Two in one day!
I had to work with another organization to support our work here. Apparently I fucked up big time and they didn’t want to work with me. Thing is, I can’t think of what I did wrong. All of my work reviews were good and no one had anything negative to say. It was just towards the end I was getting a cold shoulder. A few months before, the manager in the other organization had left and things never seemed right after that so I thought maybe it was all about that. Anyways we parted ways and I was left with a weird feeling and to cover my butt, reported to my boss that I had repeatedly asked them and our liason with them for ways to improve (true) and never got anything but positive responses (true). FTR: They have never come to me saying anything negative about my performance.
So today my school is trying it again with the same organization. I got an email forwarded to me (so not directly sent) that basically said they should have a meeting with me to discuss expectations given my (still unknown by me) earlier fuckup.
I feel like Dean Wormer has me on double-secret probation.
This makes our awkward office parties look not so bad. Including the weirdest baby shower I’ve ever been to (even weirder than the ones where you have to guess what kind of chocolate is melted in the baby diaper). Thanks to Covid, we haven’t had any of those for a while.
The best thing about the “Agile” process we use now is that we get to call this out as “task blocked by whoever”. Especially effective when it’s the management doing the blocking.
I don’t really have any funny stories—it’s mostly things like too many people in a conference room that’s too small so there’s nowhere to sit, and speeches that go on forever when I just want to eat some cake. (Hush, it’s Costco cake. Don’t get between me and that cake that contains more sugar than is physically possible.) We do sometimes have fun parties, so it’s not all bad.
I will share a story that probably won’t be funny to anyone but me. We used to have birthday parties where we sang Happy Birthday. Imagine a small conference room, and 6 to 8 people singing very badly. I tried my very best to bring it up a notch, but I’m not a strong singer, so it just kept on being very, very bad. Until one day, one of our coworkers retired. It turns out that she single-handedly ruined our singing. It was so much better after she left. We don’t sing Happy Birthday anymore, and I think we’re all happier that way.
Ooh, those parties sound like torture (though, if they had homemade cake…).
I kept flashing back to Seinfeld, where Elaine’s work was celebrating birthdays and other “special days”, often two in one day, with huge slabs of (non-Costco) sheet cake.
.
“Trying to fill the void in your life with flour and sugar and egg and vanilla? I mean, we’re all unhappy, do we have to be fat, too?”
It’s too bad that a beautiful Thursday afternoon is going to be ruined by a meeting with difficult people. This is not the same group of people from my last post, which means that I’m dealing with too many difficult people right now. I wish they would learn something from the better people I work with, who appreciate my work and don’t ask for too much.
It would help if I felt a little more diplomatic today. It is very hard to tell someone that an idea they’re proud of is really not good. Some of the things they’re asking for are probably not allowed, but I haven’t gotten confirmation for that from my boss yet, so I can’t shut it down right away. I’m going to need massive amounts of chocolate to recover from this one.
The meeting went okay, but then InDesign crashed and deleted text out of many text boxes and saved the document that way. I don’t know how that’s even possible, and I’m not a happy camper. It seems that with every update, it gets worse. Progress is not improvement.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that it didn’t just delete the text, it also changed the style, so now I have to change the style for each text box. This afternoon is cursed and I just want to go home now.
Would a previous version be saved somewhere? I thought Adobe apps saved a version as you worked on them (on your hard drive… or in Adobe’s cloud?). Maybe your company’s server saved a copy. Or do you have Time Machine? It’ll save a snapshot of your hard drive so you can pull a document off an image from a couple of days ago?
I’m grasping at straws here… you might be well into the realm of Plagues of Locusts and Frogs and Typography.
We have our Quarterly Performance Review with the board today. Woke up to find out that some Bright Young Thing has spiffed up our presentation by adding pithy quotes to the section header slides.
They are all stupid, but two are particularly galling.
One is attributed to Socrates. Sounds very unlike what a serious philosopher would say 2500 years ago, and when I looked it up, it’s actually some modern business “author” who goes by Socrates.
The second is attributed to the head of our own business division! Basically just some toxic positivity phrase that her boss’ boss likes to use. Nothing more than fawning flattery, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of that section.
Labor shortage? I’ve had 3 interviews in the last month, one of which was with Herbalife via Skype messaging. Herbalife has hired me for data entry and are sending me a check to deposit into my account so I can buy my own equipment.
We don’t sing Happy Birthday anymore, and I think we’re all happier that way.
I wish they would learn something from the better people I work with, who appreciate my work and don’t ask for too much.