My company has a certain form that needs to be filled out to kick off a process. One of the items on this form is essentially “Why are we doing this?”. That’s asked because it’s the type of task where upper management periodically asks “Why are we doing so much of this work.”
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of these forms filled out like this:
“Why are we doing this?” “Because we need to.”
Sure. Yeah. OK. Right.
So I send the forms back. I guess the people are surprised that someone actually reads these things, and expects a clear statement.
P.S. And, the people who do this typically want their request pushed to the front of the queue.
I’m afraid I have filled out such forms with that sort of answer. The reason is usually because I have no idea why we are doing it, the boss said, “Do it.”
A lot of the work I do requires me to remotely log into servers to check/modify configurations and around once a month I’ll log into one that pops up a dialog that says basically, “Hey! I was rebooted unexpectedly. What happened?”
I take my work seriously enough that I won’t fill in “How the fuck should I know?” but not serious enough that “As was prophesied.” isn’t acceptable.
It helps that the odds of anyone actually reading it approach zero. But anyone actually seeing it will understand.
What you need is a visor with a speech-to-text capability and a hand-held pointer (to only translate speech from the speaker you need to be “hearing)”.
Or I could just play a game of chess with my wife. Chess, classic rock and a couple of beers. It’s gonna be a couple of years, but I’m rolling into retirement quite well.
Even better…we had a customer who, up until just before the pandemic, would only conduct business via fax due to security concerns.
Today, I learned that my workplace has bugs. No one will tell me what kind. I do know that the front desk area has periodic ant infestations, but from what I’m hearing it’s not ants causing problems in other parts of the building. On the plus side, the rodent activity has pretty much ceased since a certain customer service rep retired and took his snack collection with him.
When I ask for authorization to release a document, you should not be asking me to add new stuff to the document that will be added to the product over the “next 2-3 weeks”, especially when I can’t see the changes and work with them enough to know how they work and can take screenshots of them because, frankly, the ones you put in the Word document you sent me suck. Their resolution is crap.
Goddamnit, people, I am ONE WRITER. You cannot keep giving me last minute updates to documents. I have other documents to write! Stop churning and call it butter!
That’s often what happens in these team building exercises. Unclear instructions, and you all have to figure out what is what.
We are a bunch of programmers and sysadmins. So we figure it out. That’s our jobs. Every day.
The weirdest one I think is when we broke up into teams and given a jig saw puzzle to put together as fast as we could. Each team had a puzzle, but with pieces of another teams puzzle. We had NO knowledge of that.
Actually that wasn’t the weirdest one. Team of 15 each given a cropped picture (we where not told that). We could look at them and explain them to other team members, but could not show it. The cropped picture was complex and we had to figure out how to but them in order and stand in line (???), without showing any team member your picture. But we could talk, and explain the picture.
What we where doing, nobody knew. But we got it. It was a zoom out to a zoom in of the same picture.
My boss is very good, I like him, but enjoys these games. And has some psychological background related to computer science. These games are all good, but I don’t like competition like that.
My Wife and I play a lot of chess, and we give each other mulligans. While we are competitive, I help. I’ve been playing a lot longer.
I would never willingly through someone into an unknown situation. Ain’t my style.
I remember one team building activity where we had to get a golf ball to travel 20 feet and we could only use the provided PVC pipe of various lengths and tape. The other ground rule was the ball had to be inside the PVC pipe for the entire 20 feet. Of course all of the teams were trying to tape PVC pipe and hold it together over the 20 feet. Our team got the record for fastest time ever and it wasn’t even close.
I put the ball in a short length of pipe, taped the ends shut and threw it to one of my teammates on the other side of the line.
In the last few weeks, employees have started noticing a powerful pumpkin spice stench in the main lobby area. It’s frickin’ July, which is definitely NOT pumpkin spice season, but that’s really beside the point – this smell was overpowering, especially in the main conference room with the door closed. While I was in that conference room last week, the smell became so strong that my throat started itching; I ended up submitting a hazard report about it.
It seemed especially strong this morning, so I finally did a thorough search of the area, and found a Bath & Body Works Wallflower plugged into an outlet behind a chair. Yep, some fucking genius thought it would be a great idea to plug what is essentially a miniature heater equipped with a fuel pod into a wall behind a piece of upholstered furniture. I unplugged it and turned it over to the company’s safety coordinator, along with a news article about a similar product getting so hot that it melted a nearby radio.
The fire hazard shouldn’t be ignored, but that’s actually unlikely, and not the reason I would be offended. Scents like that can trigger allergic reactions and migraines in some people, as you experienced. That’s the bigger reason, IMHO, that whoever put that there was quite the self-centered asshole.
Is that the chair they sit in, so they can cover up their flatulence? I am very scent-averse in the workplace. You did good finding, removing, and reporting it.
Yep, that was my main concern, but the culture at my company considers allergies to be an uncommon, personal medical thing. >.< I knew the fire hazard angle would get more attention.
That would actually explain why this chair had been pushed so close to the air freshener! Flatulence is a known issue at work, mostly due to the available food options nearby. (There’s a guy in the inspection area who claims he can identify people walking through the department based on the smell of their emissions.)
We’ve got several barbecue joints (Eastern NC style) located a short distance away, plus a few down home country cookin’ places that fry everything but the Pepsi. Not many people will admit it, but large portions of that type of food don’t sit well with anyone’s digestive system.
On the plus side, the rodent activity has pretty much ceased since a certain customer service rep retired and took his snack collection with him.
Yep, some fucking genius thought it would be a great idea to plug what is essentially a miniature heater equipped with a fuel pod into a wall behind a piece of upholstered furniture. I unplugged it and turned it over to the company’s safety coordinator, along with a news article about a similar product getting so hot that it melted a nearby radio.