New and Unimproved Workplace Rants

Depending on how your local storage is configured, the delay is one-time & thereafter the doc is local. And your local copy should autoupdate when somebody else modifies it between your accesses.

PITA they sprung this on you all semi-unannounced. But you’ll probably find it’s pretty transparent and convenient once you crawl over the learning hump.

I would not want to install Intune on a personal device[1], because all of the sudden it becomes a company device. To me, it would be a signal that they don’t want me to check my work email when I’m not at work.

My work email is handled by an MS Exchange cluster. One or more of those servers has a setting where I can’t check email using imap. When my phone happens to hit one of the bad servers I get an “authentication denied” message from Thunderbird. Oh well, I guess no work email for me right now. I’m sure if it was important that I get work email away from my desk, they would fix it.


  1. I know sometimes it isn’t much choice because the alternative is collecting change on an overpass, with the knowledge your personal phone is intact. ↩︎

Good to know! It seemed to be working as you described today.

Exactly!! To IT’s credit, they pretty much said that in their email introducing this, noting that it gives the company the ability to delete anything it deems “too sensitive.”

We have an employee at work we are sponsoring for an H-1B visa and he’s at that final stage where normally we’d be ready to file for PERM Residency (Green Card). This employee asked me months ago if we were ready to move foward, but here’s the problem, due to budget considerations, management decided to cease all sponsorships. If managers want to keep their H-1B employees, they need to petition our CFO for an exception.

I encouraged our manager to tell his employee the company didn’t intend on continuing his sponsorship months ago when he first started asking about moving forward. I directed him to his management team, but they told me the intended to tell him sponsorship was coming to an end 90 days before his current visa expires, which I thought was a crummy thing to do. He should have been told months ago so he would have as much time as possible to find another employer willing to sponsor him.

We’re close to the 90 day mark, and the manager wants me to tell the employee we’re not sponsoring him. I told him in the most polite, professional manner possible, to fuck off. This is your employee, ceasing sponsorship was a management level decision, so you need to tell him. On the bright side, I think the employee may have found another job. He asked me how long his insurance would cover him if he left the company in the middle of October. That’s not a question someone asks unless they think they’re leaving soon.

Walked in from taking out the trash, to hear my coworkers having a friendly debate over the difference between “escort” and “whore.”

In their defense, I could see that sort of nit-picking fitting in 'round here, in a way.

Well, I hope you set them straight!

(What was the consensus, by the way?)
I used to get to my classes early just to hear what my (college) students were talking about. Never anything boring…

I vote for “escort” = “dinner no sex” and “whore” = “sex and probably no dinner”.

As long as they weren’t talking about it because you were taking out the trash.

About ten years ago, my agency put in electronic timeclocks that people were going to be required to use with their thumbprints. (I actually decided to take a promotion out of the union to avoid being subjected to this system.)

The system was very buggy. The administrative assistant in my area could do overrides in case someone’s thumbprint did not register (so it looked like they never clocked in or clocked out). One day she did an override for herself, and the person in charge of implementing the timeclock system decided she was committing time fraud, and fired her for the offense. A few weeks later, the whole system failed and was subsequently abandoned. And the person in charge of implementing the system resigned and left the agency. What a complete clusterfuck. :roll_eyes:

My employer suddenly discontinued merit pay increases yesterday on account of unforeseen expenses and declining revenues. During a previous downturn in I believe 2008, they instead chose to discontinue a 2% 401K match for 1-2 years. I personally think the latter was a better move but can see the rationale.