Only if they are diabetic!
I think I already talked about this guy previously. At any rate, the office for the extremely prideful/arrogant/egotistical PhD physicist on our team is right next to my office. When he’s talking to someone on the phone or in person, he talks VERY LOUDLY so everyone up and down our hallway can hear him. He does this because he wants everyone to know what a genius he is on all things electrical/electronics. (We’re an R&D lab that does testing on electronics.)
His voice is grating. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that much of what he says on electrical stuff and electronics is flat out wrong, which pisses me off.
I found a solution, though: I now wear earplugs when I am in my office. That way, the B.S. he spews is just a muffled noise.
Well, today was not a good day. I have to keep reminding myself that my generous salary is the only thing that’s keeping me from homelessness. I’m so stressed that I’m thinking about trying those Olly calming gummies. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that most of our parking at work is closed, and I’m trying to go in to the office as little as possible. I work in a college town, so if the lots we’re supposed to use are closed, it’s not going to be easy to find parking anywhere close to work. So almost two weeks ago, one of my coworkers asked if it would be possible to get a poster done by tomorrow. I said I couldn’t get what he wanted that quickly (it’s something new and different, and needs more time for development and installation), and I told him I would get more info. So today,
…sorry, I need to take a break here to growl…
I got an email that we need to have a poster by tomorrow. I found one that’s already printed that we can borrow, but I need to come up with a way to hang it. I may need to go to a store, in person. I am not going to run in and out of the office when there is no place to park. I am so annoyed. I could have taken care of this earlier, if anyone had asked me to.
…time for another growling break…
I could make a lot more money working for a hedge fund, but I really don’t want to sell my soul. It’s not worth it. Maybe I’ll get those Olly gummies when I’m out shopping tomorrow.
We have a Daily Operations Review (DOR) meeting every work day where we go over how the plant is doing and then review action items to help make the plant run better. I am apparently the only engineer who works here (I am not, btw) because my name is on a lot of these action items. And, as you know, engineering things takes time. But, still, every day, we go over the action items, and, every day, I get reminded that these items need to be completed. What’s more annoying about this is that most of these items are kind of out of my hands.
One of them requires production support to troubleshoot the issue they need solved. Unfortunately, they have not given me much if any support to do that. Instead, they have yelled at me that the problem isn’t solved while pushing all the buttons when the problem happens instead of LEAVING IT ALONE FOR 5 FUCKING MINUTES to let me look at it.
Another one of the action items requires a vendor to finish rebuilding a piece of equipment. This vendor is currently having a COVID outbreak. The production manager apparently wants me to cure COVID so he can get his equipment back faster.
I’m really really tired of getting yelled at every day.
Yell back!
(If you can.)
DAILY?
Oh.
My.
God.
Do you even have time to do your job?
Management is totally failing. They should know what’s going on. If they don’t, ask the person THE CORRECT PERSON that knows the answer to a question. The ‘manager’ is wasting every ones time.
This is beyond micro-management, this is a manager that wants his manager to think that he is doing his job by having daily meetings.
My 3 meetings a month cut into what I could be working on. But DAILY???
At the next DOR, tell them to put the name of the person who actually has the action item to complete. If they are out of your hands, put the onus on the person who is actually holding things up.
There is nothing particularly wrong with having daily meetings as long as they are done well (and with purpose). We have one in our team that lasts at most 30 minutes and allows everyone to know what is happening which is good as we often tackle quite different things. I thought I would begrudge when we started doing it but I find them to be quite helpful especially since it cuts down on having to repeat yourself to several different people. To be clear though, it is just a status meeting, 98% of the time no action is decided upon or assigned during it.
Also, there is no yelling.
//i\\
To be clear - It’s not my boss having these meetings, it’s production. I’m in engineering. It’s a production meeting talking about the daily production goals.
Can’t really put the action item back on the vendor, but the other ones… Oh I wish. That would be a great idea if I thought it would fly.
Ok. The stuff we do takes weeks, months or years to accomplish. The day to day little stuff is handled by any staff member that picks it up. Often before 7am. And we let each other know though IM’s or in software that handles ‘tickets’ that come up that need attention.
It should. Anytime someone else is holding up your work. you should call them out on it.
As does a lot of the stuff that we do as well. My point is that having a daily meeting is not necessarily bad because it is daily, but because it is simply bad, and I have had my fair share of those.
What drives me crazy is in a meeting where you have people that are only partially paying attention ask something that has just been answered. There is one particular coworker that tends to do this on a regular basis and it drives me mad, but usually not enough to rant about it here since it does not affect me getting my work done. I never hesitate to say something like “as I just explained a moment ago…” but it does not seem to have much of an effect.
//i\\
Or when the agenda is done, someone asks something completely off topic. So you have another 20 minutes of meeting that no one is prepared for, and the whole thing spins its wheels. I love doing meetings online now.
According to my husband, a start-of-shift meeting is pretty standard on construction sites. Also applied when he worked in a factory shipping department. Known issues were discussed and what was priority for the day got addressed. 10-15 minutes at most, according to him.
This fits with the ADHD theme, too. We had a team of way-too-creative folk (ad agency), and I was the worst. Things would slip through the cracks (in my brain), and I would have been fired if it weren’t for our quick 15 minute “What HAS To Go Out The Door TODAY?” meeting at 8am.
Led by our Non-ADHD Production Co-ordinator.
It was also the only way we could get everyone to show up by eight…
Does your manager attend these meetings? If not, maybe they should.
Today was a quiet day, which is good, because I’m still exhausted from yesterday. The high points of the day were trying to find a solution to the poster problem (see my last post if you want to know more), thinking about how I’m going to respond if that coworker tries to throw me under the bus, and looking bad to the head cheese because I haven’t gotten enough done on getting the permanent poster because I was working on the temporary poster all day so it would be done for the meeting last night. 
I do want to give some credit to the people in my former department who helped a lot, which just proves that we work well together and we should still all be in the same department.
For years, I worked for a horrible boss. I stuck with this job because it has a lot of good aspects, and I worked hard at making things run smoothly. I’m so stressed with the current situation that I am actually thinking about looking for another job, even though I don’t have any interview clothes. I might try to tough it out until we hire the person who would be my manager, which will be November at the earliest. Otherwise it would be really bad for my current coworkers. I’m not totally sure they deserve it, though.
Go for it; can’t hurt, might help.
Update, I finally got the right paperwork filled out the right way from my doctor’s office and HR approved my accommodation the same day. I am officially the only person in my department who isn’t remote.
Hmmm. Seeing as I’m more often than not the one running the meetings, I tend to get pretty annoyed if someone on my team did that. Then again a lot of organizations often have meetings for the sake of having meetings to the point where people get double and triple booked. Which is stupid because you are guaranteeing that not only is no actual work getting done, half of the time discussions about that work aren’t getting done.
Years ago I had one client like that where they were overrun with meetings. The program head asked if I could recommend some sort of “technology solution”.
“Yeah, You all work for the same company you dummy. Use your fucking Outlook calendar. Other than that I can’t bend time and space for you.”