We’ve all been working from home since March save for a very few employees who cannot do so for whatever reason. We’re tentatively scheduled to come back into the office within the next few months, but I bet that’s going to be pushed back as most of us will not have been vaccinated by then.
I have a few line managers asking me what the best way to go about convincing their directors and vice presidents to allow them to have their employees come into the office on a regular basis before we all go back to office sooner rather than later when we all return. I’m trying to be charitable because I suspect some of this stems from anxiety and a desire to get back to normal.
But I lack the authority to just tell them that it’s a stupid idea. We’ve had at least three employees I know of who have died from Covid over the last 10 months. None of them were exposed at work thank goodness. We’ve had potential exposures here at work among those who were unable to work from home and in each case, we shut down the area, sent everyone home for two weeks (with pay), and paid a crew to come in and sanitize the ever living fuck out of the work space.
So while I sympathize with them, it’s a bad idea to bring people back right now. If they’re feeling as though they’re losing office cohesion I don’t mind discussing ways we can improve that. Do they talk to their employees once in a while? Do you guys have regular meetings? If you’re hell bent on talking to your upper management about this I can tell you that you’re going to have to give them a list of business reasons for returning to the office. And I just don’t think those are going to outweigh the current risks associated with returning to the office.
background: I work at a curbside pickup only store, and we currently have a split team, where a couple of people are outside managing incoming customers and their orders, and 1 or 2 are inside filling orders, and assisting an endless stream of customers who can’t - or won’t - place a pre-order.
I had a specific problem with an individual co-worker yesterday. Actually, multiple people did. Issue revolves around walkie-talkie protocol - homeboy kept stating his need/request, without 1.) identifying a recipient, and, more importantly, 2.) waiting for an acknowledgement that he was being heard.
He just keeps dumping single-sentence information, and when I’m the only one inside I may be on the phone with a customer, or outside helping one of the no-order people, and so I don’t hear what he says.
Then we get customers sitting around for ten or fifteen minutes with zero help, and I look like the asshole! He’s all, “Well, I called it in!” and is off the hook.
I don’t work with him again for a while. Hopefully by then, someone else will have schooled him more successfully. I - and at least two others - told him repeatedly to wait for a response before telling us what he needs.
Grrr. Couldn’t sleep last night chewing on this frustration with him. I wish I could just let shit go.
You just brought back memories of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about a problem employee. The real problem there was that he was the CEO, and was impervious to criticism.
When I’d come home fuming about the boss, my wife would say “C’mon, shake it all off like a duck…” and I’d do a shivery shake and make funny noises. It helped, so I started doing it at bedtime, too (though getting exhausted from exercising helped the most).
If I send out a draft report for comment, then later give a presentation saying that I received comments, incorporated those comments, and am now presenting it to you for approval, you should not be surprised that the report has changed from the original draft! I mean, how could I incorporate comments without making changes?? It’s a very clear implication. So when you say that you were surprised there were changes, you look like an idiot to your boss who is running the meeting.
I put together two URGENT draft specifications back in September for some components that would ABSOLUTELY be delivered in October. There were multiple conference calls about these components; everyone had agreed to a rather rigid schedule to ensure our extensive list of inspection requirements would be met. The drafts were reviewed, commented on, edited, and released in their final form in mid-October. Then, nothing…until this week, when the vendor comes screaming back at us with a fresh set of comments that MUST be addressed NOW. Come to find out that the vendor – who had been the first to review the drafts – wasn’t very clear on which parties would be performing which inspections, and when (there are lots of ‘in process’ inspections involved to eliminate the need to ship parts all over the place just to take a few measurements). It turns out that quite a bit of fabrication has already taken place; our engineering department wasn’t aware of this, and no one in our quality department is admitting to knowing a thing about it either. The vendor attempted to document some of the steps as requested, but I’m not sure at this point if their level of documentation is acceptable.
I had wanted to take a couple of vacation days this week, but that won’t be happening now.
I gave you the short version. Here’s a little more just to make you not feel alone.
I wrote the first draft in October 2019 and sent it out for review to the designated reviewers in 6 states and 3 federal agencies.
I received comments and incorporated them in December 2019.
We have meetings every 4 months with our commissioners to approve these things.
It was sent to the commissioners in January 2020 to be acted on at the February 2020 meeting.
They were confused about who reviewed it and wanted more time to discuss with their underlings.
It was sent out in May 2020.
The June 2020 meeting was shortened and they didn’t get around to it.
It was sent out to the commissioners in July and and again in September 2020.
At the October 2020 meeting after I presented (again) several commissioners said they didn’t think they had seen it and wanted more time to review it.
It was sent out for review (again) in October 2020, comments incorporated (again) and resent in January 2021.
At the February 2021 meeting several commissioners said they didn’t receive it. I pointed out that they had in January. Then they said they didn’t read it. At which point the chairman told them to read it that night and it would be voted on in the morning. It was then that the lady said she was surprised it had changed.
In the end it was approved 16 months after I wrote it.
And by the way, there were no substantive changes from any of the many reviewers.
Trying not to scream…a coworker who’s difficult to work with sent me an email with a page of text that needs to be added to the website. The text is in an image that she inserted into the email. I asked her to send the text, and she emailed me back with this:
“Do you have to have the logo… I can work on that for a few minutes, otherwise is the text okay.”
I just emailed her back. I can’t wait to see how she responds! I’m using small words. I just really don’t know how to make it simple enough for her to understand. She must have had to do some extra work to put this text into an image and put that into an email. Why? And why do I have to explain the difference between text and image to a fully-grown adult person?
The solution is simple. Go ahead with the web site the way it is now. Days from now, email back and say “Sorry, couldn’t use your text the way it was.” Wait a day or so for her to ask why not, reply days later with “SO sorry, but it was in a format I couldn’t use.”
At this point, a week or two has gone by, she’s not sure what to do with her text, and she’s probably cooled on how great, and how necessary her text really was (certainly not worth actually working at figuring out what’s wrong and how to fix it).
Annnd, with any luck she just drops it.
…
I spent almost two decades in advertising, trying to keep “the suits” from gumming up ads and web sites (so my assumption here is that her text is long, boring and will be a pain to fit where she wants it).
Often the very first step is all I needed with bitchy Account Executives. Just say it won’t work, maybe add minimal reason why… as soon as it looks like it’ll take work (and worse, thinking) to get what they want… ooh, look, here’s some other “sexier” project they can chase after. And hopefully forget all about you and that web site thing.
I feel your pain. The exact same thing happens to me several times a week.
We do this thing where we make temporary pages where clients of the firm can upload and download stuff (usually enormous numbers of documents – this is a law firm, after all). There will be text, written by one of the lawyers serving that client, explaining what’s suitable for upload, and what’s available for download.
Some of the lawyers writing that text, or adding to it, will for some incomprehensible reason send me a screenshot of the text. Maybe they got it in an email, or wrote it up in Word, whatever. But why send me a screenshot?
And while we’re at it, what is so difficult to understand about aspect ratio? If you send me an image, and tell me to make sure it fills the page (or screen, or whatever) horizontally, why can you not understand that it will get bigger vertically too? Maybe bigger than the area available to fill. This should be a very simple concept.
There are a lot of people who think they know better what content should be on websites and how they should be developed /designed than the people who actually do them. Most of them really need to stay in their own lane.
Impressive! I don’t have any approved documents that took that long. There used to be a document that sat on my supervisor’s desk for nearly three years awaiting his approval; he finally gave it back to me unsigned (something about a supplier issue), and I’m not sure what I did with it. I can’t even find the file on the server.
You ever have one of those projects that you just know is going to result in everyone waiting until the last minute to get you the shit you desperately need?
I’m having one of those projects. It’s a federal grant. Certainly the most complicated one I’ve had to write. And I’m fine writing it. We have six weeks of lead time. It has like two dozen attachments on top of a twenty page narrative. And I can just feel, in my bones, how stressful that final week is going to be, because not getting the shit I need on time is like half of my fucking job.
Yeah, I was so lucky to have a wife who used to work in a firm just like mine. When I’d tell her the deadline on a Clusterfuck-In-The-Making, she’d just plan on being a single parent for that last week. Sometimes even planning a trip out of town with the kids (and they’d send me pics of a beach or an amusement park, while I suffered).
Good luck! However bad it is, it will be over in six weeks. Sometimes I think about starting a project early, but it always ends up like this. I can’t get the info or someone decides they want it done a different way and I have to redo everything at the last minute.
Similar for me, with a husband who also worked in software development. His company has been generally better than the ones I worked for, but there was one time when they went through some really idiotic management decisions. One time in particular he described to me how they were implementing something after it was no longer needed (knowingly). Over dinner we were laughing about it and I, being my cynical old self, told him he should call it Project Barn Door. (as in closing the barn door after the horses have got out)
Even better a week or so later he told me that his team had liked that so much they were calling it that at work. LOL!
Decades ago in my software development days I finally got in the habit of reporting the due-by date on requests-for-information as several days/weeks before I actually HAD to have it.
July 2017: Adobe announces EOL for Adobe Flash on January 1st 2021.
3 weeks ago: People start discovering that standard training packages are only availabe in Adobe Flash and no longer work. No one knows how many presentations are no longer viewable.
Some months ago: Outsourced all IT support. The IT support person who answered my ticket wanted to install Adobe Acrobat to fix my Adobe Flash problem.
Result: Mess.
And someone should explain to IT that updating all instances of Teams in the same day kills connectivity, which also kills productivity. To the extent that many could not use a business critical application (not Teams).
Our IT department is having massive network issues today so I’ve been sitting here, watching TV for the past three hours. Thinking about asking for the day off.
I just emailed her back. I can’t wait to see how she responds! I’m using small words. I just really don’t know how to make it simple enough for her to understand. She must have had to do some extra work to put this text into an image and put that into an email. Why? And why do I have to explain the difference between text and image to a fully-grown adult person?