Oh, it gets even better…I failed to mention that the other side of the building (customer service/purchasing) uses Oracle. My side of the building never uses it; I don’t think it’s even installed on our computers. Setting up a new order involves entering the order into Oracle, then importing it to Access. There’s quite a lag with the importing process, which is really fun on days when we get emergency orders – the paperwork will show up on my desk for review before the order is actually available in the system.
Today is my one day a year where I get to wire up controls for an instrument.
My question is this:
All the parts are dedicated for this system. They are compiled by a company that does this one thing. They write up their own set of instructions with drawings and labels to include with all the parts.
The parts are not the same as the drawings/instructions.
Why? Why, why, why, why, why???
I inevitably have to call them and ask what should be done with this extra wire; which wire is “bare” if none of the wires are actually bare, etc.
So our parent company is selling us to another company. We’ve known about this for months, and everthing’s finally finalized and goes into effect this weekend. We just trained on the new payroll system this week, and so far everything’s gone smoothly (well other than the logistics of scheduling that training for about a 1,000 employees & redoing everyone’s I-9s). One of the things we’ve been told al along this that our health insurance will stay the same thru the end of the year. Then today just before 5:30 a mass email went out to notify everyone that our insurance is going to term **08/31/2017 **instead of 12/31/2017. :eek: That’s next Thursday, aka 1 week from now. Starting next week we’ll have the change sign up for our new parent company’s insurance retroactive to this Saturday. There won’t be any information available to us about that insurance like who it’s with, what type of policy, etc. until next week. :mad: And this email went out after most people outside the call center had already left for the day. I only noticed because I’ve been working overtime all week. So needless to say tomorrow is going to be a fucking shitstorm and next week even more chaotic I thought it be. Especially the big welcome meeting with our CEO & the new parent company’s leadership team. I’m wondering if the only reason they send this out Thursday evening instead of Friday evening was because they were afraid of a riot Monday morning. :rolleyes:
Please report back on the riot Monday morning.
I have to wonder if the lack of notice is a violation of some state or federal rule.
Perhaps an anonymous call to local media outlets would stir the bovine end product.
I am thankful that somebody must’ve told my manager to stop texting me as to when I’m coming off medical leave. I hadn’t said anything myself, but had he continued, I would’ve have to report him to HR for harassment.
Look, I’m sorry I needed surgery. I know I’m a key member of the department and you’ve been struggling in my absence. OTOH you really need to put on your big person panties and learn to deal because this isn’t the first time something like this is going to happen. Besides, your attitude, if anything is going to make me want to deliberately delay my return.
Needing to record hundreds of documents across dozens of counties, and have a hard deadline to meet.
Most counties’ on-line fee schedules break out every charge, so the person whom I’m overseeing / managing has been sending in checks that are short the full amount required by the various county clerks, causing additional delay.
Well, now as it turns out, in one of the bulks we received, the notary did everything but sign the acknowledgement, so we have to send all of them back to the original signor, which will probably add a week or so on the project.
Second this, I’d like to read about it.
That post reminds me of something that happened at a former job. It’s been years ago now, so I think it’s safe to say openly that this was at Northop Grumman (one of the large USA defense contractors for those who may not have heard of it). Emphasis on “contractor” because every employee had to charge their work time against some contract or other. It was rather a pain in the butt because they’d never give us “general overhead” or administrative task type account numbers to use, they forced us to charge every minute of our time to a specific job.
So one year around Junish we got the news that they were changing accounting systems and we’d switch over to the new system on Jan 1st of the next year. In December we all got training in how to use the new system. We were told that all of our account numbers would change but they didn’t yet know what they were going to be. We came into work on January 1st and they stiill didn’t know what the new numbers would be so we couldn’t do our timesheets. Time flew and around March is when we finally got the new numbers. Fortunately for us they didn’t make us go back and try to remember what we worked on and enter the time retroactively. However, it was very bad for the department managers. Their performance was evaluated in part based on their team’s compliance with timekeeping. And the division head was also boned because he had no reports for the whole quarter that showed financial status of the contracts. So many people were boned with a capital B.
A few months later when I happened to be bored, I was browsing through the corporate intranet and stumbled on an HQ newsletter. The CEO had awarded himself some kind of excellence award for that project to change the accounting systems.
The big meeting with the new big wigs is Tuesday. I filled my prescription refills today. I could’ve gotten shot too, but I think it’s too early for that.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
I’m dealing with about 20 interns under my belt. They’re way too email happy. I want to jump off the 30th floor. Just one of them, a 22 yo grad, managed to send a chain of emails totaling about 300 before lunch.
Whaaaat? Were there massive "Reply All"s involved?
We recently had one of those company-wide emails that some doofus replies to, but includes all 350 employees. I kept waiting for the inevitable “Reply All: Please remove me from this email.” “Reply All: Me too!” “Reply All: I don’t know WHY I’m getting all these emails…”
I didn’t have long to wait…
So I wasn’t able to attend the big welcome meeting on Tuesday, nor was anyone in my department below supervisor level. A recording of the meeting will be made available for us to view at a later date. Today we had the HR onboarding sessions, benefits meetings, & 401K meetings. Except contrary to the email send out announcing them yesterday nobody in my department was allowed to attend them because call volume is spiking, and we can’t be spared from the phone. :rolleyes: Recordings of the those sessions will be made available for us to view at a later date.
So considering how my insurance ends at midnight tomorrow I just went threw our new benefits portal myself and signed up without actually talking to an HR person. Fortunately I’m a single male with no dependents; I could be having oral surgery on Friday or have a husband going thru chemo. Also the health plan I got is only slightly worse my existing plan (that wasn’t sarcasm, I had a pretty sweet plan w/ a $500 deductible that doubled as a maximum out-of-pocket) and I confirmed my provider are in-network. It’ll just up to 2 weeks until I actually get an ID card, and a few business days before I show up in the insurance company’s system and get temporary proof of coverage even though it’ll be retroactive to 8/26.
So hopefully I won’t need any kind of medical treatment until after Labor Day. My left hand is starting to swell up & I think it may be a recurrence of cellulitis like I had a few months ago. It’s not bad now, but I’m thinking maybe I should stop at urgent care after work tomorrow and dash to the pharmacy before my insurance card turns into a pumpkin. Also I’ve been given a raise.
I’m trying to get civil responsibility insurance, as my current client indicates in the contract that they may ask for proof that I have it.
Getting this from a Spanish insurer is almost impossible: since no freelancer in my sector has ever been sued, they treat us as an “unknown” (and therefore unratable) risk, rather than considering that we’re low-risk.
So I’m using an agent I used a few years back and who got me insured by a UK firm. He’s sent me some paperwork to sign.
Instead of listing my activity as “Business IT Consultant” or similar, he’s indicated I work in “Compliance, Quality Implementation and Social Responsibility Improvement”. The only similarity between that and “senior SAP Consultant (Production, Maintenance, Quality)” is the Q-word. My tax classification actually is called “electronic data treatment by third parties”.
Some compliance, his own. I work in what I work, damnit, and I’ve got the tax classification that I’ve got, and I’m not a motherfucking auditor! Or any other kind of auditor.
The job description said they wanted someone who knew X, Y, and Z, and I’m one of the few programmers who knows all three. But when I came on board, I found out that they didn’t need X, Y, or Z. They don’t have much work for me to do at all.
I wouldn’t mind so much, but the office has an open layout, so everyone can see my monitor. I’m working on a side project of my own, and I feel terribly, terribly awkward every day. I keep thinking that I should quit the job, but this isn’t my fault. They shouldn’t have hired me.
That’s exactly what happened with my husband. It turned out that his direct managers wanted nothing to do with the implementation of the project/program my husband had been hired for, so they gave him busywork instead and told upper management he wasn’t doing his job. He has since left the job, but they’re now doing the same thing to one of his old coworkers.
I hope the not-doing-the-job doesn’t happen to you.
I’ve been temping since June and it’s been an interesting experience. So far I’ve had a bunch of short-term postings with one that was supposed to be six weeks but only lasted half that time. I’m working with two different companies and both know that I’m looking for office work with an eye towards moving into an admin assistant position.
So why did one just call me with what was essentially a call center job? “You’ll be calling people to remind them to make a payment on their account! It’s not a collections job!” Sure as hell sounds like a collections job to me. “Here’s a list of what you’ll be doing: <long list>…oh wait, that’s the wrong one.” The wrong one what, wrong list or wrong item on the list?
So you’re going to lie to me about what the job entails and then give me the wrong list of duties? Plus you’re not my usual rep at that agency. Are just calling everyone marked available in the system to fill this position? Is it one of **those **jobs?
So I turn it down. And then immediately start kicking myself for doing so because I have to second-guess all my decisions. :smack: At least the other agency I’m working with is a little more proactive and pays attention to my resume, preferences, and abilities.
I have a networking event to go to this afternoon. Our marketing guy wanted me to get tickets for three of us, and my boss said that we might as well go ahead.
Here’s the rub - I have nothing to do with marketing / sales. Basically, I’m going to be paraded around and shown off as a selling point for the business. I hate schmoozing because it’s all so fake and things rarely come from it. (This guy always has something “just around the corner,” but rarely do they materialize.)
Well, the event starts during the workday, so maybe we’ll leave early?
No. Looks like we are going to leave around the end of the day, to go downtown, during rush hour. Fun.
The selling point to all of this, to incentivize and motivate me to go? “Well, you’ll probably get some free pens.”
Yeah, that’s gonna make this whole thing worthwhile. Why would I want to go home and relax on the couch with a glass of wine, when I could schlep around a convention hall for a few hours, meeting people who have little, if any, chance of giving us business, and get a handful of pens?!
I mean, the hundreds of pens we have in the office do not meet my writing needs!
I have no problem doing things when they are going to reap a benefit, or if I’m needed, but the way this has been presented, I’m literally just going to be put on display and parade around giving out business cards - an awkward thing for me.
There’s a reason I am not in sales.
You’re missing the point. These aren’t just free pens. They’re free crap pens that work for half a word and then go dry!
Prior job, I used to have to go to an annual office products convention. Where I’d come back with… lots of free pens. And other office products. Because, that’s what it was for.
All those free pens lasted about a week, because they were so much better than the free pens available from the office supply cabinet at work, that my desk became the new office supply cabinet.
Enjoy your free pens while they last.
(I also had the opportunity one year to get Dustin Diamond’s autograph. I didn’t avail myself of the opportunity, despite there being no line for the autograph. But maybe he’ll be at your event; he probably needs to network, and I doubt anyone will swipe that from your desk like they will the free pens.)
With an additional layer of aggravation / irony being that, outside of signing my name, I never need a pen. (My handwriting is atrocious. Years of typing everything has caused that skill to atrophy.)