this is so stupid, I learned how to flush a toilet when I was 3 years old. We have grown folks who cant seem to work out after you use the toilet… flush the damn thing. if you put anything in the toilet, flush it. no body wants to come after you and your disposables. So we got automatic flushing toilets… sounds great. NOW, I assuming people with penis’s (we have unisex bathrooms) can’t figure out that if you leave the seat up, the auto-flush doesn’t happen. I guess I should be grateful they aren’t peeing on the seat.
Oh, God, yes.
I’ve got one. Let’s call her “Charlie.”
She called me once for technical help. I helped her. She was happy and appreciative. She called me again. I helped her. And again. And again. To the point where it’s a couple of times a week now.
And worse, it’s become institutionalized. By which I mean sanctioned by our management, to the point where apparently it’s part of my job now.
Evidence:
She called me with a technical question last week. I was nice about it said, hey, I can help. Charlie is in a different office (different city). So I said, can I proxy in to your computer, share the screen? She said sure. I did, she gave the required permission, and I saw an IM from her site supervisor, in response to Charlie’s IM to site supervisor saying she didn’t know how to accomplish this technical task, saying “call [SL], he’ll show you how to do it.”
So now it’s apparently in my job description to help Charlie do her job, and not in Charlie’s job description to actually know how to do her job (which is the same as my job).
That’s the kind of thing that I might be tempted to bring to the attention of my site supervisor.
It’s so not cool for him to waste your time with duplicate requests. 
So you’re being punished for being helpful. I hate when that happens. 
Agreed! My supervisor didn’t go into detail, but he indicated that this isn’t Cookie Mouse’s first time doing this.
I hope this means your supervisor is going to do something about this. 
You shouldn’t have to do more work because this coworker can’t do his own job.
Unfortunately, Cookie Mouse is viewed as a sort of kindly joker. When he isn’t dawdling through his work (often for the second or third time, as previously noted), he’s wandering the office sharing ancient jokes or showing off old gags/pranks from his collection.
So yeah, I’ve learned to run all of Cookie Mouse’s requests by my supervisor to make sure someone else hasn’t already worked on them.
WolfpackJeep, maybe he’ll retire soon. 
I have good news, for a change. I finally found the solution to an InDesign problem that’s been bugging me for months! 
I’m still cleaning some things up, but the hard part is done.
We’re hiring a new person, so we’re doing interviews this week. I don’t like doing interviews because we usually have more than one excellent candidate, and we can’t give them all jobs. 
I’m writing a software manual at the moment, directed towards users who have a certain level of access/authorization. And I am, naturally, running into some issues with figuring certain aspects out, despite having full access to a very good sandbox, leading me to contact our lead engineer for installation and configuration with many, many questions.
Our software design team has … issues …
- The information they put in the help pop-ups is often not.
- They have no UI design standards, so we get things like 3 different versions of username (“Username”, “UserName”, and “User name”) all on the same small login window.
- Their quality control is apparently non-existent, since there are frequent typos and grammatical errors in the UI.
- They didn’t code the product name as a variable, so we literally have places where the text uses a product name that was replaced 3 years ago because of a trademark issue and they haven’t fixed it yet because they don’t consider fixing bugs in the UI to be as important as fixing functional bugs or adding new features (with new bugs).
- They don’t take direction or correction very well, either. I’m told they can get a bit snippy about being asked to fix problems in the UI.
- And for the third or fourth time since beginning this project, I’ve learned that an entire page of configuration options that I’m already halfway through documenting shouldn’t even be visible to our customer admins, much less editable. This page, I’m told, isn’t even touched by our in-house field engineers who install and configure this system for our customers because doing so tends to break the UI. But because the software team has a habit of wedging things into inappropriate spots on the “it’s close enough” basis, users with a certain level of access can make changes if the idea occurs to them; and we can’t block them out of these screens because there are other modules in the same area that they have to have access to.
(Can we talk about how this page has about 40 different options on it, all crowded together so that the screen looks like someone Lorem Ipsumed all over the screen?)
Days of effort wasted because this team can’t be bothered to do their job correctly.
I’m going to be very happy if our new CEO manages to get software development and support moved back to the States as planned. I just wish it would happen faster.
Today’s “team” consists of one guy I get along with, one absolutely butt-hurt drama llama, and a pack of teenagers who need constant supervision and don’t know how to deal with adults having butt-hurt drama llama problems.
Yay, me!
I have a long time (20-ish years) coworker who is currently having some health issues and has scaled back his workload significantly. Which is fine, you do what you need to do to get healthy, but…
Said coworker has always been a big proponent of “let’s make sure we have all of our processes documented, just in case.” Now that the rest of the team is having to step in to help with his workload, we are finding that a lot of the things that he does are not documented (or, if they are documented, are nowhere to be found in our project documentation).
And apparently he hasn’t been straight with the project manager about how sick he really is and how much work (if any) he is actually able to do. And he may have made some promises to the customer a few months back that none of us were aware of and don’t know if we will be able to follow through on them.
So even though I am sad at the possibility of losing a long time colleague, I’m also a little pissed off at him for not being honest with us and leaving us in a position that was easily avoidable.
Coworker complaint -
We’re trying to put together a plan. Very early in the planning stages, someone identified that we could end up in situation A. Situation A is bad. So, we came up with subplan X - which avoids situation A almost entirely, and subplan Y - which is what we will do if we run into situation A on the off chance we can’t avoid it. So, situation A is covered. This was discussed. Everyone agreed. It was written down.
Except one co-worker. Who, once every few days, throws up her hands and runs around like Henny Penny screaming “the sky is falling - Situation A. Situation A! What about Situation A??? Did anyone think of Situation A! OH NO, SITUATION A!!!” And because half the team has forgotten what was already decided and a few co-workers who apparently read “Cool New Business Ideas” blog and really want to try the most recent listicle recommended. We need to re-open everything, re-discuss it all, re-come up with X & Y again, re-document it all, and go back to implementing the plan… Or that’s what would happen, except there’s also a situation B & situation C (they also have subplans. they’re also solved). So often, during the re-discussion, she starts spinning up about B. and then C. the back to A. And then C again. then B.
Eventually, everything is resolved. Everyone (including her) agrees. And we have 2-3 days of quiet until “SITUATION A!!! what about Situation A???”
I’m at my breaking point.
It’s probably waaaay up in this thread – or even somewhere else on the board – but we had a quality engineer who seemed to be caught up on his work despite having a full schedule and a new baby at home. One day, another engineer went looking for something on the server, and realized that a bunch of documents that should have been marked as “closed” or at least “approved” just weren’t there. He took it upon himself to search the entire department; I was present when he opened a lower drawer in a file cabinet, and found folder after folder this other guy had been hiding. There was stuff dating back a year or more and, even more disturbingly, evidence that he had falsified trips to vendors. Needless to say, that guy doesn’t work there anymore, but he’s still a punchline.
Engineer A: “Huh, this says Chuck visited the vendor back in 2013.”
Engineer B: “Did he though??”
Reminds me of one of my first jobs out of college. The team I was in charge of,could not even procure pens and paperclips because the department was continuingly “over budget.” Meanwhile, one of the upper managers, coming home from a hunting trip, accidentally shot his house’s propane tank putting up his rifle*, blowing up his house and sending him to the burn center for several weeks. It turns out were were only over budget because he had pocketed about $800,000. He had also been taking kickbacks from vendors.
* This one still bewilders me. Why would someone transport and stow loaded weapons?
In this particular case, I believe the answer is karma.
That is very much not supposed to happen
https://propaneoregon.com/if-you-shoot-a-propane-tank-will-it-explode/
Lovely story, but sounds highly suspect.
I know he was in the burn ward. We were told he had shot his propane tank. I never understood how he shot the tank on the side of his house from inside the garage. I’m willing to concede the circumstances are suspect, but I’m just relaying what we were told.
At the and of the day, he was an embezzling POS.
Maude - “God is gonna get you for that”
This sounds similar to a bookkeeping job I got at a local bank. The system was two ‘tickets’ were generated for a transaction and their job was to reconcile the ledger and the tickets. So if she had a discrepancy she would just hide enough tickets until she got the number that she was supposed to get.
That’s why despite minimal accounting skills the temp company called me to replace her, since she suddenly left the company.
Hah. Many, many, many years ago I worked for a no-longer-existing savings & loan. After the RTC came in and took over, the woman who handled travel arrangements for the S&L had to go into the hospital for some procedure or other, and literally tried to take her computer with her so she could work from the hospital during recovery. We’re talking very early 90s here, so laptops and remote work really wasn’t much of a thing.
Of course, her manager told her she shouldn’t worry about that sort of thing, they’d get someone to cover for her.
Said someone discovered the travel manager had been embezzling for a number of years, using fake vendors, to the tune of, I think, $5 million (it was a long time ago, but the sum was significant).
It’s always a bad thing for an embezzler to wind up in the hospital for any length of time.