I’ve explained before just how bad the phishing attempts are at my school district. Today it was “You’re password expires TODAY!. Click on this link.” which is totally not how my district does it. Of course it was from an external site but in the email they assured us not to worry, that it was actually from my district. Thing is, they used the formal official name for my district which no one ever uses - not even the district themselves. Reported the phish attempt and they said it wasn’t a real attempt but rather a test the district wrote and good job on me detecting it.
Interesting timing, we had a simulated phising email blast at work today too! This one was impressive due to all the correct spelling and grammar…but it appeared to be a notification from Apple regarding a full iCloud account. To me, that made it glaringly obvious…who uses their work email for something like that??? (I know, probably the same ones who keep using the company’s guest WiFi to watch YouTube all day.)
I’m not actually sure why my company hired me. Like sure, I have all these skills and knowledge and the company definitely does this work that interests me and they definitely needed more people and they met most of my demands during hiring and it looks amazing for my career… On paper, it’s great. In practice…they still don’t actually use any of my skills or knowledge and barely give me any work, let alone work at my level.
So I don’t know what they want me for.
I’m not content to sit around and do nothing or push paperwork, and feeling this undervalued - nevermind their collective poor communication skills - is making me seriously think I need out. I’m trying to be patient because there’s an accreditation I will be able to get, but I don’t believe the shitty work environment will change once I get it.
Also:
Dear Boss, no, I won’t “forward you” the email I already sent you twice because you still haven’t read it. Outlook has a search feature, use it. I’m neither your secretary nor your mother and you’re a grown-ass man.
When I first hired in (1999), there was one senior engineer that got one of the junior engineers who was “good with computers” to print out his emails. It happened roughly once a month, whenever someone called to ask if he’d reviewed their email, yet.
At least it isn’t that bad! But these guys (it’s a couple of people guilty of this) do get a lot of emails and it seems they don’t have any automatic filters, so it’s just 4782368 UNREAD and they only want to read what’s immediately at the top of their inbox. It’s so fucking frustrating. Search my name, search the project number, search by day of the week… So many ways to get to the email in question.
Nevermind that they seem to think they need the email to get to a task in a database when, in reality, you could just log into the database and click on the inbox there and see all tasks.
This company stalled in 1994.
I always thought I could start a business training Old People to use their PCs. Now that I’ve seen how much Tech Support Hose my elderly mom needs, and how batshit some of the situations she manages to get into, I’d slit my wrists if I was dealing with even a handful of older trainees.
So I guess my newest idea, training all these “Email Challenged Execs”, would result in the same: bleeding out while some CEO is yelling "I don’t WANT to learn, I just want some minion to do it FOR ME!"
Yeah I know what that’s like.
I’ve been at my company for just about three years to the day. For the first couple years everything was fine and I was busy doing stuff that seemed like what they hired me for, and yet something always seemed “off” about it (I’ve started a whole series of threads about it over the years).
For the second half of last year, I had ZERO client work to do. I had a bunch of client projects that were supposed to start, but then they changed their mind for one reason or another. And we kept having layoffs through that period (up to the CEO level), but for some reason they kept me around.
A couple months back I got on a new client project at a big bank. It’s all just processing paperwork, tracking shit in Excel, and chasing down executive status updates. And for about a month our main client never spoke with us so we just invented bullshit work to do to look busy. Like we would have a meeting with some people and then spend an hour typing up and circulating “minutes” to the meeting.
Then since the client couldn’t figure out what they wanted us to do, they shifted us over to another team that was processing a lot more paper for some compulsive idiot who would work until 3am every day and made us work through Memorial Day weekend.
Now we finished that bullshit and we are back with the first team, but with a new team leader from my company whose only qualification seems to be a senior executive at the client is a former partner from our firm and worked with him in the past.
What I should be doing because that’s what I used to do both at my current company and for years prior is help you build a system to manage and automate all this bullshit paperwork you are processing. Not actually file it for you. So it makes me ask, why the fuck as a company are we doing this?
The answer is that for all our fancy offices and pretentious parties, the nth-tier consulting firm I work for is little more than a glorified temp agency for back and middle office operations at banks and other financial services companies.
And to make matters worse, for people at my level, my whole performance and comp seems to be tied to my ability to go around the office begging for scraps of revenue to have assigned to me so I can make my “number”. Like what the fuck sort of business model is that? I’m part of a “practice”. Why doesn’t that practice have salespeople and partners who get evaluated on their ability to sell X amount of work to sustain and grow the consultants and managers who work in that practice?
And not only is it impossible for me to make my “numbers” because we don’t sell enough work and the work we sell isn’t big enough, the company seems to have plenty of other goalposts to move so people can’t get promoted (except for those who seem to be up the right person’s ass, which I and maybe even my boss clearly aren’t).
The amount of “playing work” my company does, forming little “community groups” (which we are evaluated on) to do everything from pretend to track other people’s sales to organize drag queen bingo night for Pride month is asinine.
Like it makes me furious that not only is this my job, after almost 30 years of work I still get stuck in these sort of jobs at these sort of companies.
What happens if instead of thinking, “My company” you say this entire post (maybe out loud!) with “This bullshit company at which I currently work” does that help re-frame things?
ETA: I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic; that does indeed sucketh mightily. But … it could just be a temporary situation, perhaps?
With all the reorg over the past year and the fact that its all project-based client work, I imagine it’s definitely “temporary”…one way or another.
It’s actually not a bad place to work. People are easy to work with. I get to work remotely, except when I feel like going to our very nice Manhattan offices. Which is part of the problem, I think. It’s “comfortable” but ultimately doesn’t feel like the company is really growing or doing anything interesting.
One of our tenants broke their key off in the door to their storage room last night. We dispatched the locksmith, who had to disassemble the lock to get the piece of key out and diagnosed thathe’d need to replace the assembly. This resulted in this actual conversation between their manager and our head of security, who oversees the locksmithing services here.
“We expedited this quote from the locksmith for you, here’s what it’ll cost to replace the damaged cylinder.”
“No, that’s way too much, we won’t approve that. Can you have him just do the work and we’ll see later what we’ll approve?”
“No, this is what the repairs will cost.”
“Can’t you just make a copy of the key?”
“We can’t because for some reason you only had one key to that room, and he can’t copy a broken one.”
“There’s another key, I know Security has been able to access that room.”
“They were using the building master key.”
“Can we get a copy of that?”
“No, we’re not giving you a master key to the building.”
“Well, can you just copy the part of the master key that opens our door?”
I have a dent in my forehead from all the hysterical headdesking I’ve done today.
Unless the locksmith had to destroy the keyway part removing it, he should easily be able to measure the notches to cut a new key from scratch.
That’s just locksmithing 101.
I believe he had to do so.
There’s a thread about an employee with a manager who denies her work assignments and doesn’t respond to messages. I admire and really respect the OP’s patience in putting up with this disjointed relationship. I’ve sometimes been much more reactive in my emails where I come off like a mugger unfortunately.
Someone took my phone charger from my office. I hate people.
Those little thieves ought to lose fingers over a thing like that!
A small thing, but it baffles me—many of my coworkers don’t realize you can add links to many useful things on web pages. I shouldn’t be seeing email addresses with no links!
Our project management process demands a particular meeting take place before finalizing a project. This should be done by the project managers, but the reality is that engineering schedules it when the project is ready for it (small team, not that much of a problem).
Except…
The Project Manager asked in last week’s meeting whether the meeting was necessary. For this week’s meeting, another Project Manager didn’t even show up.
It’s entirely performative, but “required” by the PM team.
I’m wondering how best to complain about this so I never have to coordinate this bullshit meeting ever again.
Sometimes processes need to be revised & updated … what if you said it like that?
I have, about so much in this company over the past year. I feel that they are stuck in the 90s and I find a lot of the processes painful.
They’re all just so used to it, they don’t see the problem. I think almost all of them have essentially only worked at this one company. I’ve worked in three other companies and have dealt with better methodologies.
I’ve had success at recommending small improvements to forms and templates, but I haven’t tried eliminating a form and entire procedural step yet. I’ve been trying to push for a modernization overhaul, but that takes a budget and time. There’s vague interest, but there’s no traction yet. They’re hyper efficient with astoundingly inefficient procedures, and the corporate metrics don’t see the pain points at all.
I do love the work but it’s so frustrating to try to do here.
Nice work if you can get it. I HATE applying for jobs.
(Fortunately for me, I seem to have managed it. Strong union, no mandatory retirement age. At sixteen years, it’s the longest job I’ve had in my 55 years in the workforce.)