Unfortunately, in our case, it was the wife who had the common one-syllable name. Which I really wanted to take when we got married, but she liked mine and wanted a change. And I am the last of a long line to go by [long name from Just Outside Suburban Liechtenstein redacted], so my dad would NOT have understood (how little the next generation cares…)
Eonwe, that really is unfair and we all feel for you. Maybe you can get a promotion.
Don’t worry, Nava. If I made a sale to you I’d have to shorten your name to two words, totaling 22 characters, anyway. And no, I have no idea why the field length is 22, either.
Our comment field, where we sum up all needed info for the next person, is only 60 characters. I complained to my bosses, noting that it is less than half a Tweet, but there are no changes to that. OR to how if you log off for lunch immediately after a sale your meal time is marked against your personal break (we get a quarter more per hour if we keep our personal time under 22 minutes/day), so we have to keep calling until we don’t make a sale. OR to how we suddenly can’t get into our personal callbacks without locking our systems. OR to how if, before that “improvement,” when we went into our personal callbacks immediately after a sale the system would lock. Or to how the network has taken to not bringing up our general, anybody can call because we trust each other not to fuck up the sale, callbacks at 3:30PM CST, no matter when we scheduled them, even though we SCHEDULE a callback FOR A FUCKING REASON, most of our calls are to the Eastern time zone, and most medical offices are closed by then.
Our lead screen is recognizably ported from an AS/400 and a guy I know in IT recruiting sez that the only AS/400 hands he can find are Russian, so it may be something like Nava’s problem. 
All I know is that the Russian receptionists I speak with must be hot because they are neither competent nor helpful. And I no longer find that cliched, languorous way of speaking, dripping with ennui, entertaining. It’s just annoying and I’d fire them; this is America, dammit, so do some work! But of course the doctors are Russian, too, so they probably expect it. Or expect to get cut if they speak up, since their receptionists are probably their wives. 
You guys know how one of the things facebook used to strout about was that people there “use their real names”? I still run into that claim sometimes and it makes me roll my eyes sooooo hard, because they only accept two spaces, so there are a lot of people out there who aren’t allowed to use our real names by the software (and then add all the aliases, corporate webpages, and yeah rite). You know, even when it was something designed for the student body of a university, I expect a bunch of them had names that were not Firstname Middlename Last(Family)name.
I keep saying I need to find me a nice Anglo engineer with a lastname of Smith, or Jones or something like that…
Thanks to your reminders, I did indeed bring the laptop in.
OTOH, the background checks people blow ass. They wouldn’t if I was British, living in the UK, had had all my education there, and also my work history, but as is? Aaaaaargh!
Hey, I admitted that it’s a pretty lame-assed problem. But I needed to vent. It’s still a kind of dumpy feeling when the guy to your left is gets a multi-thousand dollar raise, and the guy to your right gets a multi-thousand dollar raise, and sitting in the middle you get $50. I’m mostly over it, but it’s never fun to be stuck with the licorice-flavor jelly beans because all the good ones got handed out to other people, even though you have jelly beans when once you didn’t.
But thank you for your snark.
I can’t speak for j666, but I actually do feel for you and I suspect his/her remark was in earnest. It’s a crappy feeling when everyone else is celebrating their good fortune and you were struck out on a technicality.
Also, it means that all your hard work getting to the point where you made more than others is no longer recognized - they’re getting paid as much as you are now. I know we’re all supposed to regard ourselves as more than our paychecks, blah, blah, but the way a company shows that it appreciates people is with cold hard cash. Now, through no fault of your own, you’ve been re-leveled with people you’ve already outworked.
Exactly. And, j666, if you were indeed sincere then my sincere apologies for assuming otherwise.
What? Hey, no …
Yeah, what s/he said.
Don’t worry about it, life is not be kind to you today, and we are all here to vent. (And I really think that if you were the highest paid in your group, you should ask your manager for a promotion.)
That sucks.
So, can I be sympathetic and still fantasize about getting black jelly beans at work?
White mint-ish flavor. Licorice flavor are yum.
Oh, I hate those white, mintish ones! OTOH, there’s a reason you can buy the black ones by the bag.
Licorice jellybeans are divine. Those buttered popcorn Jelly Bellys are vile denizens of hell.
Co-worker, you know how you get really angry when you have to deal with anyone who doesn’t speak English very well (even though yours isn’t actually all that amazing either; understandable but nowhere near native level)?
Well, given that poor English annoys you to the point of being unable to do your job properly, have you ever considered maybe not working in a freaking airport?
Fine, you think that other people should put in the effort to learn English when they move to England and I can’t argue that it’s a very good idea to do so, given that not speaking English here vastly reduces a person’s options, and can be very isolating. Stretching that to being personally insulted that someone slightly mispronounced a word while waiting for a plane to fly out of the country is… kinda crazy.
Oh, and while we’re at it, if you’d stop being a dick to people because you think everyone of their skin colour is a dick to you, maybe you’d realise who the real total dick in the situation actually is.
And again, if you want to to deal with an ethnically homogeneous group of people, maybe an airport isn’t the place for you, mmkay?
I think you have that backwards… 
A few months ago I had ranted on here about my work partner, who was a sweet lady but just couldn’t get the hang of the job. Year and a half and she was still asking the same questions every day about the same things. I got moved to a different team recently and I was finally free of the questions. I had to learn a whole new part of the job but I didn’t have someone constantly hovering over my shoulder asking me to show them what to do over and over and over and over…
They just fired my former partner. Apparently on top of not ever getting the hang of the job she got caught doing something highly illegal- twice. So now while I’m still trying to learn all the details of my new job I’m also being expected to jump in and cover for some of her stuff too. You can read that as “fixing her mistakes”. All the jumping back and forth between teams and trying to remember what I’m supposed to be doing is exhausting.
My boss seems to be appreciative, she brings me chocolate and tells everyone I’m a rock star. All I really want is to be left alone so I can finish learning what I’m actually supposed to be doing now. And the powers that be better remember this come annual review time.
Oh good, someone to trade nasty jellybeans with.
The white jelly beans…are we talking about the ones in the standard Brach’s mix you find at Easter? I thought they were meant to be pineapple-flavored.
I’ll be happy to pass along any cherry flavored jelly beans.
The white ones with pale, pink dots that cost extra? No, those are delish. I mean the cheap ones.
Bumping this thread to get it back on the page