New and Unimproved Workplace Rants

The BBQ Pit
1081

Two months ago, our team from one side of the floor to another. At that time I lost my cubicle partner (cue absolutely NO tears - he’s a jerk). We shared a phone.
Now, to ME, when people no longer share a cube, they shouldn’t share a phone.
It took a month to have them split the phone. Incorrectly.
My ex-cubemate now has two phones assigned to him and I have none. For a month.

I try to be nice and not call clients when I am in office, as instead of calling me back at the number I leave on their voicemails, they call back the number that comes up on caller ID (we’re not supposed to *67 our calls), but I’m at the point where it’s interfering with my job.

Every week I send the “Fixit” form to the right people. Every week I’m told they’re working on it. How friggin’ hard can this be?

1082

A logistics company by the name of DSC Logistics fired me today despite only starting to work there today. Actually, it was 30 minutes I was in the place before I got kicked out. The recruiter gave me a lift to Rosemont (at the CTA station), and that was it. As we speak, I’m at the Harold Washington Library at computer #37 on the third floor just making this minor rant.

What happened? Bullshit happened. The IT director (who was nearly unintelligible when speaking- he was mostly mumbling), gave me a mini interview, and asked a couple of questions, one about my background, another about my experience with Active Directory, and I assume that was it. Before and after, he talked about the company and what they do there, and then afterwards, he set me up on an empty desk to wait for 10 minutes. Afterwards, he told me to get my coat, and walk out. No work, no job, and no day to prove myself.

Like who’s at fault here? Guy couldn’t give me a chance, I was prepared to go into the trenches and get started, but I guess he didn’t think so. I’m utterly disappointed, and I’m not sure I’m going to do now.

1083

Wow. Did you drive over his dog in the parking lot, maybe?

1084

Sounds more like an interview than “employed”.

1085

That’s what I was thinking. But, if the guy mumbled as badly as ultimate11 says, then the recruiter also misunderstood.

1086

I didn’t drive. That could have happened, but only if the Pace driver was negligent along my route- yeah.

The recruiter, as I said, also couldn’t hear too much from the manager, so we were both at a loss as to what he said. I would have worn a formal suit if I was going to be interviewed, but the recruiter told me to put on something business casual before the day.

Either way, I’m going to give myself a week or so until I get back to searching (again), at this point I’m really worried I might have to work at retail for a year before I get started with my career.

1087

I’m confused. Going in, were you expecting it to be an interview or had they interviewed you previously and this was now your first day reporting for work?

1088

Ugh, just because the managers have assigned me to support a product doesn’t mean I know anything about it or have any experience/history with it. Sorry.

I pit the corporate practice of throwing you into the deep end with zip training. I don’t mind learning on the job, but it irks me when coworkers instantly assume that I’m the guru of whatever-it-is.

1089

Do you work where I work? That’s the same thing they do here.

1090

Dear Program Manager,

Telling me that we have lost one of our vacation months* because the customer is upset about our team being short-handed is bad enough.
Telling me that we’re not losing money, despite my hourly rate being reduced to keep the new rotation schedule “salary-neutral”, is insulting. Working 10 months to earn what used to take 9 months to earn IS a pay cut, no matter how much you try to church it up.
You get paid the big bucks to, among other things, explain reality to the customer. Reality, in this case, is that your team is pissed, and have already begun to find other employment because this change was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

  • Your disgruntled employee
    *I work overseas, and we have (well, had) a 90 days on/30 days off rotation schedule. One 30-day vacation is paid, the other two are not paid.
1091

Let me tell you, being THAT Doper got me through a really rough time! I’m glad I had you guys to rant to. I still check the obituaries to see if former Bosshole’s wife finally got fed up and hit him upside the head with a skillet. So far no luck. :smiley:

So rant away, kiz! We’re listening.

1092

My previous supervisor made each engineer in the department responsible for handling orders pertaining to specific suppliers. My current supervisor has deviated from this somewhat, making each engineer responsible for certain types of products (i.e., one person specializes in motorized assemblies, one person is responsible for electrical components, one person is responsible for filtration units, etc.). There are still people in customer service who remember the old system, and think that I know every single little detail about my previous assigned supplier. I certainly remember details about the parts that I dealt with…but no, I do not know why the supplier’s draftsman decided to use such a tight tolerance for that particular dimension. >.<

1093

Pokes thread with a stick

I’m currently working as a waitress/barista in a little independent cafe, which is normally OK. I’ve been there about 3 months. I wanted something low stress and part time, to keep things ticking over while I try and get other life things sorted out, and it’s generally fit the bill. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s really not ticking either the low stress or part time boxes; what shifts I have over the next week have changed at least once a day for the last week, and despite only working ‘4 days a week’ I only get one day off in the next 10. Probably.

This is because waitress #2 is going away for a week on Wednesday, and the chef (who has a fairly serious health issue that randomly flares up every few years) is currently kind of unwell, but still just about able to work; if he does go off sick, the cafe basically can’t serve proper food until he’s back as, with waitress #2 away, there’ll just be me and the boss, which is insufficient people to cook, make drinks, run the till and clean up. In the hopes of helping said chef get well, he’s getting almost all the available days off before co-irker goes away, which means I just get to squeeze one in. This is a little annoying, but understandable.

What is a problem is that the boss is panicking about potentially having days when he can sell only coffee, cake, and maybe soup (especially as there’s a new chain coffee shop opening round the corner, plus last time the chef got ill he wound up in hospital for two weeks), and is responding to the stress by picking fault with everyone else, while messing up more himself, and generally being a total pain in the neck to work with.

Getting angry at your staff about not looking happy enough is not a thing that works.

Getting annoyed at waitress #2 for not being able to make coffees to an acceptable standard, after in no way teaching her how to do it, or even telling her what your standards are, is also not a thing that improves the situation.

1094

My mini-rant for today: Dear coworker, there is no need to put “re:” in the subject line of every email you send. The fact that it’s the subject line implies the “re:” for you. You would think that the fact that all responses to your emails now read as “Re: re; That thing I want to talk about” would clue you in, but I guess not. Minor annoyance.

My not-so-minor gripe for today…well, not really a gripe as it doesn’t affect me directly…but…ugh, I’m inadvertently aware that someone’s getting laid-off. I shouldn’t know it, but my boss put in an email, knowing full well I have full access to his account. (One of my jobs is to go through and screen things for him…it’s not something he would have forgotten about so I don’t know what he was thinking. I did notice later he went back and deleted the relevant emails.) It’s not really any skin off my nose, but I hate knowing that the ax is looming over my coworker who hasn’t a clue, and it’d be my own job at risk if I was to give her a heads-up. And I don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen, but my guess is this Friday since they were going to wait until after the holidays and well…

This is why I’m not the boss.

1095

It’s difficult to rant when you’re too exhausted and beaten down to begin with :confused:

I have three days off this week because I worked New Year’s. Other employers would let us bank those holidays – in the past I’d end up getting another week of vacation because I’d save them. New Employer? Nope. They don’t want us banking them probably because of that reason.

OTOH I have six weeks’ vacation this year because of my “senior” status so I can’t complain.

I have a feeling things are going to hit the fan when the annual employee survey comes out as in “New Employer couldn’t see this coming when they bought us out???” Because I’m not the only one feeling this way. When customers start commenting that the help looks bedraggled and unhappy, that should be a huge clue…I’d think.

1096

A year ago I got involved in an environmental issue that ended up taking 3 months to resolve and required near daily communications with 3 federal agencies and the health and environmental agencies of 6 states. Plus every other person that decided they wanted to be involved.

It was a communications nightmare. Which we learned from. I wrote a plan and got it approved by all the involved agencies. It’s streamlined. It lays out responsibilities and procedures.

And now my boss has apparently forgotten all of that. Twice in the last month he’s asked me to add someone to the communications list.

Hell no. I’m not going back down that road. Today I asked for a meeting with boss and Big Boss. If they want this to become a nightmare then they can do it with open eyes.

I ended my conversation with the boss “I will send an email to you and Big Boss objecting to doing it that way which I will print out and nail to my office wall. When the communications become a problem I will point to the email and say “not my problem”.” He laughed and walked out, but I’m serious.

1097

I love politics that ensue from silly organizational structural decisions. Case in point:

We are a data warehouse and distribution company but we also provide online software for management of said data on a subscription basis. Last year, upper management got the “brilliant” idea to divide the business analyst teams in two: Some BA’s working on data collection, and some BA’s working on distribution. It’s been stupid because aside from a lot of finger pointing (that’s your job, no it’s yours) and confusion, the net result has been that the collection BA’s work only on requirements for UI changes, and the distribution BA’s get assigned to work on everything else, which is:

developing and documenting in detail brand new solutions
documenting database changes
documenting data processing changes
all communication with external customers
Being the product SME

Okay, so we’ve sort of settled into that even though nobody much likes it. But in the last few months, one of the middle managers figured out a way to convince upper management to give her ownership of a line of our products and implement this new-fangled thing called “product management”. (I’m actually more in favor of this approach.) But they didn’t change the old organizational structure, just tacked this new product management on top of it. So now we have a power struggle between this manager and mine. My manager “owns” all of the data distribution activities for the same product line that the other manager is now in charge of - and feels strongly that she owns both collection and distribution activities because hers is a more holistic approach. Upper management seems completely oblivious to the friction. My manager’s director is protecting her, and the other manager’s director is protecting HER!

1098

New team lead thinks that lying to team members is a good idea :rolleyes: She’s told each of us that everybody else is writing meeting minutes. We’ve known each other for three months, we all use the same shared repository for documents, and I’ve actually got more minutes than the other three put together. And having the person who is explaining something be the one who takes minutes on the explanation is duuuuuuuuumb, FFS.

She also tried to rant at me for “not having given proper warning” that I’d be off last Friday when 1) I’d given warning (verbally and in writing), not my fault she didn’t read the mail, and 2) there has actually never been a protocol established for how to communicate those things.

1099

I start Monday morning with another voicemail that takes a full minute to get to the point, after which the caller apparently delegates the task of reading off the return contact number to someone who is simultaneously conducting a livestock auction and giving a blowjob.

1100

I had a team force me to do meeting minutes. There were ‘factions’ in the group. All they did was fight, snipe, and bite back at each other. Meeting after meeting, the same thing. First time they asked me to do the minutes, I did a transcript (I can type as fast as they can talk). I left names off but put in the entire thread of bickering.

  1. I was never asked to take minutes again.
  2. Minutes were shared with upper management. They were furious with the team (but not me)
  3. My boss called to tell me it was the funniest thing she’d read in a long time and that she knew exactly who spoke even though they weren’t named.

4… and most important… The bickering stopped and we got some damn work done.

Seems the Muckies were not happy with what they read.