Projects have been behind, so overtime has been eating up the yearly budget. VP decreed that running over budget is unacceptable, but when 2018 budget kicks in there is extra budget buffer to make up the shortfall. His brilliant plan…
He said we’ll declare a stop-work for all of December, then work overtime in January to balance the difference. Literally, send people home and stop work. Oh, and somehow not just the budget, but the incurred schedule delay will also magically get recovered also.
[Danny Glover retirement day]
I’m getting too old for this shit
[/Danny Glover retirement day]
I once worked on a rush project where i worked at least 4 hours on every single day from Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. The boss complained that I wasn’t entering my hours on our time-consuming system, but wasn’t willing to have me take time away from the project.
So after it was installed over New Years, during the first week of January, I finally got time to enter all those hours, including a whole lot of overtime. Got one real nice boos in the next paycheck.
And then a couple months later, when they finally settled the contract negotiations. With a pay increase retroactive to January 1st. So I got an extra check for the pay increase, including all those overtime hours. Nice bonus!
Epilogue: Co-worker ended up walking out of the event with over 50 pens. It became a game of how much useless junk he could acquire.
Luckily*, there was wine at the event, so that placated me, and I was saved a trip to the FedEx / Kinko’s because I was able to snag a USB Drive.
Not really sure if it is “luckily” or not. I have to send some documents for a subpoena, and I usually use the “I need a flash drive” excuse to leave work early, get the device, and work remotely for the remainder of the day.
Pro Tip on collecting swag at conventions and similar events: look for the booth handing out bags as swag, and visit them first. Not only will you get something to tote around all the crap you collect, but they tend to run out of bags to hand out in short order. Particularly if they’re nice bags (canvas or whatever), and not just flimsy plastic.
My coworker legitimately believes in cemtrails. When he told me this I had to walk away before I told him that he needed to go return his college degree.
Say the Indian team “can get over themselves and work past their bedtimes” as you refuse a 7:30am (our time, 7pm in Chennai) phone conference.
Say “that’s not in my job description” when, in fact, it doesn’t fucking matter if it is or not because if you’re half the professional you want us to believe you are, it most definitely is in your job description.
My favorite ‘my god I wish Karma was real’ moment with this kind of shit was the Director of Security at the U I worked at refusing to come in at 7am to meet with the 11pm-7am shift and instead forcing them to come in at 3pm to meet with her.
Yup, exactly half-way between their end and start times. Would be like working 9-5 and being forced to come in for a 1am meeting because that’s when it was convenient for your boss.
She pretty much threw away any good will and respect she had stored up by pulling that. Which of course, only made her angrier, because that shift no longer respected her and the other shifts (mine included) were giving her side-eye.
So I come into work at 11pm work 'til 7am and then come back for 3pm? - nope, violates split shift rules even if you’re paying overtime.
Separate shift?
So I come in for a 15 minute meeting?, yer coughing up for 2 hours minimum, and if I’m working again tonight, you just violated the 8 hours free from work between shifts or split shift rules again, 'cause a meeting ain’t an emergency.
Kinda makes me glad I was unionized back when I was working at the University.
Right now, my department is digitizing all of our paper files. This has caused upheaval all on all its own, but our normal processes have to happen, too. I have to deal (almost past tense!) with stuff on the back end, once it comes back from the outer provinces.
So one of my co-workers is a guy I’ll call Wayne. Wayne is not a pleasant person to work around for many, many reasons, most of them having to do with his weight, and what isn’t weight-related has to do with his creepy personality.
One of his less-endearing habits is that h falls asleep at his desk and snores. Loudly. This probably due to sleep apnea, but whatever. Management can’t do anything toward firing him because it’s a grey area, ADA-wise, but also because if they fire him, his position goes away. The decision has been made to transfer him to the file room, where he will be on his feet all day and where he can’t fall asleep.
Tomorrow is my last day in this department. I cannot wait to get away from this clown. I really can’t.
Our resident creepy guy has grown a Lou Albano beard. He likes to tug it and then quickly fluff it when he’s worked up over something, which is often. Most recently, he became extremely agitated while having to match a box full of marked samples with their test requirements by comparing the codes marked on each sample with a table containing these requirements.
I may need to spend Christmas in Quebec due to a go-live on January 1st. If it’s so they better let me have some other weekend Over There because damnit, I refuse to be one hour away from Montreal and not even set foot in the place!
A couple years ago I was forced to hire an “expert” in electronics. He’s 65 years ago, and recently retired from the government. He does not do any lab work. He does not do any research. He does not do any analysis. He does not write any reports. His “advice” on electronics is usually very wrong. He’s part-time, but his hourly wage is much higher than mine.
So what does he do? He sits in other people’s offices and talks. And talks. And talks. Mainly about retirement, and how to structure retirement funds for maximum benefit. When he’s not talking about retirement strategies, he tells stories about things he has supposedly done.
Best thing to do - talk to your colleagues, not your bosses, about things that have been on their to-do lists for months. Or see if there are any utilities to write which will help a lot of people. Making people more productive is a win-win, and helps you learn what is going on.
This is not offering to take half their tasks. That won’t work very well.
you would think that if someone borrowed computer equipment that they would make sure the equipment all came back to the lender but apparently not. I just finished a project at work that meant I had two stand alone laptops to work on in addition to my work laptop. I borrowed two mice to use with them from out local IT guy. I am finished with my project and had them ready to hand back to the IT gut to ship back to our corporate office. Meanwhile we had folks visit from corporate for physical inventory. I loaned the 2 mice from the temp laptops to two of folks and then on the last day I loaned a director of the company my wireless keyboard (personal keyboard) and the new mouse I just got still in the box. I got back 2 mice and the keyboard with no chip. My keyboard is useless without the chip and if one of the mice I got back was my brand new one it got used hard in the 36 hours he had it. not happy but not much I can do about it.
You can, I hope, learn a lesson. Repeat after me: I will never lend computer equipment (you could expand this to include pretty much everything) to strangers even if they work for the same company. Whoever took the chip out of your keyboard did it on purpose, making me wonder if s/he knew it was your personal property or thought it was a company item they could salvage goodies from. The rest of it might just be carelessness, which is bad enough.
It was someone I know with the keyboard and the new mouse, he says he left the chip with the keyboard and the mouse and yes he knew they were my personal property. He is a nice guy but it is still irritating.
I have telling everyone here, that I am never loaning out anything again.
This scenario ticks me off and it seems to happen to me a lot:
My company allows each employee to identify some professional growth goals every year. They can be classes, or working on a special project or anything you think will help your career. At the beginning of the year when I need to set my goals, I ask my manager what classes or things I should do to keep myself aligned with the company’s goals or make myself more valuable to the company.
boss: I don’t know
Me: Okay, how about some classes in project management (or whatever)
boss: hmm, well I’ll see what I can do… (in a tone of “yeah, that’s not happening”)
In my second year here, I asked for some training in our business domain. Was told that the training offered by the industry standards body was too expensive.
Me: Can I spend a week with one of our customers, to learn how they use our data?
boss: Nope, we can’t inconvenience them.
me: Can I sit with our customer service team for a few days?
boss: No, I don’t think they know what they’re doing.
me: Hmm… well, then can I buy a couple books about our industry?
boss: Sure, you can do that. (My mom ended up buying me the books for Christmas after they never materialized at work.)
and I’m sitting here kind of fuming this week because I can overhear two coworkers discussing some online course they’re both taking, and I heard about some other coworkers being out two days next week for some training that I expressed interest in. Nobody told me they were offering/scheduling it.
I feel for you. I have absolutely been in those situations, and it’s aggravating as hell. Times like these remind me how great my boss is. My professional goal is to take a project management course (YES!), and when I started looking around, I found everything from a $99 online class from the local community college to a certification from the U of M, which would cost $5000 just in tuition, not counting the missed days from work, gas, and food on the company account. When I brought everything to him, asking for clarification on what he’s thinking, he told me that he was going to bring in someone to do a few days of training at work sometime later this year, but to go ahead and sign up for the certification courses instead, because I seem to end up with a lot of large projects on my desk, and nobody knows how (except me, because I see you, lazy engineer).
My latest gripe is a new machine that’s just been installed. We were sold on 23-25 second cycle times, and the machine has barely managed twice that. Assuming we can’t shrink that time down by…oh, 50% like we were told, it simply does not meet our production needs. I like fancy displays and infinite parameters to modify as much as anyone, but if the shit doesn’t work, then the shit doesn’t work.
Why am I (and the whole company) copied on a message about a power outage in Manila? I and about 90% of the rest of the company are nowhere near Manila. I’m not particularly interested in information about a server outage in Espoo either.
not happy but not much I can do about it.