Well I certainly learned something today!
I now think it’s very likely that the filter is based on the site’s address rather than its contents; today at lunch I was reading articles on an automotive site, and had no trouble accessing an article in which some interior features were compared to buttplugs.
Ah, the Little Bobby Tables method!
It is quite possible the block is based on the site’s address, not name. That site is in a shared host, and if the blocklist is based on the IP address instead of the name, it could be on there because some other host with unwanted content also shares the same IP address. So collateral damage.
I was very close to having some words with a coworker who kept interrupting me in meetings, but then Covid happened. I don’t have many meetings that involve her now. Which is good, because I can’t be diplomatic about this, and it wouldn’t go well.
We’ve settled on using the hand raising button in our google chats meetings, which has smoothed out our meetings considerably with one gentleman who has/had a tendency to interject and ramble. He was at least self aware of it and noticed other people using the hands up protocol.
-DF
My project is going down in flames and my asshole manager A is sacrificing his team.
My coworker asked manager A what they could be working on, as their work is currently blocked due to IT issues. The remainder of the team has other projects which need attention.
Manager A invited for a meeting. At the meeting was my coworker, manager A, manager B, and manager C. A and B report to C.
All three managers told my coworker to decide, immediately, if they want to accept re-assignment to another task (basically a demotion). Not sure about the other options, as I got this third-hand. But leaving the company is probably on the table, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
I have the feeling that I will probably get the same treatment in a few weeks.
My school, to make their new, tighter budget, is telling faculty to teach an additional class every semester.
And, since they predict that most teachers will say “But there are no more Bio/Art/History classes!”, teachers will then be assigned a class in a different field.
A class. In a Different. Field.
My brain is still trying to wrap around that…
“Hi, I’m Lydia Schmedlick, I usually teach Ballet and Modern Dance.
But welcome to Organic Chemistry, where you’ll start out by teaching me about [checks textbook] carbon chains and benzene rings. And what all those cute little C’s and H’s and O’s are about.”
Is this high school or college/university?
College! . . . . 
Where if a student’s taking a Nursing class, they damn well better be taught by someone with a nursing background.
I used chemistry as an example, because I probably could teach it (with a summer spent reviewing), but for serious students who’ll end up in a biotech lab, or medicine, or even engineering, I wouldn’t have the know-how to emphasize what issues they’ll run into in the field, or even in additional schooling.
Since I posted that, I’ve heard from a couple of fellow teachers who think this is the stupidest thing yet from the administration. Which is saying something, the school is often extremely short-sighted (and I could’ve sued them twice for racist/sexist/financial things that were said during my interviews).
Of course, the college will still charge full tuition, right?
By nine this morning I already had the vein in my forehead throbbing because I had to deal with our company’s IT department. I assume this is common, but we contract to an overseas call centre that has bounced around from Costa Rica to Hungary to Buddha-knows-where. We are actively not supposed to contact a local team; if the call centre operators can’t resolve this issue, they “escalate” it to an office that’s actually in our city. From my experience with this, the call centre help desk is able to resolve maybe 4% of the issues we have. Quite literally, the middle man that shold be eliminated. Needless to say, contact info for our local folks is guarded like the Roswell files.
ANYWAY, we use Outlook for our email here. Every morning, I attach an updated Excel file to a bunch of manager. Just click the “Attach file” button and…today it wasn’t there. Wondered if it was a glitch. Restarted Outlook. Nope, still no button. I called the help desk. After sitting through a full minute of an unskippable recording saying “Did you know that you can contact us online?” (always a helpful message when the issue is that we can’t log in to the intranet), I get my Eastern European helper. I give him my name and he asks me to confirm my email address, and phone number, and physical address, and the name of my immediate manager…finally he’s ready to help.
I explain how the “Attach file” button seems to have vanished overnight. He immediately asks if I’ve tried dragging-and-dropping the file into the email. I tell him that before we go to a workaround, I’d like to try and fix what seems to have gone south since I logged off yesterday afternoon. He takes a few minutes to take over my screen, and I show him. Jeez (or whatever the Balkan equivalent to “jeez” is), he’s never seen this before. He eventually finds another two-step way to attach a file from the opposite end of the screen, but has no idea why the usual way isn’t an option any more. Nore does he know, while I’ve got him on the line, why sometimes when I’m typing an email address, the email to which I’m responding vanishes from my screen and I have to retrieve it from the Archive folder. Or why the “previous” and “next” buttons actually take you in the opposite directions when you’re sifting through emails.
Sigh. This is a minor one. In a crisis, our IT “team” can send me into a near poo-flinging rage.
Too late to edit this in…I’ll concede that this may be Microsoft (a sudden overnight update to the software) and not our internal issue. Still, the utter bafflement with which they respond is notable, the instant suggestion of a workaround says they’ve already gotten calls about it, and they react the same way even if it’s our proprietary stuff.
Fuck Adobe Acrobat, and fuck Adobe Sign. I keep two signatures on file in Acrobat; one is my full signature, the other is just initials. I noticed today that my initials had been dropped. I tried restarting the program, and sure enough there was an update to install. Nice. After the update, my initials were still missing. This has happened before, and was solved by signing out and signing back in.
Not this time! 
My initials are still missing, and my recent files list – including ‘starred’ items – have been wiped. There goes the rest of my afternoon trying to locate all this crap. Thanks a lot, Adobe.
OH my god I just need to vent.
I have a new boss. I didn’t have one for six months, and I got rather used to it. The new CEO was my boss, and she listened to me because she didn’t know what she was doing. I’m a grants manager with thirteen years experience in the field of grant writing.
Funding opportunity comes up. They have funded us in the past. Three people attended the meeting with this funder, in which they described her as “pissed - but we won her over.” Great. “You have to submit this grant ASAP,” they tell me. “Write it about A,” CEO tells me. “She definitely emphasized A during the meeting.” OK, I have a vacation scheduled for the following week, so I submitted the draft of the grant for feedback within literal hours of being told to make it a priority. New boss then responds, “No, it’s supposed to be for B. She very clearly said [things indicating not B, but C.]” Great, so now we have three possible things this funder is expecting from this grant, which I have already written once, and nobody can agree.
Meanwhile, I see an email from said funder in which she says she wants us to submit for D. New boss has zero grant writing experience but she seems to think she knows exactly what this funder wants, even though what she says directly contradicts the funder’s email.
CEO asks me for my input, since I am the fucking grant expert, and I provide it. “I’d say we go by the most recent email she sent and submit it for D. We can incorporate some of New Bosses’ ideas for future collaborations in this other section.” CEO asks me the amount I recommend we submit for, and I give a modest bump up from what they’ve given us in the past. No, New Boss wants us to apply for what seems to be an insultingly large quantity of money (insulting given that the funder is currently pissed at us and we should be begging for table scraps at this point.) CEO pushes back on New Boss, New Boss does not budge. She insists I submit it for $X.
At this point it’s been a week since I first wrote the draft for feedback. It is the day before my vacation. I draft the new version, which tries to incorporate New Boss ideas while also trying to write something that is likely to be funded, and immediately send it back to New Boss for feedback. I wait for feedback so that I can submit it that day, so it does not interfere with my vacation. I do not receive feedback that day. OK, guess this “urgent grant” I was ready to submit last week can wait until Monday then.
Then, during my vacation, I get an email from new boss saying she knows I am ''technically off" today but funder is pressuring her to submit the application so can I submit it first thing Monday? First of all, I am not “technically off” work today, I am using PTO I put in for two months ago. Second of all, no, I was unable to do it first thing Monday, which is why I finished it today, on my vacation.
I’m afraid the funder is going to think this ask is confusing, because it kind of is (I did my best), I am worried they are going to be pissed we asked for so much money, and I am worried this is going to be a trend.
I actually do like New Boss, she’s been great especially with the flexible schedule I need to address my son’s needs, she even said I didn’t have to take PTO for his ADOS… but I kind of feel like she’s playing with fire here, not yet understanding the grants process or how grants fund our programming but insisting we do things her way rather listening to ME, someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes grant writing and has been at this agency for almost eight years.
And a part of me is just like, how much does this matter? Am I just pissed because someone is telling me what to do again? I don’t remember feeling like this with the old boss. Old boss was the best boss I ever had. Am I just mad this person is not Old Boss? That’s not fair to her. Maybe I need to give it more of a chance. But I am not happy how this went. It was an extraordinarily stressful one-week ordeal that should have taken two hours.
Not mine but Mrs Cad’s.
She has a new boss who has exactly zero knowledge about the field he’s in. Mrs Cad is pretty much to only person at her site that has any experience and she has 20+ years plus the highest certification you can have. So her boss calls hers and says, “Hey, what are your ideas on this new project our department has been assigned?” so she does her job and tells him. Flash forward a couple hours when during the department meeting, Big Bossman presents “his” ideas on the new project.
They did it again today! This time I contacted the IT department and specifically asked how to respond by yesterday. IT apparently doesn’t give a shit.
Why on earth do these students call every year and want to NOT use their summer Pell and instead use the free summer class hours the college offers for qualifying students? Why why why? Why do some students think the free hours are preferable? I can’t understand it. And if you qualify for the Pell, you DON’T get the free hours, so just stop calling!!!
I would like it to be known that I am a chemical engineer. I am not a controls engineer. I know the PLCs are a thing and that they take IO and that they get programs and do stuff with the inputs and output stuff. That’s what I know. I hire programmers and integrators to know the rest of this stuff. So why is my integrator not helping me know where to land the interlock wiring? Why am I looking at electrical drawings of the PLC IO like I know something and trying to figure it out myself? I’m going to fuck this up. I really going to fuck this up.
You’ll be fine. The interlock is just some safety namby-pamby anyway.
On top of that, I forgot we have to integrate the cap elevator with the capper. I’m an idiot who should not have a job.
I’m a mechanical engineer; I have very limited electrical experience. My university provided just enough background (“Electrical Engineering for Non-EEs”, plus a semester-long lab) that I’m comfortable with very basic stuff, but beyond that I would rather leave things to the electrical engineers. Two weeks ago, I was summoned to the production area by a manager who went into an absolute rage because I hadn’t provided detailed wiring diagrams for a switch that needed to be tested (well, more like monitored to make sure it cycled on and off correctly); instead, I had supplied the (admittedly crappy) basic diagram from the manual, along with very basic instructions that allowed the testing department to do whatever they needed in order to monitor it while cycling. It truly didn’t matter how it was done, it just mattered that the switch was actuated and monitored for a period of time. I spent nearly a week going back and forth with this; ultimately, my supervisor had to get involved. He actually got to go out and work on the wiring himself at one point.
I still feel like an absolute failure. It doesn’t help matters that I’ve been struggling at home all week to install a WiFi adapter on a Linux-based computer. Great, there’s something else I suck at doing.