New and Unimproved Workplace Rants

Dammit. One of my coworkers is very ill, and he probably won’t live much longer. :cry: He’s the kind of person who’s friendly and helpful, and always glad to see you. I’ll never see him in his bright yellow jacket riding his bike around town again.

… my favorite kind of human.

I’m sorry for your impending loss.

A mixed bag, and with the caveat that MOST people are kind and decent and do not do the following. As usual, it’s a minority that messes things up.

Dear Customers:

Stop licking your fingers before peeling bills off your cash wad. It’s disgusting and unsanitary. I don’t care if you’ve been doing it for 80 years, STOP IT. Saying “sorry, I’ll give you a different bill” does NOT work because you still have spit on your fingers and you’re contaminating EVERYTHING you touch. I don’t care if you’ve had your covid shots, your saliva, like that of everything human being, is a seething cesspit of bacteria and viruses. Stop sharing. When mom said “bring enough for everyone” that is NOT what she meant.

Stop bitching about bare shelves. Yes, we’ve noticed. We’re only reminded every three minutes. We shop, too, so we are having the exact same problem getting stuff for ourselves that you are. Whatever is going wrong we aren’t in control, either, and we’re doing the best we can with whatever we can get.

Stop saying we’re short-handed because “no one wants to work anymore”. Holy fuck what a goddamned slap in the face to the working person standing right in front of you. Oh, you never considered that it might be taken that way? That when you say workers today are lazy, or don’t want to work, or whatever buzz phrase you’ve acquired in your social media bubble to the worker standing in front of you that said person might take it as an insult to them? We’re back to six day weeks and days longer than eight hours ago so yes, we’ve noticed the labor shortage so FUCK YOU blathering about laziness and people not wanting to work - some of us want to work, and a bunch of us are working in excess of 40 hours a week. Again. Because we have a labor shortage but go ahead, keep taking it out on us, because retail workers aren’t real people like you and your family and friends, right? No matter how much we put in we’re just selfish and spoiled and somehow not doing enough.

Stop saying people are being paid to stay home and do nothing. Because it’s not true. That ended back in September 2021 for everyone, and for a lot of people sooner than that. So whatever the problem is NOW, that is not the cause. Please keep up with current events.

Stop trying to engage us in political speech. I am not here to engage in any sort of debate with you. I am not here to discuss politics. My coworkers and I have the following tasks in relation to customers: stock shelves, be nice to customers, help you find whatever shit you’re looking for, apologize if we don’t have it, ring up and pack your shit, try to resolve any problems that arise, call 911 if you collapse in a pitiful heap on the floor or otherwise assist you during an emergency, and tell you thank you for shopping here and have a nice day on your way out the door. That is all. We are not here to tell you who we voted for, our stance on the 2nd amendment (or any other amendments or laws), cheer (or boo) when you yell “Let’s go Brandon!”, how we feel about gays/trans athletes/immigrants/Muslims/Jan 6/Fox News/any other news media/Biden/Trump/Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter/riots/insurrections/n-words/other ethnic, racial, religious, or other slurs/Biden/Trump/Pelosi/McConnell/Democreeps/Republithugs/Biden/Trump or really a lot of other shit that has no bearing on our customer/staff relationship. Really, it is MUCH better if we don’t discuss ANY of that, pro or con.

Who I did or did not vote for in the last election is none of your fucking business. Likewise, whatever political, religious, racial, or financial views I may or may not have. Likewise, don’t make a statement and try to pressure me to agree with it.

Don’t give me shit about covid or wearing masks or not wearing masks or anything to do with the goddamned pandemic. Holy fuck, we’re still dealing with this bullshit two years into this pony ride?

Yeah, it’s been a rough week. Did I mention Wednesday when I had to dig my truck out sufficiently to drive off into eight inches of snow with howling winds? My normally 15 minute commute was over an hour. Then work nearly 9 hours in an understaffed store? Then, when done with that, I went out to the lot and the snow had drifted over my truck. Not over the hood, over the roof of the pick up. So I had to dig out again, then drive home - again, over an hour. Then, when it became apparent that the lot I usually park in had had the same drift experience as the store parking lot I had to continue to drive to an alternate lot the building management was trying to clear out with a plow, two snow blowers, and a crew of six men, get a slot to park in, then walk home four blocks in conditions that ranged from ground scoured bare by 30 mph winds to knee deep to hip deep snow. If you’re keeping count, that was over 11 hours.

Then I got to wake up on Thursday, walk BACK through all that snow to the alternate lot, dig my truck out AGAIN. Drive to work in slick conditions AGAIN (although the commute was “only” 45 minutes) then work another 9 hours in a short-staffed store AGAIN. Although conditions did improve so I didn’t have to dig out at work. But management was still struggling with the drifts in my building’s lot so it was park in the alternate AGAIN and walk home in knee-to-hip deep snow AGAIN…

Six days in a row of nine hours days (at actual paying work - not counting all the work that went into commuting two of those days). I get one day off before back to work. Don’t fucking talk to me about “oh, but you get overtime!” Fuck the money. I exhausted, I’m sore, and I’m behind in all the other shit of daily live from doing my own grocery shopping to cleaning to laundry. I want time to take care of myself, time to spend with friends even if it’s only over the phone or by texting, time to actually cook a decent meal instead of grazing the fridge (which is getting quite empty at this point). All the money in the world won’t buy me even one additional minute of life. I want and deserve more to my life than work and shoveling snow.

FWIW, I always look my grocery clerk and bagger in the eye and thank them. (After the transaction has completed, so they don’t get dinged for taking too long.)

Thank you. Much appreciated. And we do get a lot of folks like you. It helps a great deal.

And thanks for grokking we’re on timers these days.

To be honest, I try to do that for everyone behind a register, but I have a soft spot for grocery store clerks, have done that in high school and college. I was cashiering and bagging when Harris Teeter bought Big Star, and closed the store up the road from my store. I was amazed how it was my personal decision to close the Big Star.

I fully support every word of @Broomstick epic rant. I wish I could print it out & post it on the door of every establishment I’ve ever worked at or shopped at.

I would amend the first paragraph of Broomstick’s wonderful rant to add: NO SOCK OR BRA MONEY. Yes, even in the winter.

Heartily concur.

Hear hear! Great rant. I used to be a grocery clerk in high school. Second this fully.

It’s not unusual for quality inspectors to come to the engineering department to ask for clarification regarding a particular dimension, or to seek advice if a particular dimension is difficult to measure. Very rarely, the inspector will request that I revise the drawing to ‘fix’ the dimension in question.

:no_mouth:

The drawing wasn’t even created by our company, it belongs to an engine OEM. All we have is a scanned copy (in PDF form). Strangely, I used to get requests for drawing modifications all the time when I first started working here.

Actual words uttered by clients:

“Well, can’t you just turn the drawing so we can see the back side of that part?”
(The… hand-drawn, 2D drawing…)

“Well, can’t you just blow up the barely-legible PDF, and output a CAD file that you can edit?”

“Well, can’t you just download this tiny JPEG and make it less, you know, pixel-y?”
. . . . Same client, a year later:
“Well, for the 9x12” wide prints, can’t you just use the aerial photos of our building off our web site?"
(No, those are only 144 pixels tall … that’s why we’ve been asking for the original photographs.)
“Sorry, Roger has those.”
(And Roger’s… a… problem…?)
“Oh, he retired years ago. We have no idea where Roger is…”

One of my least favorite co-workers is at it again. I’m doing a training for some people in his department (which I thought he was going to organize, but he never did, so the people who need training asked me to do it). The training takes a full hour, and we have around 8 people in this session, which will probably take longer. So this person emailed me, not asking, but telling me he wants to talk about something else before we do the training, and I’m 100% sure he would take almost half the training session for this if I let him. I might have to be mean to him if he takes too long. I need a whip so I can crack it at him to keep him under control.

You’re supposed to just say “enhance!”

This morning, I got to work and saw a frantic email from one of my coworkers. She said there was an article on the front page of the intranet we all needed to read. And we definitely needed to read it.

About 3 years ago, our company decommissioned the various site-based servers that stored all our company data and transistioned us to SharePoint. It was incredibly dumb and everyone hated that decision. I had to put in a lot of work to transistion our files to the SharePoint and then eventually get space on a super secret server that they kept because, finally, people realized that SharePoint is too slow to run large files (like our CAD drawings) and makes it an absolute document control nightmare if everyone has to download local copies of every CAD file they want to update. I headed the effort for my group because I’m the millenial and, therefore, understand the cloud and whatever.

While we were working on the transistion, the IT people were very vocal about the new corporate data retention policies and how we need to make sure we are adhering to them. They say we need to review each file every 3 years. If we have not MODIFIED it in 3 years, it should be deleted.

OK, that makes no sense for the engineers. I have saved so much work by saving all the random bullshit I have about the projects I have completed. On top of that, we are an OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM) site. For covered processes, I need to keep that information for the life of the equipment. We were assured, however, that local laws and regulations trump the retention policy.

Awesome, right? After I did all that work moving our files to SharePoint, I promptly forgot about the data retention policy and went about my day being an engineer, not a damn librarian. Besides, it didn’t apply to most of what I do because my stuff, for the most part, needed to be kept.

Well, this morning, having been alerted by a coworker, I read an IT article that said they are going to automatically delete all files in all the SharePoints that haven’t been MODIFIED in the last 3 years so please make sure to go through what you have and MODIFY the files you want to keep.

When are they going to do this? Beginning of March, of course. You know, next week.

I’m screaming on the inside.

(PS - My boss sent a beautifully worded email to our IT contact about how what they are doing is stupid and potentially puts us out of compliance and he replied with “Just modify the files you need to keep.” Like that’s an easy thing I can do on my lunch break.)

slalexan, my head would have exploded by now! They could actually talk to the people who are doing the work before they make decisions like this. I’m having a similar problem with people from our IT department who are demanding (not asking) that we delete a folder on a shared drive that has photos from the last two decades. Yes, it’s big. Photo files tend to be large. No, we can’t just delete them all. They hate me, and I don’t care. I’ll continue to be a bitch about this as long as they keep treating my department like it’s less important than any other department that’s taking up lots of file space.

I’m grateful to IT for all of the good work they do, but sometimes they really can make life more difficult.

Being a guy, I of course jumped to solutions when all you wanted was support :slight_smile:

I don’t know a lot about how SharePoint stores its data, but if you decide that you want to keep all you (or someone) should be able to just go and touch all of the files so they look modified. Assuming Windows, the base command you want to execute is:

copy SampleFile.txt+

which just updates the date/time stamp (doesn’t actually copy). The tricky bit will be setting up a shell to find and touch all of the files in the SharePoint space (which I know nothing about).

That sounds useful and I will keep it in mind. Though I’m not sure I can do that, it helps me to know that someone could.

Technically someone could do it on their lunch break with a bit of powershell. They just need to have the ability to run a powershell script

MS Technet: How can one change all the Modify By column of a team site?

Code near bottom.

They would also need to comment out the lines to modify author and editor.