Oh, I would pay to hear that you said that. Send me a link to your “If I get $500, I’ll make a ‘flair’ reference” kickstarter.
My umbrella was destroyed going from my car to the building this morning. The wind bent the handle so much that I couldn’t collapse it once I got inside the vestibule; then managed to break it in half trying to force to collapse. It was still raining 13 hours later when I went back to my car, but not as much and the wind died down. Sleepy time now.
[monotone]
“I am grateful to be forced to be grateful to others, for it shows me how ungrateful I am for the nurturing mother that is XYZ company and our joyous and most beneficent manager Becky.”
[/monotone]
This isn’t so much a rant as an amusing anecdote: Thursday we had a pop-up thunder hailstorm blow through the area. We all, of course, stopped doing any useful work to go watch the crazy going on outside the window.
While we were lollygagging there was a sudden BOOM! that shook the whole building. Which prompted me to relate the story of a similar boom when lightning hit the shed that has the foam fire-suppression system out in the solvent tank farm, and caught the fire-suppression system on fire.
So, guess what this boom was? I’m going to start referring to it as the Flaming Shed of Fire-Suppression.
The customer (to call 'em something), which already banned several of us from most meetings because we are too senior and suffer from glass faces (IOW, you can see we’re thinking “that’s incredibly stupid!.. My God, that’s even stupider!.. Did he say what I think I heard?”), has now rejected the new team member on account of being too junior. Her “senior”, who as far as we can tell is a used car salesman with no stock, is on the other hand ok: they like his glitter. Our team lead asked if we know anybody from that rejected team member’s specialty.
Honey, I don’t keep one in my pockets, but none of the ones I know is someone I hate so much I’d want them to put up with this particular customer :rolleyes:
I guess there’s an annual company wide “career development” thing going on where all managers and FT employees are asked what their future plans are with our new-ishemployer. My talk with HR was last week.
I was told to “seriously consider” management because my position with our new-ish employer is not FT, and that all FT positions are management (I wasn’t the only FT person told this, btw).
If I decline, I can stay with where I am right now until the position “dissolves” and I’d automatically become PT. When that would happen is anyone’s guess.
If I accept and don’t perform to “expectations”, I will be asked to leave the company. No, they will not move me to another position.
I have until Friday to tell them my decision.
What part of “the job requires that you work until 6:30” do you not understand? I have let you off early when your work is done, but have reminded you several times that the job requires that you be available until 6:30 if needed. Now you have the chutzpah to inform me that you HAVE to leave by 5 every Monday and Thursday? Are you aware how flexible I have been with your schedule? Are you aware that other practices may not be as flexible? Why does nobody take me seriously when I tell them that the job requires working later hours? It was in the initial ad. I brought it up at the interview. What do I have to do to find somebody who will not suddenly decide after working here for a couple of months that they can no longer work the hours they were hired for?
I am afraid of jinxing myself, but I seem to have an exciting new possibility for improving my work situation, without even having to fill out a job application or do a formal interview – or maybe the meeting I had with the director the other day was the closest thing to it, which consisted of her telling me about their organisation and me telling her about my project and us deciding that it would be great to integrate them.
I would have more support and less professional isolation, the project would have access to a greater staff and volunteer pool, the organisation would have another program with which to engage and support their clientele, and I would get out of an uncomfortable environment that has been chipping away at my health and wellbeing for the past, oh, well, four years, I guess, which is how long I’ve been there.
Extremities crossed for the duration. In the meantime, it’s nice to feel like I might have some kind of a future, for a change.
Granboss left for greener fields* last week, leaving us missing part of our workflow. Technically the responsibilities fall to great-granboss, but GGB has no idea what we do or how we do it. We have presented a solution to GGB, but now he’s taking his time making a decision, leaving us with reports piling up with no one to approve them.
*Greener fields being in this case a higher title at a different agency.
We use a service that charges by the hour. We use it 24x7, and it bills us monthly.
Senior leadership just demanded that I explain to them why our bills were 10% higher in March than they were in February.
I am going to chuckle about this all day. I’m sure you’ll answer this tersely and professionally, but I’d be SO tempted to create an overly-thorough infographic. Maybe one of those vertical ones that you have to scroll down forever. Making the bosses read through facts and figures and cute graphics until they get to the artsy typographic payoff: “30 Days Hath September…”
Yet another peeve in this Most Peevesome Company:
I’m noticing a strong tendency to try to change history here. For example, I’ve been collaborating on a project for the last two months with a bunch of people from other internal teams. We’re trying to develop a solution, and bouncing it against external customers by phone every few weeks. After the last call, we all seemed to understand what was needed, so three of us worked on drawing up scenarios to illustrate how two different ways to implement the solution. In our last call with the external customers we showed them what we came up with and the feedback we got was that we seriously misunderstood one of the possible solutions. Back to drawing board…
The peeve is that in every internal team huddle since then, various coworkers have been saying that we understood the correct solution from way back. Um, no. Maybe YOU understood it, but you failed to explain to the rest of us. So it was NOT something that we all understood. I actually pointed this out yesterday in almost those words, but slightly less confrontationally. Got an email from one of them this morning and again… it’s worded to say that we understood the solution since a couple months ago. :mad:
I know it’s not productive to blame or churn on the misunderstanding. But twisting the situation to claim that we all understood it pisses me off because of the logical issue. If we all understood it from way back, then why in hell did we propose the wrong thing? Someone didn’t speak up to get us all on the same page, but the solution is not to pretend that they did and we just had a major group mind-fart.
Dear co-workers: Just because I wear glasses, it doesn’t mean I know a lot about computers.
I have another one. I’m assigned to a team that really requires deep experience with our business domain, which I don’t have. (I was originally hired as a business analyst for software projects with the understanding that I would learn the domain over time as one does. Was later reorganized onto this other team and management clearly gave no thought to that.) I gave it the old school boy try, but after a couple of years of being told that I’m wrong at every step, including my answers to external customers, I accepted reality that I’m a bad fit for the team. This particular team isn’t one where you can learn as you go very successfully, it really demands experience and background.
So a job opened up with our project management office that entails collecting data from project managers, doing analysis on that data and helping to do resource planning. It didn’t require business domain experience, and I do have some project management experience, so I applied. Was interviewed and subsequently turned down because they chose someone with business domain experience instead. I’m not bitter about it, but can’t get over the irony.
(bolding added) I seriously don’t understand this, not knowing what business you are in which might make a difference. Wasn’t it someone’s job to summarize in writing the understanding to make sure everyone was on the same page and that you had buy-in from the customers, before the work started? Because without that, this is precisely what happens. I mean, the real problem is not that someone is mis-remembering the past, but that work time was wasted chasing the wrong goal.
The way it happens is this:
tl;dr answer: We’re shitty at communicating
Long answer: We’re a bunch of analysts coming up with potential solutions for processing some pieces of data. We spent a lot of time coming up with two approaches. Do you compare A to B and then A to C, or do you compare A to B and then C to B? That’s what I thought our two options were. We documented six scenarios to illustrate the processing of each.
But yesterday one of our members - who was working with us from the beginning and every step of the way - said that no the second option should be comparing A to Z, B to Z, C to Z, etc. The details don’t matter here, but basically she failed to communicate the solution she had in her head, throughout many working sessions where we hashed them out. She never once said, wait, you guys have it wrong. So then we had to go back and draw up examples using the new, third solution.
And then subsequent statements (emails) by her and a couple others on the team have been making it sound like we all shared her understanding all along.
The rewriting history thing is some weird flavor of “let’s all get along”/“move forward from here”/company politics thing that I find distasteful. I don’t expect blame or acrimony, but this… is just surreal.
So one of the quality inspectors has started munching on giant sunflower seeds, I suppose in place of smoking (vaping is now banned within the building). That’s nice…except he walks around the building with a fistful of the things, occasionally pausing to remove the soggy, chewed-up shells from his mouth with a thumb and forefinger, and often dropping them on the floor. Fucking EWW.
Try working with guys who chew tobacco. They spit in the trash cans. I once knocked my bar-code reader in there and had to fish it out and clean it off after one of those guys had been sitting at my work bench. I ripped him a new one for that.
During the big office reorganization, I acquired a credenza that had been in the office of a tobacco chewer. One side of it was coated in layers of nastiness from backsplash and/or missed shots from his spitting into a trash can. XP
Co-worker seemingly wants me to prove a negative.
Marketing wants to enact a program that sounds like a logistic nightmare. Although she admits she is unfamiliar with the project, she is insistent that there is a regulation prohibiting us from engaging in such conduct, so she asked me to look into it. She really doesn’t think we should engage in this project, and I agree with her.
After a good deal of research, I report to her that I could not find anything. She tells me that I need to look harder because “there has to be something that speaks to this.” I tell her that, no, all my searches have not found anything that speaks to it, but she keeps wanting me to waste my time looking for something that I’m 99.9% certain doesn’t exist.
And the thing about the whole matter? We don’t even need legal justification to say no. We can object to it on the basis of all the factors that Marketing hasn’t considered (third party costs, among other regulation nightmares), or we could just say we don’t feel like doing it, and not give any justification whatsoever.
I think she just wants something to throw in their faces, but for all I can tell, nothing exists, but she won’t be happy until I convince her nothing exists.