To my employee:
I didn’t say anything when you decided it was OK to randomly take off for 15-20 minutes at a time to pump milk-I understand that you can’t always plan the exact time.
I arranged to have another employee cover you although it meant she sometimes works into her lunch hour so I end up paying her overtime for the coverage. It also means she can’t go out for lunch since she never knows when you might decide to pop off for awhile without notice and I need somebody working.
But where do you get off putting in your timesheet and indicating that you didn’t have a lunch break and wanting to be paid overtime for working 9 hours straight??
You are taking at least an hour’s worth of breaks daily and I will gratefully grant you the time you need but I am NOT paying you overtime wages to sit in a room and pump milk while everybody else covers for you. By all means, take the time you need but don’t include it on timesheet as working hours.
Strictly speaking, what is the law on that these days? Are employers expected or required to allow pumping-breaks, and are employers expected or required to allow the same on company time? Our culture, expectations, and laws are rapidly evolving on all kinds of issues like this, and it’s hard to keep up.
Relevant State Law:
They started playing Christmas music at my work today. Within two minutes we had our first complaint about playing Christmas music before Thanksgiving.
The music is still on.
If I make it until January without going on a Christmas-music inspired choking spree, it will be a true holiday miracle.
Poor Catamount! I truly feel for you.
Maybe you can get your doctor to say continual exposure to Christmas Carols for longer than two weeks is injurious to your mental health. Then you could get paid time off, or something.
Or at least have them buy you noise-canceling headphones. 
What if the noise-cancelling headphones like Christmas music?
Oh god help me, I have to sit through 3 hours of videos telling me not to discriminate based on race, colour, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, gender (including pregnancy status) or disability, and other riveting topics.
In 25 years of teaching, I can’t t tell you how many hour-long videos I’ve had to watch with overly thorough quizzes afterwards. But some new tech they’re using means I figured out how to finally bypass the video and cut straight to the quiz. Been acing those using a little thing they never anticipated called Common Sense…
"In the video, a student ‘George’ revealed to the class that his family was relocated via the Trail Of Tears. Should the teacher ‘Biff’ have attempted to bond by mentioning that his family has always been Washington Redskins fans? A) Yes B) No C) Yes, with reservations D) All of the above E) One of the above"
Equipment problems at work. Why? Because no one has oiled the parts before each use, like I showed them. Now the parts are failing, to the tune of $540 to start, plus whatever service calls for in-house repairs plus wait time for repairs on parts that have to be sent out. Nice work, dipshits.
Me and my co-worker bitched about it all day until someone switched it to the instrumental Christmas station that’s marginally tolerable. At least this way I don’t have to listen to “Feliz Navidad.”
My job decided to have a pollyanna and I don’t like it
Feliz Navidad would be ok. Katy Perry sounding like she was sucking on a oxy tank gasping Xmas tunes? Kill Me Now.
I am having a language issue.
My current agency recently implemented a New! Shiny! Reporting tool. There were some issues setting me up with my usual email, nava @ myemail . com so I eventually provided a second one, myotheremail @ myemail . com and asked if they could use this other one. They said no.
Last week they emailed me saying “we have reset your account and sent the new link to this email”. This went to the nava email so, idiot that I apparently am, I expected to get the email with the link in the nava email.
Nope. They sent it to the alternate email, the one they had previously deemed unacceptable, the one that was not “this email”.
Am I wrong in thinking that if someone emails me at nava @ myemail . com and says “this email”, it would be to be expected that they are talking about nava @ myemail . com? Would it count as cruelty to morons if I search for the Sesame Street episode where they explained Thiiiiiis and Thaaaaat and send them the link? I’m reasonably sure there has to be at least one show explaining that concept.
C, evidently!
I must shun you now.
Once a day? Ok.
Twice a hour? Ready the Wave Motion Gun…
I have a collection of interesting Christmas music from the time I worked retail. Lots of parodies, punk collections, Solstice collections. Stuff you wouldn’t usually hear in the store.
We had two tapes, with about 10 songs each. We often ‘forgot’ to flip them…
Coworker:
Can you wait until I at least take my coat off before bombarding me with questions in the morning? You know how you get in extra early so you don’t have to deal with folks before your caffeine kicks in? Well, I wish you’d extend me the same courtesy. Your questions are not that urgent that they can’t wait ten minutes.
By the way, your questions are the kind of stuff you could just shoot me in an email. Email is great because you’re not putting me on the damn spot. I can think about what I say before I say it. Also, a big advantage of email is that you have my responses in writing. You wouldn’t have to keep asking me the SAME FUCKING QUESTION because you keep forgetting what I said.
I would tell you this but I don’t think you can handle negative feedback. Why do I say this? Because even though you’re old enough to be my mother, every time you come into my office, your face is all twisted up like you’re terrified to talk to me. I can only guess it’s because you sense I’m irritated. But I swear I wouldn’t be if you’d just wait ten minutes or so for me to get settled at my desk. Every time I hear you knock on my door before I’ve had a chance to put down my bag, I have to force myself not to scream “GO AWAY!” I hate feeling so pissed off in the morning.
Boss? If I ask to not be scheduled on Monday after 7pm when possible, because I go to a club on Monday evenings, I assumed that you’d, I dunno, get the idea that I want to not just be off, but awake on Monday evenings.
Telling me that’s fine, not a problem at all, then scheduling me in for a freaking 5 am shift Monday and Tuesday three weeks in a row isn’t actually what I had in mind…
Send HER an email every morning; one that will take her ten minutes to get through. As soon as you arrive, ask her to deal with it before she bugs you for anything.
I’m trying not to quit my job.
A couple of weeks ago was my 4th anniversary working here, and in that time we’ve tripled our number of contracts. Like cancer, the center keeps growing uncontrollably because the director enjoys setting up new programs without regard to how much work that creates. Well, she probably likes the money too; I know our specific annual budget now rivals the whole institute we’re part of’s general operating budget.
The insanity of trying to juggle everything just gets worse with each new program. This all got too much for my boss, my favorite boss ever, and she quit without warning in July, and left the first week of August. Being pretty self-sufficient, I had only minimal supervision from my grandboss while they looked for a replacement. In October her replacement finally started. I read all sorts of people talking about how their favorite boss left and their next boss was their next favorite boss. Lucky bastards.
I cannot stand my new boss. For the first several weeks she kept asking endless repetitive questions, since my grandboss isn’t interested in supervising her either, it has basically fallen to one coworker and I to teach her how to do her job. And because she constantly interrupted us, neither of us could get our actual work done. There have been days where I’ve literally tried to find things to do out around her dozens of e-mails and IM’ng me every 30 minutes. I wish this was her only fault, but she’s constantly condescending and dismissive people’s opinions, which is super awesome since she still has no idea what the hell we do.
If it was just he being a pain in the ass I could probably deal, but the fact that we keep adding program after program means that the workload keeps increasing, and no one gets hired. We have a large budget but the director expects the same people to just keep spreading themselves thinner and thinner.
New boss is not helping, and when she complained on TH that I hadn’t managed to do the 101th thing that shouldn’t even be my responsibility for her, I told her that with a new website (on drupal which I’m still learning how to work with - and she keeps scheduling meetings when I’ve put time aside to work on it, then bitches I haven’t spent enough time on it!) and launch of a big online course both happening on November 30th there isn’t enough time to get everything done. I also told her that I have serious concerns about not knowing enough about drupal yet to begin managing it on 12-1 because people keep dropping other things in my lap. She said she understood…
…and then yesterday asked my “opinion” about whether we could fulfill a new program’s request to create a course just for them before Thanksgiving is realistic. I said no, of course, and that the 10th or 11th is more realistic. Her response was to suggest we meet to determine a better timeline. Look, you twit, of the four people you want to meet, I’m the only one who can actually build the course out, do you think you think meeting is going to magically make more time in the work week?? Why the hell did she bother asking my thoughts when she was going to ignore what I suggested as a realistic projection?
Since they have no apparent interest in hiring anyone, and they just keep adding things, there is no end in sight of having way more work to do than time to do it, which is horrible - I am so sick of feeling like I’m getting nothing accomplished and that I don’t have time to give everything the attention it deserves. And idiot boss will be going on maternity leave in early December, and of course they expect that coworker and I to cover for her rather than hiring a temp, so it’s only going to get worse on that front even if we don’t have to deal with her constant questions for 12 weeks.
So… I’m sorry this is longish, but I’m really trying to find reasons not to say fuck it and quit, or give an ultimatum that they ever hire someone to do part of my job (and other worked to death coworker’s job) or they can hire someone to do all of mine. I haven’t bought a new house yet, and I’ve got over a year’s worth of take home pay in the bank so it’s really tempting to tell them to go fuck themselves and let them try to find someone else who can do all the things I do for them from being the LMS admin for the courses and editing lecture videos and all the other stuff that other people refuse to learn how to do. Even if I left without finding a new job first, I’m positive I’d find a new job faster than they could fill mine.
We are required to take the last several days of December and the first few of January off, and I’m tempted to begin looking for a new job. This sucks because I used to like this job, and might again if they’d just hire a few people. (and, you know, if new boss says screw it and stays how with the new baby permanently). Sigh.