We’re in meetings in France. Work sessions (which as one with half an hour experience may expect, have roamed all over the map) interspesed with “demos” of stuff which doesn’t work. Bosette (who doesn’t speak enough French to get a plate of crêpes) kept roaming about and then trying to redirect the work (can you kindly buy yourself a piece of Gobi and go get lost?). In two weeks we come back for more smoke and mirrors.
I’m leaving in a month, I’m trying to close issues, and the inmates in charge of the madhouse want more demos. It’s bad when you find yourself wishing for an apendicitis.
Two months ago, I was told to put together a staffing model for my new team. My boss told me to expect a new customer about once every eight weeks for the new product we support; each one of those customers will have a six month lifecycle, so I planned for a nice slow ramp up, where my current (very small) team could get up to speed, and we’d gradually staff up ahead of the workload.
I was told: “Great plan, but you can’t hire anybody else in the US. All new hires need to be out of the Bangalore office.”
No big deal, I thought. I’ll just have to show up earlier in the mornings to manage the handoff of the work. I mean, it takes about a month and a half to get a new hire in the BRU office after you make the offer, but we have plenty of time.
In the intervening eight weeks, I’ve averaged one new customer per week. 800% of the workload I was told to plan for, and there’s no end in sight. And I’m still not allowed to hire in the US. And I can’t poach internally because they’re all in the same boat I am - nobody has any slack at all.
I’m in conversations for a job, with an agency for which I’ve worked before twice. The agent wants “end client” references who must have been in my line of command.
I’m wondering how long has she been an agent, because the immense majority of the time there is simply No Such Person. My boss is either from a consultant firm or a freelancer; the people from the client that I am in contact with are not in our line of command. They’re our clients but they’re not our bosses. If I ever get to meet my boss’s boss, it’s unlikely to happen more than twice in a whole project. The first job from which she wanted an “end client, line of command” reference was a support role where my boss (Mr. I Never Answer Email, Phone or IM) was from the consultant firm, as was his boss, and then we finally got to the in-house person; do you think she may remember having signed one form giving me permission to access the shared drive? I don’t.
The last project in which I worked through this particular agent happens to be in the desired timeframe and one of the few where I expect my boss’s boss to be able to recognize my name, but WTF? At least with those other idjits who try to hire me for modules I don’t do, I can just trash the email and be done!
It’s been my experience with agencies that requests for references is usually agency-speak for wanting contacts they can approach to try do drum up more business.
Oh wow, apparently it’s Bring your Squalling Infant to Work Day.
Also, when I repeatedly tell you “I’ll take a look at this and let you know what I find,” what I’m really trying to tell you is “Stop hovering and take your hacking, germ-ridden ass back to your own desk.”
Apparently it was also “bring your squalling infant to the grocery store” day. If someone opened a shopping mall with grocery stores, drug stores, clothing stores all adults only, I would be there. Anyone with me?
Given that one of the references they got off me was the IT manager of a company that’s already their client, and that he’s already their primary contact there, it’s still fucking stupid. Asking for a second reference could be logical; this wasn’t.
British agencies are always asking for two references; Spanish ones may ask if you know so-and-so and if you say yes, ask so-and-so if they do know you, but that’s an actual reference. It’s someone that they know and who can tell them what were you good, not-so-good and bad at.
Maybe for the clothing store? Although I see very few children (squalling or otherwise) in the store where I buy my adult clothing in.
For the other, particularly the grocery store - you’re going to see a cross-section of the population. Some (fairly large) proportion of folks have kids, some of whom will be squalling at any point in time (maybe more at the drug store, since the kid may be sick). And no one is going to hire a baby sitter to go grocery shopping.
And excluding the folks who buy the most food (families) isn’t a good way to run a successful grocery store.
Go to the grocery store late at night – there are much fewer infants there (and those there are often asleep). I frequently stop in on the way home after a meeting or event, from 10pm to midnight. (There are fewer checkout registers open, but also less customers than in daytime – I think I waith the same or less to checkout at night.)
OK, you used “fewer” correctly once and then just 5 words later you messed up and used “less” instead. Do they measure customers by the pound where you come from?
Speaking as a former IT person: Our internal IT support group sucks. They’ve been rolling out changes incrementally, a few months between each one - Office 365, then Windows 10, then Sharepoint Online, then they decided it was a good time to give me a new laptop. After each one of these, I keep having to re-customize my computer because Windows products just seem to get worse and worse. I have to remove the keyboard lag (some kind of “ease of access” non-feature), reconfigure Outlook (why aren’t customized views saved somewhere?!), re-set up all my printers (fucking lazy asses can’t do that for me?). After they “upgraded” my old laptop to Win10, we discovered that they didn’t save any of my profile settings, so I got to start from scratch on browser bookmarks and everything.
They conveniently (it could have been) decided to replace my laptop with a newer, smaller model just before I went on a 2-week vacation. They had 2 weeks to do the job. I got back this morning to find… no computer on my desk. Go hunt them down and learn that they have to load my profile and tweak a few things. Gave me my old laptop to use in the meantime, and I discover that it’s battery is at 8%. So, useless.
Finally, extra hate goes out to Windows 10 and Office 365. It’s mindblowing how slow everything is now that my computer has to “check with the mothership” before every task. Email is so full of lags and lulls that I may as well start sending paper memos to coworkers.
I’ll be getting a Windows 10 laptop in a few weeks for work. I’m starting to become scared - I have yet to read anything positive about Windows 10.
Speaking of Windows… Most of our forms are in Word. No big deal. Unfortunately, some workers were doing weird stuff with the Word form docs, causing problems. Instead of telling us there was a problem, the tech team placed a mandatory hold on ALL Word docs, preventing them from appearing in our files for 24 hours (so they could review them). Clients, attorneys, court officers would call asking for a letter about something, I’d generate and upload… for nothing. Attorneys and court officers do not LIKE waiting.
The guy in the cube next to me was an early adopter (not sure if it was voluntary) of the Win10 upgrade, so I got scared listening to his rants. As I mentioned, we use Sharepoint. Upon being upgraded to Win10 (and being told about it’s wonderful features from our IT idjits) he tried to also store documents in the Cloud/OneDrive. THAT was a horrible mess. He never knew whether he was working on a copy from SP or from OD or a local copy. When he saved, he never knew where it was being saved to. At one point I overheard him ranting about finding different versions of the same file on each location and neither one was the most recent.
A few weeks ago I also overheard three coworkers trying to figure out what was going on because they each could see a different version of the same file, despite checking with each other to make SURE they were looking at the file in the same location. Some kind of version control lag or issue, I guess.
As a result, I keep my files on my local computer as much as possible. It’s still really annoying that when I open one of my local files for the first time in a few days, Word/Excel/Whatever insists on logging into the cloud before it lets me have my document. Why does a word processor need to log in? I’m becoming a luddite.
I’m confused. We used Sharepoint at my old job, and I thought the whole point was that you had to sign a document out to change it, and no one who hadn’t done that could change the version saved in the location in Sharepoint. That’s not how everyone uses it?
Oh, yay, I get to go through ITIL “Grey Belt” training. Roughly 30 hours of online videos on the differences between Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, etc, and they want it done by next Friday.
Today was Bring Your Toddler to Work and Laugh as He Has Multiple Tantrums in the Middle of the Engineering Department Day. Seriously, we’re a rather laid-back workplace, and it’s Friday afternoon, but critical business is still being conducted. I’m sure the guy reviewing the drawings at the drafting table really enjoyed that little display. (Or maybe my company is taking a novel approach to providing free birth control?)
