They need to be careful with that. My Oldest Sister’s MIL wanted her grandchildren to call her “Nanny.” The oldest one misheard it as “Ninny” and so she has been ever since.
My Mom’s side of the family is absolutely horrible for that…due to one nephew’s inability to pronounce her name, one aunt is now known as “Aunt Hottie”.
I thought it was called LSD, not Escherite?
My dad’s favorite trick was to get all the toddlers in the family to call their grandparents by whatever name would annoy them the most. But every single name backfired.
One granddad was a doctor, but hated “Doc”. Even after a month of training by my dad, I persisted in saying “Duke.”
He’s been Duke for decades…
One pastor would’ve rather died than to be called “Rev”. Somehow that came out “Ruff”.
That’s okay, Grandpa Ruff loves it.
If you’re not part of the solution,
there is good money to be made
in prolonging the problem.
From the point of view of a bottom-line-centric firm selling programmer hours, it makes sense to push the solution which needs more programmer hours.
From the point of view of a bottom-line-centric firm that will get paid a fee every time they get called to fix something, it makes sense to come up with incomprehensible designs.
But FFS, you guys are the client! You’re not supposed to always insist on having the solution that’s going to be the biggest pain in the ass for us, for your factories and for yourselves!
On another order of business, today those of us who the client has been banning from doing the jobs they pay us to do have had occasion to speak with the team lead about whether we’ll be staying after our contracts end in July (the client is assuming we will; they don’t seem to understand the concept of “freelance”). I’ve made it clear that July 14th is SOOOOOO my last day. A couple months ago she wouldn’t have understood it; now she’s conscious both of the level of stupidity demonstrated by the client (she’s seen things in the areas she knows well which had her rummaging in the darkest corners of three languages) and of the fact that my own skills are in high demand. They need someone with those skills; I do not have any reason to want to stay here.
UPDATE: We’re going with a 7-stage wash. The contractors that came in yesterday actually asked Grandboss where he expects to fit it. Fortunately, I held my composure long enough to keep my job.
I’m picturing not only the conveyor but the 19-stage wash winding through the executive offices. Soaking all the management types as they pretend it doesn’t bother them.
Dear Freshmen, I realize you are overjoyed to be out of your small towns and in an environment where people can freely celebrate their sexual preferences. However, it IS NOT homophobic when I tell you to stop the mini-seminars on how to give good blow jobs when you are supposed to be shelving books. This is a library. Shut up and do your damn jobs (er, the jobs we hired you do to that is)!
Spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out why we couldn’t get a redlined document to appear as a “final copy,” where the changes are still there, but hidden, and you’re able to view the document as if the changes were finally accepted.
The office just upgraded to the latest version of Word, and there’ve been some hiccups along the way with the transition.
Since drafting and editing are one of the things that I do in my job, I get brought in to see what’s wrong. I try the usual methods, but no matter what, there’re still all these changes in red, items are shown as deleted (but not removed), etc.
At one point, five people are trying to figure out why we can’t get this to appear as a final document. Some are mad at IT because the upgrade has not gone as smoothly as promised / desired, and I’ve now made figuring out what happened and how to fix it my #1 priority.
I pull up other redlines I’ve done, and sure enough, they “behave” as they are supposed to. It’s just this one. Damn. Document.
Tensions are getting high, and I finally sit back and have one of those “Surely, it can’t be this” moments.
I take the cursor to some of the redlined text, and I check the font color.
Yup.
The person in question didn’t use the “redline” feature, but instead opted to just type into the document in red font, used the “strike-through” feature, etc.
We confront him about it, and he says that, no, he didn’t know that Word had a “redline” option. He always just thought it meant to change the font color when you edit.
He was taught shortly thereafter.
The “BIGGER IS BETTER” mentality annoys me. It’s more annoying that our QC processes are junk. Actually, worse than junk, because sometimes junk can be useful. We have parts coming out of the paint area with NO paint on one side, at times. I could install a 50 stage wash with 7 automatic paint booths run by Cray supercomputers - if the guy at the end can’t be arsed to make sure everything got painted and doesn’t look like crap, it’s useless.
But 7 stages it is. Guess we’ll find out next week if the landlord will allow us to cut a hole in the roof.
I feel your pain. Many years ago I had to “fix” an employee manual that had been created by an older employee who knew nothing about word-processing. All the text was essentially typed in with hard rights at the end of every line and indention done by tab key. It was the first time I wanted to drink on the job.
I’m not so good with word anymore, I use excel so much and word so little that my focus is there. Indents and formatting would be my bane, but even I know about the redline feature.
Excel on the other hand, the way people format stuff in there drive me crazy. The typed spaces instead of using the indent button is one.
Why type so many spaces when you can indent and entire column to the same space with a few clicks of a mouse! Then I also don’t have to go into each cell to remove them when you decide they aren’t wanted. Argh.
I work with a woman in her 50s whose excuse to not knowing this stuff is “Oh, I use a Mac. I’ve never used a PC.”
This industry has never been Mac-friendly (she left nursing a year ago to work in healthcare IT as an analyst). She did a Masters course in our industry, so at the same time why the fuck wouldn’t you get some training on Excel, Outlook, and Word? Everyone uses them. But no one will ever make her take a class.
She also has ongoing meltdowns about “all the passwords”. (I agree, because our passwords are ridiculous – IT tried to implement a “single signon”, but forgot 2/3 of the programs that people actually use, and didn’t coordinate even the login ID across all programs.) I suggested she use a password manager. She doesn’t like *that *either, no doubt because you have to do some work to make it really effective with our company’s weird naming of sites. “It’s SO CONFUSSSSSING!!!”
Flutterby, I feel your pain with spaces, and it always reminds me of this Feminist Hacker Barbie meme… Linky
I work from home; I’m available 24/7. If you want to buy something from me (I’ve been scavenging and re-selling lately), GIVE ME A DAY AND TIME WHEN YOU WANT ME TO BE HOME!!! Don’t be all coy and, “Well, what works for you?” ANYTHING! If you tell me two pm, I’ll be home at two pm. When I say give me a day and time and I’ll make sure I’m home then, that is exactly what I mean. I’m not sure why this is so difficult for so many people. Do you want to buy it? Yes. Then you need to come pick it up and pay for it. You know this, right?
And respond to your Goddamned private messages. YOU were the one who messaged ME that you wanted to buy this widget. Don’t send me a message asking me if it still available, then I never hear from you again when I say it is. Tire-kickers are the worst.
This really isn;t a workplace rant, specifically, but it involves work. And it’s not really a rant, more of a peeve, but anyway…
My immediate supervisor had a death in her family over the weekend. Very sad. She sent an email to the people she supervises plus a few other people more or less on her level to explain what had happened and to say that she would be in tomorrow, and then she would see (funeral arrangements are incomplete; the family member in question died while on a vacation out of the country, and it’s not clear when the body will return home).
As of right now, eight people–perhaps half the disribution list–have hit “Reply All” to express their condolences to my supervisor.
I am not wild about “Reply All” under the best of circumstances, and avoid it unless I really do need “all” the people on a list to see my response to something. So I always find it a little out of place when someone "reply all"s to an email that really should only go to the sender. But this seems not just out of place but downright odd…condolences seem like a very private thing, and I don’t feel like it’s appropriate for me to be seeing a whole string of "sorry for your loss"es and "my deepest condolences"es and "May God be with your family at this difficult times"es. Makes me feel a little like a voyeur.
I wrote her back–but didn’t reply all.
As I say, not a huge deal, but it just doesn;t feel “right.”
Submitted vacation request to my supervisor on 5/12 to have off 6/23 and 6/26 off and have not received confirmation back that it was approved.
Normally I can just check her calender on her desk with my name jotted on those dates but she is sitting in a different area now. And has a little book with a calender which I can’t see because it her personal book. So I guess I will just have to ask her if I don’t hear anything by 6/2/17.
Not sure why it takes so damm long when I put the request well in advance:mad:
I HATE “Reply All”! – Is this set as the default on most people’s work computers?
I’d love to blame Microsoft… is it an Outlook thing?
It really makes the “replier” look unprofessional, and a bit insecure, too, in cases like this. As if everyone who does it is thinking “Ooh, I want everyone else to see how sensitive I am! Look how saddened I am, and how kind I’m being to the bereaved… and I snuck God in there, too! Now everyone knows I’m sensitive AND spiritual!”
Yup, exactly!
My work computer, which runs Microsoft, does not really have a default for replying to emails on my work account. To the extent it does have a default, it’s the simple “reply”–that is, I can either click “Reply,” or go to a drop-down menu that allows me to choose other options including “Reply All.” So “reply” is easier. You have to really WANT to reply all. My own laptop, which also is Microsoft, does the same thing.
Worth pointing out is that today we were off, so people are most likely posting from their own computers. I know several of these folks are Mac users; I guess it’s possible that Reply All is a default in some MacWorld or other.
Just did some extensive research (Mac Book Pro and iMac. Rigorous sample size = 2).
Command-R* triggers “Reply” in Outlook. Basic Vanilla Reply. But not in Gmail – just acts like the usual “Refresh window”.
I see that in Gmail there’s a “Make Reply All Default” button, but I had to click the gear icon, then open Settings, then go to “Default reply behavior”. Not something that someone would do without planning it… you’d have to really try to be a RAT (a Reply All Tool).
*a shortcut that I didn’t know was there til I just guessed… wonder if it’d save time. Doubt it.
As an aside, our ancient iMac and our Cube don’t have the word “command” on the keyboard, just the icon. That’s why when I hear my wife make a mistake, and I call out “Command-Z…” from the living room, she lets out a sigh from the computer room.
(Training people on Macs in the 80s, we called it the Sphincter Key)