My theory is, the worst people are making all of the decisions now. People have to make unnecessary changes so they can justify having their jobs and prove they’re doing something. So that’s why bad decisions are made, good features are removed, and buttons are switched from left to right for no apparent reason. And that small text makes me hate young people with good eyes. I’m too old to read tiny text, dangit.
When I went to work for an I.T. department in 2005, I asked why the Help Desk area was in the middle of the building, locked away from everyone else. I was told it was because they were always being physically threatened by outside employees. Of course, working for I.T. meant our problems were always expedited (and we knew where to find them) so they were safe from us . 
The bottom? What sort of barbarians would do that?
My job sucks, and Canva is a nightmare. Why would any fully grown adult person think that a free app is preferable to professional software? It’s absolute lunacy. I just want to get some work done, and I can’t even get things to align the right way in Canva. I hate it with a fiery passion. I have so much to do, and now I have to design things in InDesign and then find a way to make them work in Canva, and I do not have time for this nonsense.
Do you ever wonder how basic common knowledge eludes people? And I mean both stuff that should be generally picked up as knowledge through the act of existing for decades, as well as factual info that you learn once in school as a kid then retain the rest of your life. It’s hitting me over and over how many people are missing that.
Like for example, I’m not an electrician. I can’t wire or rewire anything, and I barely remember all the stuff I leanred about Amps and Watts and Joules from high school physics. But…I understand that if you plug too much stuff into one outlet, you’ll trip the breaker. It’s a basic rule of life, and you don’t need to be an electrical engineer to grasp that principle. I live in a cruddy apartment, and at least once a summer I try running the microwave while the air conditioner is on and the power goes out to my apartment (I smack myself upside the head for forgetting, and I reset it myself). The number of tenants we have at my office for whom we have to reset tripped breakers, repeatedly, is ridiculous. They plug in four space heaters within ten feet of each other rather than calling the building to turn the heat up, and are shocked when all their cubicles go dark. We offer to get an electrician in to upgrade their kitchen counter, they decline, and just call us every other day because they ran the blender and microwave at once and blew the fuse once again.
“What side of the floor are you on?” “I think I’m in the north-south corner of the building.” No problem, I’ll just bend the properties of physical space and meet you there, because you never looked at a map in 6th grade geography.
“Why do we always get mice in the office?” Well, the last four times the pest control tech came in to bait the area, he advised you to stop eating at your desk and leaving crumbs all over the place, and to stop storing improperly bagged food inside your desk drawers. When he goes up again tonight, will he find a bunch of loose, opened granola bars and peanut butter in your cubicle?
I legitimately don’t understand how some folks find their way to work in the morning.
I’ve spent most of the day working on these stupid name tags. Such a good use of my time!
Our site manager does regular sweeps for unauthorized electrical equipment for just that reason. Officially for fire safety, but also to prevent outages.
Our building has far too much square footage for that kind of daily survey to be unfeasible, sadly. We often catch issues only when they trip up, like bringing in contractors to do unauthorized renovations, and then a nearby tenant complains about the construction noise.
After spending waaaaay too much time this morning tweaking various settings, I finally found settings that work for me without terribly distorting the other graphics. My desktop icons are a little bigger than I would like, but I can deal with it. (I even tried installing PowerToys from the Microsoft Store, since past versions have had a few useful interface tweaks, but of course IT blocked it.)
At least they let us move the start button to the left. 
(I’ve left mine in the middle, because the itty bitty menu looks better there.)
Sheessss. I’m making training videos of the important stuff I manage. I’ve been automating the stuff to run on a schedule which is well and good… until it breaks and it’s no longer well or good.
More from the world of property management:
I continute to be stumped at how certain things just go walkabout and need replacement. “We’ve got some ceiling tiles that are missing and need replacement.” Okay, how did that happen? There’s no record of contractors doing work in the ceiling, no HVAC service calls lately, how do the tiles just walk away? Same thing with grates in the heating vents. Sometimes I imagine it’s the occupants of the office futzing around with the grate while they’re on the phone, and dropping it down the back of the radiator, but sometimes they’ve genuinely vanished.
(With ceiling tiles the other bugaboo of mine is when the tenant has brought in a contractor to do some work, and they leave shit out of place. “Our tech left the ceiling open and we’ve got visitors coming, can you send someone up right away to replace the tiles?” Sure, no problem, but are you deducting from your construction bill because the doofii you hired didn’t actually finish the job?)
A floor tile here, a soap pump or toilet seat there, a nail removed from a wall with a framed picture left leaning underneath it…there are times I suspect someone is trying to build a same-size replica of this office building in their basement, one desk chair roller at a time, and wow are they playing the long game.
Hahahaha. I work with sorting machinery for USPS, and when I replace a belt, bearing/pulley assembly, or interlock switch, I tell myself a little joke that I’m going to save the bad part until I have enough to build a complete non-working model of the entire machine.
Wasn’t sure if I should post this here or in the scam thread. I just finished the mandatory online security training, and I have a few issues with it.
First, their recommended way of detecting phishing emails is if there are urgent requests, any misspellings or grammar problems, or links to click on. Sort of like the email that said I had two days to complete the security training, click here?
Absolutely no mention of checking the address the email came from. Is it claiming to be a vendor invoice, well, does it actually come from the vendor? If the security training was worth anything it would say the first thing for checking if something is a phishing email is to open the headers and look at the actual text address of the sender. Don’t know how to do that, then do email training.
The training also says “use a password manager” and “don’t use your browser to remember passwords.” You know, pick one. Maybe more useful would have been training in how to set your browser to be a reasonably secure password manager, because people are going to do that, so show them how to do it right.
Or, just maybe, provide a password manager as a common good for the whole organization instead of telling people in one slide to not use personal stuff for work, and then in a later slide to use a password manager when none is provided by work.
Johnny Cash had a song about that…
I replied to one clearly indicating I knew it was a scam including the return email domain being different than the link (think upsdelivery.com) and that I did a Google Maps street view of their office address in the email and ask them why their huge company was in a broke-ass shack by a railroad track. I also told them I was offended that they thought I would fall for such a pitiful scam and please try to challenge me in the future.
IT sent me to scam training for replying to a phishing scam email.
I almost got caught once, like cursor 1/2 inch away from the link before I stopped because something very subtle was off. Thing was this was a really REALLY good one that I would swear up and down was from our office manager and something she would send to me. The thing that stopped me was she called it “the attached document” rather than what the document was, but it flowed so naturally that it took a third reading for me to even notice it. In other words, completely different than the juvenile ones IT tests us with.
But my very favorite was a generic phishing email that said it was from my district (then why is the sender surveys@infogatherers.com?) about a work survey I was required to take. Just login with your credentials using this link (not suspicious right?). I reported it along with a lot of other teachers as blatant phishing.
It was real. The district outsourced the survey
I did that too! The school district was trying desperately to train people not to click on random links, so they had an outside contractor send us an email with a link to the online training!
I reported it to the head of the district IT department.
My place does that, too, or at least used to. All of the links in campus wide emails were replaced with tracking links. They now have it setup so the tracking link ends in our domain name. It’s still a tracking link, but at least it can’t be spoofed by a third party (without hacking or an insecure redirector or something).
It did generate lots of blow back, with things like follow up emails saying that the weird looking link was actually correct. Which to me suggests that scammers just need to send pre- and/or post- emails saying, “the next email will have a link to a non-corporate address, but it is a third party we are contracting with to collect your login information assist with this project.”
Heh. That’s like the time during the COVID lockdowns my employer was encouraging us to use the hand sanitizer they were providing all around the plant. It had a lovely coconut fragrance that simply begged to be sniffed and savored.
“Oh, and by the way, keep your hands away from your face!”
When I was working, I was a consultant that assisted clients with the procurement, installation and programming of very expensive home automation systems.
It was a common practice for professionals in the business to hang on to extra parts, lightly used items that were replaced because the client changed their minds, until we had enough stuff to outfit our own homes with a very expensive system. We even exchanged parts with each other. I had a nice system in my home.
I think still have a box of stuff in my garage, but I haven’t been motivated to do anything with it.
That, I totally understand. I just have this image in my head of some lawyer in my building re-doing his basement rec room, and thinking, well, if I take one ceiling tile a week from that unused section on the other side of the floor, nobody’ll notice and I’ll save some money, and my man-cave will be done by the summer…