Poor factory, I feel like that pump should get a super-sized Donald Duck bandaid and a pat for being a good boy 
Dear Software Provider,
I have been working through your online training and so far so good, but it should would be nice if you provided the correct training documents in the download for the most complicated section of the process. I do not have X set of documents, I have Y set of documents and there is apparently no copies of X sets of documents on your website.
You suck.
Sincerely,
TheFaerie
I swear I love my job, but there are just moments that just stun me.
Perhaps someone can explain to me the purpose of sending an e-mail to me and two other co-workers (all on the “To:” line), asking me to ask one of the co-workers on the list to provide information on a fairly generic form, with no context or backstory given?
30 minutes later, I figured out the reason / purpose of the document, but considering I had no advance knowledge of the transaction, and that the co-worker with whom I was supposed to consult replied to the original e-mail (there were multiple e-mails sent out by me upon receiving the request, trying to understand what was occurring) with the information requested, the inclusion of me in the whole conversation seemed superfluous.
Am I middle-management? I feel like middle-management.
Sigh. This week is Inventory Week. Enough Said.
And of course, because somebody out there hates us, Halloween arrived yesterday. As did 7 pallets of other stuff. And we couldn’t work yesterday’s truck, so that was also sitting around on the dock. And today’s truck was there, too, even though there was some doubt as to whether it should be.
So our dock which is generally mildly claustrophobic was majorly overcrowded today. And we were understaffed to deal with it.
And my job all day was to hang price tags. Which is no big for the first few hours, and then becomes tedious and exasperating. And for extra fun, the lion’s share of tags were post-reset tags, and the re-set isn’t occurring till next week. So I had to go hunting for where things were (and make good judgments on which things were worth looking for).
At least Boss seemed perkier today-- Sunday, she seemed to be mad at everyone in the department, and while I’d agree she had a right to be exasperated with some of them, I couldn’t see that her attitude was improving the whole situation.
If you kick the can down the road too many times, eventually, you will run out of road.
We are now at the end of the cul-de-sac and half a foot away from a house. We have to decide whether to leave the can there and litter or to pick it up and throw it in the recycling bin. We have passed the point where we can pretend there’s no house there and “What if we give it a teensy tiny kick?” is not good decision making.
Busy as fuck, on 3 different conversations at once and trying to research an issue.
Ask co-worker to help someone I can’t get to and don’t know much about their issue.
Co-worker starts explaining how I can do it.
I tell co-worker I’m slammed solid and getting frustrated, please help this person.
Co-worker keeps “explaining”.
I ask co-worker if this is a ‘no’ to helping that person.
Co-worker refuses to help the person, thus refusing to help me.
:mad:
I just saw a customer email the other day where she put a little cartoon of cats underneath all of her contact information. I didn’t realize people were still doing that.
Former co-worker had a quote from L. Ron Hubbard at the very bottom of his signature (was fairly lengthy, so I was surprised anyone read it all).
His boss made him take it down after someone complained.
Looks like this coworker can only process one fact at a time (“I’m slammed and I don’t have time” OR “I don’t have adequate know-how”). And chose to only hear the one that they could “solve” without taking over a call. :dubious:
Next time, maybe just say “I don’t have time to do this one,” and leave it at that.
Eh, the very first thing I said on the issue made it clear that our team is responsible for the issue, and he’s one of the two people most qualified to resolve it. He then proceeded to ignore everything I said and convince himself, based on his own reasoning, not the facts, that it was “way out of our support”. I sent the IM conversation to our manager expressing my frustration with his refusal to listen or help.
Guy is one of those people who gets their own ideas stuck in their head sometimes and keeps pressing them over and over, oblivious to the anger of people around them. Pretty much what happened here. He decided it had to be stuff we don’t support, despite what I said to the contrary, and spent the conversation convincing himself of that fact.
Flat out refusing to speak to the person and find out what was really going on? That’s a first.
Memo to the crap team “lead” on a project he’s failing to manage at a company with no concept of what project management is:
Dude, I can clamp my mouth shut at the fact that you are not guiding the two newest people in the company (me and a new hire who I’m mentoring) in requirements gathering for this project, because I know how to manage up and coached my mentee to proactively schedule meetings with you to pull your teeth - I mean gather what you know about our requirements, but…
Delegating the job of demo-ing the not-yet-finished product in front of the executive team to our new hire is a real asshole move. You, sir, suck.
I wish I could be a special princess snowflake and show up to work whenever the fuck I wanted to. But I have this thing called a conscience, which combined with other impediments I suffer from called a “work ethic” and “needing money,” do not allow me to do so.
The bitch who was scheduled to show up at 8 this morning still has not shown up. Her tummy is hurting and she wants to make sure the Immodium works before she comes in.
:mad:
Anyone else who pulls this shit as consistently as she does would be fired by now. How she gets away with it I do not know but I am thoroughly sick of it.
Can be dangerous, too. I know a case where the new-hire really impressed the executive team at the demo, and within a year was the project manager. But the new-hire was really smart, and the manager was not – and a jerk besides.
“The customer feels that VA is superior to W”. Feels? Feels, really? It’s motherfucking physics! I feel that the customer is an imbecile!
I guess it’s a good thing the customer and I are nowhere close to each other, because I’m feeling seriously tempted to ensure that the customer feels my hands grabbing him shirt and waist and dragging him to Electricity 101.
(W = VA; there is a little detail about the cosine of the phase but in 99.99999999999% of systems which have not been purposefully designed to be misphased, you can ignore it.)
Co-worker is a nice guy, but an absolute moron. He’s one of the DPS (Digital Production Specialists) who produces courses on Gomo, a web-based learning tool. He provides the links to the course and storyboards for me to check over in QA. My QA reports for him are usually pages long because he overlooks sooooo maaaany things.
In this particular ethics course, all the chapters are out of order, there’s about 20 extra chapters that aren’t in the storyboard, and the chapters that are in the storyboard have slightly different content, which means either the course or the storyboard hasn’t been updated, and I can’t know which. I send him an email explaining I didn’t review the chapters that weren’t in the storyboard. The Project Manager gets pissed at me because she thinks I’m not doing my job. I tell her I’d be glad to do it if I had something to work with. Finally, one of the Instructional Designers sends me a pull key that shows what’s supposed to be extracted from the master storyboard into the course. Next thing I know, the course is correct, matches the storyboard, and has no extra chapters. The DP must have originally linked me to a sandbox version of the master course, where nothing is organized because it only exists so material can be copied from it. Moron.
I told him yesterday the Summary and Exam chapter is missing, which is vital to the course, which needs to be finished by COB today. Still haven’t heard back from him. He probably forgot to put it together and is currently keying it up one finger stroke at a time. Moron.
The reason parts are approved before being released for production is so you can’t go back and make willy-nilly changes, and to force you to do your due diligence before attempting to cut/bend/weld shit together. Skipping that step and then continuously going back to “fix” things you didn’t catch the first time around, puts more work on MY desk. I ain’t got no time for this shit, I just started a massive project that has me planning 60 hours a week for the next two and a half months just to get it installed, not including troubleshooting, transferring assets, proving out capacity, and quality control specs. If I had the time, I’d teach you how to fix your own damn problems…but I don’t.
I found the correct documents, finally. I was supposed to set field A to X and field B to Y. Except that the video guy didn’t tell the user that. Only by freeze framing the view did I see the settings. I then looked at the pdf of the course and it did go through the step on what to pick for fields A and B.
The person making the video didn’t delete the first flubbed attempt to go through the process, and then that same incorrect flubbed attempt was repeated before I got to the actual process.
The process shown in the video is different from the process described in the pdf.
Now I find out that the view settings that are set for the training in the video are different from the ones that are set in the pdf which are different from the settings in the actual training graphic file. And there has been no explanation of what the settings are supposed to be or how to set them if they aren’t correct. :rolleyes:
I will be writing a complaint to the software company. If I can find the right email address to send it to. :smack:
My company moved to a new building about six months ago. The parking garage gate arms have never worked right since we moved in.
Some mornings some of the entrance lanes don’t work. You drive up to the gate and the little sensor box that reads your access card is supposed to beep and open the gate. One morning last week I had to back up out onto the street and try a different lane twice. Fortunately I was early and there was no traffic at that time. I thought if the third time didn’t work I was just going to go home. Turns out it wasn’t just me, by the time most people started showing up traffic was backing up all the way down the street.
What’s even more fun is when the exit lanes don’t work. Yesterday as I was trying to leave the line of cars trying to get out of the garage was backed up all the way to the third level. We all creep our way down to see that there are cones blocking two of the exit lanes on the side I use to leave and the third lane isn’t working properly. People are getting out of their cars, smushing their access cards up against the sensor and holding them there to get the sensor to read the card and open the gate. Then the people are jumping back in their car and trying to get out before the gate comes back down.
I say “Forget this!” and head around to the exit lanes on the other side. It would mean going a few blocks out of my way but I’d rather do that then deal with the malfunctioning gate. Guess what? Two of the three exit lanes on the other side are also coned off. The gate on the third lane is randomly flinging itself up and down. People are making a run for it as soon as the gate starts to go up. I didn’t hear of anyone’s cars getting damaged but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened.
The office manager is aware of the issues but seems powerless to do anything about it. We don’t own the garage, the city does, and it’s up to the city to fix it. Which means it will probably never get fixed unless the CEO’s shiny new car gets damaged by a possessed gate.
My grand boss has me convinced that she has borderline personality disorder. Up until recently, her tendencies weren’t a major concern of mine because she left me alone. But now that is changing, I don’t know what to do.
I’m just grateful that my maternity leave starts this coming Tues.
In the last couple of months, she’s:
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publically badmouthed a project I’ve led along with contractors on my team, accusing of us not being “real” technical experts and doing things “wrong” even though she enthusiastically signed off on the design months ago and implemented it according to plan. When this was pointed out to her, she stared back like a deer in the headlights. It was as if she completely forgot the eleventy billion briefings we gave her prior to us crunching a single number. At no time did she respond to our proposed methods with anything except smiles and hugs. But all of sudden, it’s all wrong and it’s all our fault. Right.
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Her background is in the soft sciences and yet she feels qualified to telling a PhD in statistics that he analyzed data wrong because his results weren’t sexy enough for her liking. It didn’t matter to her how many people in the room told her that she was wrong; she wouldn’t back down. “These findings will expose us politically! You need to relax your criteria and analyze the data again until you find something that makes us look better.” No exaggeration, this is essentially what she told us. A senior executive saying that in a room with non-government personnel. I coulda fucking died.
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When the PhD guy politely explained his methods and his rationale for his portion of our study, my crazy boss said he only did that because I told him to do it. Which was completely untrue and frankly, a gross overestimation of my degree of influence over this project. I guess she thinks I’m such a control freak mastermind that I would step outside my field of expertise and prescribe boneheaded actions to someone else more technically skilled than me, and this person would just go along with that with no complaint or argument…because hey, that’s totally consistent with my reputation in this agency. Not.
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With a straight face, she insists that she is the only one in the agency that knows how to analyze data because she went to Hopkins. This is something she regularly says to people in one-on-one convos, but to say this in a meeting like we’re all supposed to sit there and not disagree with that crap? We have terminal degrees from all over the place and what…none of that matters? Because Hopkins is the only real school? Doesnt this sound like something a person with BPD would say? I’m serious.
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Later, in totally unrelated senior management meeting, out of the blue she started badmouthing my project again and I very firmly told her (in front of everyone) that I found her comments disappointing and surprising, and didn’t feel they was appropriate given the time and place. She tried to defend herself, but I didn’t back down. i kept my tone respectful and professional, though, as evident from encouraging feedback my supervisor gave me later on. If grandbboss was embarrassed it was only because an underling was calling her own her behavior, and she’s not used to that. After this incident, I sent her an email saying it wasn’t my intent to make her feel bad but I was just sticking up for myself and my team. She said some conciliatory things and I thought, good we can put this madness behind us. But no…
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I learned a couple days ago that crazy grandbboss has been gossiping and badmouthing me to my subordinates (they told me), accusing me of embarrassing her in front of everyone and saying that I challenged her technical expertise in a disparaging way. Now even if this was true (which its not…never once did I call out the elephant in the room that she’s an idiot telling non-idiots how to analyze data), she has no business venting about to me to my direct reports. All this time she has been smiling in my face while nursing a grudge so deep that she feels it necessary to undermine the confidence my staff has in me? WTF?
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The latest atrocious thing she’s done happened on Thursday, during my staff retreat. My supervisor and I organized a full agenda, and wanted to reserve the last two hours of the day to strategic planning and group discussion on certain topics. Grandboss decides to crash the meeting and interrupts our plans so that she can start yammering at the staff about…stuff. Stuff only tangentally related to the topics we wanted to cover, and stuff mostly dressed up in criticisms and judgements. Then rather randomly, she asserted that we weren’t scientists, which then only triggered my staff to argue to the contrary, and of course, rather than concede the point so that we could return to some semblance of a constructive discussion, she doubled down. “Not only are yall not scientists, how dare you react with strange faces when I tell you this? its obvious you’re not scientists so accept that.” Almost an hour was spent on this nonsense, resulting in us not accomplishing any of the things we wanted and staff feeling pigeon holed by leadership. Grandboss was like a troll and threadshitter all in one.
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Not to mention, she’s been bullying my supervisor, criticising her every move, rolling her eyes when she asserts herself in meetings, micromanaging her. Even though my boss annoys me, the torment that my grandboss subjects her to has me feeling so sorry for her.
I don’t know what to do about any of this mess. Try to talk it out with grandboss? Complain to great-grandboss? Go on maternity leave for the next 3 months and hope she’s miraculously gotten axed by the time I get back?
I’m going with the last option.
If she brings in a can of strawberries to share with senior staff, DON’T HAVE ANY!
If you HAVE to have some, make sure there are no leftovers. Do this BEFORE the strawberry party is over.