The work desk phone does not accept texts. The time it allows for voice mail isn’t very long.
I’m bad at returning voice mails quickly. I think of it as training people to either email me or call back.
A voicemail is easy to forget, or miss details. A text or an email? It’s all there in black and white, and easy for me to check back a week later and suddenly yell “The 30th? I said I’d do that by TODAY? Well, I’d better get to it, glad I checked!”
Huh. My voicemail automatically is converted to text and sent as an email to my account.
Great system eh?
Especially when I get an email from my phone account that says:
High, this ig strepenaana tropontomart. I was genuflecting yesterbuyday and we mechanical the blumgarten. Plembenuate glantruifly. My number is 546495069493049604. K thanks bye.
Really? But wouldn’t it be fun to see what would happen if you DID?
A teacher friend played me his outgoing message at work.
(Now, keep in mind that almost all his messages were college students thinking that if they tell him they’re going to be late for class, that somehow mitigates the sin. Or parents yelling about Little Billy getting a D on a test.)
“Hi, you’ve reached Ed Jablonsky… who doesn’t listen to these messages. And doesn’t read emails or keep office hours. If you actually have something important and have to talk to me, your only hope is to catch me between classes. Have a nice day.”
I assumed someone would object and a dean would make him change (the message and his customer service skills), but he kept that up until he retired a decade later.
I don’t have texting capabilities from my work phone. I’d text these guys if I could. And my complaint wasn’t so much about the ability to communicate as it was about this supremely annoying habit from people who carry around phones all day so that we can reach them, and also know how these phones work so they should know better. This didn’t seem to be happening a couple of years ago.
Ya, sounds like many of my profs:
“Fuck you undergraduates. If you came to this university in hopes of getting an education, you’re an idiot. This institution is about upper administration academics who failed in doing research supporting academics who get grants to bring in more money. We don’t give two tiny shits about you or your hopes for a good education.”
My office voicemail is an absolute pain to access from my phone - it demands a password, then demands a password reset. Fortunately, the system also sends a copy of the audio file to my email, so that’s how I almost always check my messages.
Or -
“How dare you, mere undergrad, attempt to contact me during office hours. That is my time. I came to this university to conduct important research. This does not include the entry level solid mechanics course that this university expects me to teach for some reason. Contact a T.A. if you still have a question. But let’s be honest, you shouldn’t even be at this university if you have a question about this topic.”
I had a prof once who started his course with a lecture that basically went:
“I got my PhD at 20 years old, and every single one of you is my intellectual inferior. I hate teaching this class so I will put in the minimum effort, and I expect half of you will fail. I don’t care.”
Um, that might have been my dad. Sorry.
Yeah, well, your dad is the reason why I decided to teach at a technical college (a Polytechnic University).
There, you get taught by people who are currently working in the field. And the point is to get you employed…so you get the exact skills you need, then internships, and interviews.
.
(Hey, I’m sure your dad’s a nice guy, and I’d love to have a beer with him… but I’m not spending tuition money to hang out with him.)
I wrote a grant 10 months ago. This week I was asked to give more budget detail delineating how the budget is divided into task 1 and task 2. I sent a budget broken down by task (here’s personnel cost for task 1, here’s personnel cost for task 2, etc.) I received a comment back from the same person saying I can’t break the budget down into tasks. I honestly don’t know what is wanted at this point.
Also, my budget break down was not EXACTLY (down to the penny) like my grant submission from 10 months ago. Yes, because as mandated by you (the gov’t) I have to recalculate my indirect cost rate every year. The indirect cost has changed from 10 months ago, therefore the budget breakdown looks different.
It’s also a 4 year grant. There is no way to know what personnel costs will be in year 3. Also the laboratory will change their prices.
What these people need to know is that I will complete the work as specified for the amount specified.
I totally sympathize with you about the ever-changing hoop jumping that reviewers require.
For future costs, doesn’t your organization have an estimated cost growth? Mine has a standard formula for labor and another for materials.
Oh I can, and do, estimate it. But it will be wrong once we get to the end. Because the estimate is just an estimate. Who knows what my pay rate will actually be in 3 years and what our indirect cost will be? Will the GSA per diem rates change? Will fuel prices change? So all this jumping through hoops to make it accurate down to the penny is just stupid.
But I will pretend and jump through their hoops. Then when I get the money I will complete the tasks and they can argue with accounting about the indirect cost rate being different
Yep. And they probably won’t let you put a management reserve into the proposal to cover that risk, either.
The worst is that by the time the program ends, the people you’re trying to explain to will be different than the ones who agreed to the initial plan. So you end up trying to defend their organization’s past choices.
Learned today that many of our building’s security guards are convinced I hate them. I know that my sarcasm and general disappointment with humanity sneaks through in my voice sometimes but man… My co-worker, who used to be with the security department, assured the guy “No, Frank doesn’t hate you. He just gets frustrated at all the stupidity.” That department has ridiculous turnover, hence no institutional memory of the building, and a serious lack of training.
Example: when there’s a medical emergency up in the office tower, security is supposed to call me, and I ground one of the three freight elevators, so that the EMS team can be whisked right upstairs upon arrival. When one of the tenants called for medical attention last week, one of the New Girls in the security office accessed the elevator system herself and grounded all three freight elevators, stranding our staff and contractors all over the place. Of course, she didn’t tell anyone, so I began getting calls from staff and contractors asking why they couldn’t get a cab anywhere in the building. When asked why she thought one ambulance’s worth of medics would need three elevators simultanously (one of which doesn’t go to that floor), “Oh, I though that’s what I was supposed to do. It isn’t?”
Minor-ish incident for sure, but stuff like that happens every frikkin’ day lately. Apologies if I sound like I’m dealing with particularly dim kindergarteners when I call the security office, folks.
As someone very close to a 30 year security manager they are well trained but it’s hard to untrain dumbassery.
… and despite what the office drones think, security does not deal with overflowing waste bins. They are not going to hunt down someone that parked over the line in the parking lot. They do not care that you are triggered because some homeless guy walked passed the building. They are not responsible for fixing the fan in the stairwell.
Are security guards complete morons? Yeah most of the time. But then again, so are most office workers about what security does.
Agreed. There are plenty of ways to alert our department about things that need fixing: there’s a phone number to call, or they can do it on their desktop computer, or there’s an app to easily submit requests. Naturally, we have a handful of tenants who instead phone security for a plugged toilet, it’s too hot in their premises, they got a paper cut… And for whatever reasons, the guards won’t remind them of how this works, they write down the issue with invariably incomplete information, and then pass it along to us to decode.
Because that’s not their job. If I call you and say, “Veryfrank, the Heisenfram resonator needs recalabrating.” I’m sure you’ll write it up the bast you can and pass it on, but that’s not on you. That’s on me for not calling the Lab Techs.
Well, technically, it’s on you for making shit up, but yeah, you should have made it up at the Lab techs.