if you need a SME to help you.
Sales Teams on December 29th: OMG, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US WE COULDN’T HIT THE CLIENT’S GOALS?!? They’re freaking out!!! What do I tell them? Can you get on a call right now and drop every other fucking thing you’re doing because I was too afraid to tell them the truth?
Holy shit, you people are idiots.
Last few weeks of dealing with this perfectionist, micromanager… but my rant is about a shitty email system that made it look to him like I was being sloppy again. I spent the day trying to update a list that got out of synch with my OTHER lists of the same thing (because he wanted another list). Sent it to him to make sure it was right (because he demands to review all my work). He tells me to check it against all the email discussions about the list items over the last two months, so I do. Send it back to him. He tells me to double check it. No more details, no hints as to what he saw that was wrong, just “double check it”. So I read reddit for an hour or so, quickly review the list again but this time when I send it back to him, I tell him that I compared it methodically to all the emails in our client’s email system and then in our local email system (because that’s right, we have TWO email systems), then against the other lists I’ve been keeping and then check the list items against documents stored in our document repository. That seemed to satisfy him so he told me to go ahead and send the list to the client.
So I compose the email, attach the necessary documents, paste the list into the body of the email. Before I click send, I compare the three attachments to the list to make sure I got them all. Three attachments. Perfect, hit send.
A minute later he replies to the email to let me know that I only attached TWO documents not three. And of course there’s no evidence in the email system that one got stripped out, so I just look incompetent.
I work retail, curbside pickup only, and we currently work out of a metal shipping container.
Last shift, my co-worker was exuberant which meant she was SHRIEKING with joy for however many hours straight.
I was trapped in a small metal box with someone who has no concept of “indoor voice” and I want to never do that again.
Girl, I’m happy for you, but stop taking it out on my eardrums!
Oh I’m laughing. I’m sure I know what your client would’ve said if they’d listened. Probably “We had a meeting and we decided we aren’t going to let ourselves be affected by this coronavirus thing”, and they would’ve been dead serious. I heard the same thing except 9/11 the last week in 2001.
It reminds me of how I traditionally spent that week between Christmas and New Years. The week that is so irrelevant to almost everyone was sometime the most important week of my year. professionally speaking.
I was calling clients with a mission that varied from year to year. Sometimes, it was …”You’ve closed the X job and got your deposit, right? Can you get me an order for the materials this week? I know you won’t need this for awhile but I can put a hold for release on it and it won’t ship until you’re ready. Please do this for me, I’ll owe you one. Thanks so much.”
Then I’d call the next client and repeat the pitch.
But other years, it was…
Hey, you know that big order you just sent me? How fast do you need the product? Because I’d like to toss this order out and have you send it to me again on January 2nd. I promise it will ship on the 3rd and it won’t hold up your project. Please do this for me, I’ll owe you one”.
As an outside sales rep, some years I was scrambling to meet my quota. This was important not just for keeping my contract, but for maintaining my generous commission rate, which was subject to renegotiation if I didn’t meet my numbers.
But in other years, I had already met or exceeded my quota, and I knew if I exceeded it by too much, it would push my quota for the following year up to a place that would be hard to reach, especially without the head start of a bunch of Jan 2nd orders.
So much bullshit.
The manipulation of numbers and dates to meet sales quotas (or to manipulate the actual sales quotas) is a strange thing. Mostly the fault is management’s, not the sales staff. I’ve seen plenty of it.
But sometimes…
Years, decades ago, I worked at a company with a fairly well-known product. Not a retail product, a business-to-business product. The sales commission was, for quite good reasons, significantly more than 100% of the sales price of the product.
One salesperson decided that the optimum strategy was to sell huge quantities of the product to herself.
It worked, for a couple of weeks. Then it got noticed.
Bye-bye, Sherry, you were a lot of fun for a while…
I used to work as a SW engineer at a company where the majority of my interactions with my manager were discussing how to rephrase a bug as a feature request. Her bosses were obviously looking extremely superficially at statistics for bugs and features.
Seems like this is Goodhart’s law in action. It is more commonly known in Marilyn Strathern’s restatement of it: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
First day back at work after the break- at a college, the campus has been shut for two weeks. On Friday, it was announced that we’ll be working remotely for this week, not a problem, except… they handed out laptops to all the teachers doing over 8 hours teaching a month or so back, and, as a tech who just teaches one official class, I didn’t qualify for one. They appear to have decided that staff now have laptops which can access the system, and have disabled the existing remote access programme. I can’t get into the system. I can get at my emails, and the shared folder, but not the stuff I actually need to work on.
There’s literally nothing else useful I can do, as 90% of my job is physical stuff or admin assistance for other staff, who are all in an online meeting today.
Just as I’m giving up, I get an email from Mrs CEO (previously mentioned), with a shiny new list of demands for me to set up equipment- no checking if things are already reserved by someone else, or if it works with my timetable, or even if we own the stuff she wants, just ‘I require x on y date’ as though she’s the only one in the department that’s doing anything, rather than a whole team of very busy people, with her being the one on the least hours.
She ended the email by telling me that this is only part 1 of the full list of demands, and she’ll give me the complete list next week.
I handed in my notice during the break (4 days after the department manager, who’d been there 16 years); I’m leaving next week. It was vaguely mentioned in a meeting earlier, but I don’t think she knows.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall when she learns you can’t, and won’t, be fulfilling her demands. Especially if you’re the only one who’s been doing so and the college has no one qualified to do so…
Last October one of the QA people on our tiny 3-person QA team went out on maternity leave until sometime later this month. About that time in October, our PM’s planned our next software release for a delivery in April. They put a large number of changes and a few large enhancements into the release, all of which have to be documented (we’re waterfall) and tested. Both the QA lead and I warned him that with Susan (not her real name) out, we felt strongly that the scope was too ambitious. They ignored our concerns and just responded with platitudes. Of course.
In my 1:1 with the PM that I report to today, he commented that we’re way behind schedule. I didn’t say anything. You know what, dude? We TOLD you so!
I’m not stressing out, though. I’m too busy planning my exit when Susan comes back, or end of this month regardless. (The bulk of my job as the BA will be done (documentation) and it will be up to the QA team, then.) Suck it!
It’s wonderful to hear you’re getting out of there!
Huge congrats to Filbert and JcWoman. There is nothing sweeter than leaving… unless it’s leaving in the middle of a clusterfuck that you saw coming and warned people about.
I’m not sure I can adequately write a rant without extreme use of assorted foul language. If what I’m thinking were aired on network TV, it would sound like R2D2.
Summary version: I work in a call center. Some of us take 60+ calls/day while others don’t even take that many in a WEEK, and it’s not because they’re doing other actual work. Some privileged pets get to sit around yakking, doing crafts, or flat-out sleeping while the responsible grownups take up the slack. Management is more concerned with quashing any mention that someone stated flatout on FB that they’re COVID-positive than any actual health/safety issues. Call scoring is getting a lot harsher and more arbitrary in a way that suggests they’re looking to give as many failing scores as possible.
I’m at a point where retail cashiering or overnight stock sounds a lot better than this. I think fast food would be an improvement.
LIS, that’s the summary. More details would involve more profanity than I think even the Pit would deem acceptable.