I’m a benefits administrator, and sometimes I’ve been in the situation of asking for documentation the employee likely provided years ago. In our case, we switched our HRIS a few years back, and dependent documents didn’t migrate over to the new system. When the employee makes a benefit change, I ask for that documentation if I see we don’t have a copy. There are other times where the employee’s benefit change was approved without them providing the proper documentation. i.e. My predecessor was not too diligent about getting all the proper documentation necessary to cover dependents.
That said, asking for anything more than a copy of your marriage license is ridiculous. They don’t need to see a tax return or something showing you have joint ownership with her.
I was hired to do X. Explicitly, the entire reason I agreed to join this company.
I need training to help me fully do X. I’m good, but there’s more to learn.
Training is being denied by my company because training is “discretionary” and because some subsidiary in another fucking country can’t manage their finances, discretionary costs are under a freeze.
There is a particular specific and nuanced learning opportunity coming up that really only comes around every couple of years at best, that will absolutely help me do X better.
What documentation can an employee providing proving a negative? A marriage license, utility bill, mortgage, etc., etc., doesn’t show that I didn’t get a divorce the day before yesterday. An employee might also get a divorce in the future after I’ve already vetted their marriage. Do I require proof every year?
A marriage license is good enough for the government. It should be good enough for an employer.
After 20 years at my employer my skills have recognized and I have ascended to the ranks of middle management! Turns out what I do now is have meetings to talk about work. I don’t have time to actually work, I’m too busy talking about it.
Can you send me a calendar invite about this? Make it biweekly until we get to the bottom of it.
My not so much rant, as much as just question:
What’s with the people leaving their cars in the work parking lot for weeks at a time? Currently you have to pay $55/month for parking (thanks stupid state laws!), so I actually don’t really begrudge people taking full advantage of it.
I do really wonder about the motorcycle that’s been in the car lot for many months now. When construction was blocking the motorcycle lot, I parked my bike in the car lot, and got an official warning within hours.
At least other departments moved the boats that were in the parking lot, which unhoused people were using to sleep in. That actually went on for quite some time, and wasn’t a problem until some of the unhoused people started harassing others.
A few of my co-workers have done so while on vacations. Sometimes it is just a leaving from work thing - “I’m going to leave my car here and my wife is going to pick me up.” But for one guy it was because he was a hoarder who had a (newish, superficially well-maintained) truck jam-packed full of every imaginable bit of junk and he had no garage for it. So he parked it at work while going on vacation and covered the bed with a weighted tarp to keep the rain off. He didn’t want to leave it on the street for weeks where some rando might pick through it and walk off with a dollar store heating tray or some such. It was just sad.
We shrugged, shook our heads and went along with it. We have plenty of parking spaces relative to active employees at my particular site, so it is was never a space issue.
Not really a rant, but a sad and puzzling thing. One of my company’s senior (and I would say much-loved) managers passed away unexpectedly before Christmas. For the longest time, the door to his office was kept locked. It was slowly cleaned out by other managers, and also his direct reports, over the course of January, and now holds his replacement. I met with the new manager today, and I was a little shocked to see the previous manager’s personal effects (desk widgets, desk contents, wall art, etc.) sitting in piles around the office. Even his sunglasses were thrown on top of one pile. I’m wondering why these things weren’t boxed up for his family, who all live nearby.
Congrats!
(I’m working under the same job title as when I started at this place nearly 18 years ago, with the added responsibility of holding a couple of weekly and biweekly meetings, at least one of which could definitely be an email.)
I have actively avoided any sort of managerial position. I don’t want anyone reporting to me, I sure as fuck don’t want to manage their timesheet (I haven’t done mine yet, boss doesn’t complain til Monday noon) or, worse, their development plan and I don’t want to sit in meetings that talk more about concepts of plans of work than actually just getting things done. I’ve turned down at least 3 solid opportunities (and several suggestions)
I am a technical lead, a damn near expert in stupidly niche subject matter, I can direct process and plans and technical reviews to get complex projects and disparate disciplines to work together on time (budgets aren’t my problem) and get things done (this, in spite of the alleged “project manager” leading the project, not because of…hence why I don’t care about budges…) but I prefer to do it as the Official Pain in The Ass Who You Know Is Right rather than any “management” position.
It’s kinda sorta working for me. My company sucks and it’s clear I don’t fit in well but I do like the work itself.
The email was ultimately about combining two teams I’ve never heard of under one manager. I got the impression the two teams originated in different companies that were purchased by the behemoth that is our parent organization. I don’t really know why I needed to be informed about this, I guess it makes senior managers feel good to be seen to be Doing Something.
Not sure which thread this belongs under but it’s a work email so I’ll drop it here. I received an email through our website, so the person didn’t know my email. The entire text of the message was:
I work in the notification section of Ancestry Genealogy.We require that you reply to this email.
Very, very long story short - I wound up paying $200 out of pocket just to get a two-month overdue bill paid, because our project’s purchasing rep is a clueless fucking idiot.
I just had someone yell at me for not responding to his “many messages”
Apparently he’s been calling my old desk phone (I haven’t physically had a phone on my desk for many years) and leaving voicemails.
I just called that number and it “rings” four times and goes to my voicemail. Which tells you that I will be out of the office from “February 15 to 22”
That’s a voicemail message from 2015. When I came back from that vacation our office had been converted from cubicles to open floor plan and no desk phones were connected in our new desks.
So someone has my desk phone number saved somewhere and calls it. Even though no one has had a desk phone except a handful of Administrative Assistants and the front reception/security station.
Our IT folks still have the Meridian phone system with thousands of lines (not extensions, actual ANIs*) active with voicemails. No one knows how to reset a voicemail password.
They “don’t have the funding” to decommission the landlines and voicemails. So we are paying hundreds of thousands a year for something we don’t use. Because that’s another budget line that gets renewed every year (actually increased, because landlines are getting more expensive).
This fucked up logic is from a Director of Finance and a VP of IT.
Heh. We were starting to run out of phone numbers for our Teams system. I started doing some searching, and soon was searching on the AT&T site. I found about a hundred phone lines we’d been paying for since 2008, that went NOWHERE and did NOTHING. Got them converted over to our internet phone system, and started using those for new employees.
Conversely - At one of our offices about 10 years ago, we were being very efficient and we removed all the physical phone equipment, Meridian devices, etc., and converted over everyone to voice-over-IP for about 2000 people. We did an amazing job, and were proud… Until we the hearing-impared person in one of the offices asked what happened to their copper line that no longer worked. He had a special phone that required a land-line for voice transcription, which wouldn’t work on voice-over-IP. Had to re-do some of the physical infrastructure to put that line back in for about six months until we found a solution. (Nobody had ever talked about their needs before. We were in the clear, it was a failure of management).
I’ve been at a new cubicle for about two months now. There’s a phone jack, but no phone. And I told my supervisor I don’t want one. If I need to talk with someone, I’ll use Teams (first choice) or my personal cell (second choice).
We have WebEx-based desk phones where I work; you can dial a number from the computer, which is nice, but it won’t transfer anything after the initial number (for example, the code for a Teams meeting). The only people who have cameras and/or microphones on their computers are managers.
Lately, the computer has started playing my ringtone whenever my deskphone rings. I can definitely hear it when I’m not in my office, so yay I guess?
I was so pissed yesterday and then I couldn’t even find this thread to rant in it!
So the PTB have decided we need yet another timesheet system. Of course they rolled it out and it is so full of bugs that you can spend hours in (more than one!) Q&A sessions to find out that you have to submit a ticket.
My friend told me a shorter way to fix my issue, by contacting this one guy and he fixed it. But until that happened I was losing my shit.
The issue was:
While working for this company for a zillion years (ok, 29) I have never ever ever had to punch a timeclock. I’m a senior mechanical designer, and several years back all of us at this level were switched from salaried to hourly. Under this new system some of us were classified as the type of hourly people that DO punch timeclocks. Managers were required to correct our timesheets when we inevitably did not punch our time in correctly. Some managers could not even see their people. Vacation requests did not roll over into the new system. It was a huge clusterfuck and wasted a lot of people’s time.
You have my sympathy. I’m still getting used to our new timesheet app, and it doesn’t have bugs, it’s just different enough to require a lot of searching.
Right now I have to come to the office a minimum of one day a week on a particular day. We’ve been doing this since last year, and it was supposed to provide us with an opportunity to collaborate. Do I collaborate with my team? No, because I do that every other day of the week. So it’s just an excuse for me to go talk to recruiters, learning, and other areas of HR whom I don’t really work with directly.
It turns out one particular team here in HR has a habit of not coming in. They’re not taking time off, they just decide they have better things to do then come into the office like the rest of us. Instead of addressing the team that’s doing this directly, our director announced nobody can miss our collaboration day without using their PTO. i.e. Next time I think I have something communicable, I have to either use my PTO or come into the office and risk becoming Patient Zero.
When you have an individual or a small group flouting the rules, you should first address it with them specifically before making it everyone’s problem.
