The last time I was in Espoo it was January. The sun rose at 10:00AM and set at 4:00PM.
And it was very cold.
“Hey, could you send me the inspection procedures for the engines?”
“I need a materials list for the turbocharger.”
“Do you have the report for the valve?”
Well, I might be able to produce those things ** if you’ll give me a damn job number or part number so I can figure out exactly which item we’re talking about!!**
Who the hell schedules a meeting for 4 pm on a Friday?!!?
The same kind of asshole who schedules one for 8am Monday morning.
Don’t give them any ideas.
The same asshole who will be late for both.
In my case, it’s usually “The people in the Seattle office that forget that our team is scattered across the country.”
What cheeses me off far more than those meeting times is the assholes who consistently schedule meetings across lunch time and claim they’re so busy that they don’t have any other time to schedule it. Yeah, FUCK YOU. I’m diabetic and I need to eat, not sit at my desk and listen to you while my blood sugar levels crash.
I honestly grew to despise a certain project leader on my last job because she quite literally never scheduled a meeting with us that wasn’t over our lunch hour and I could go in and look at her calendar and see plenty of other times we could have had those meetings. Fucking asshole.
My department has been known to schedule meetings for 4:30 PM on a Friday afternoon.
Also, while executive meetings are always scheduled for 8:05 AM (8:30 AM on Mondays), company-wide safety meetings are scheduled for promptly 8 AM. Sometimes a “safety meeting” will be scheduled for as late as 8:30 or 9, but these inevitably turn out to be company announcements – such as letting everyone know there will be no raises – instead of a discussion of safety issues.
Sometimes I have to close the office door just so I don’t have to listen to the janitor grunt and groan his way up and down the hall. I get it, you’re bending over and stooping and stuff, but are all the sound effects really necessary?? Especially at 9:30 in the morning before coffee. Stop it!
Stupid people scheduling meetings at work keep trying to schedule them on top of other meetings I already have. We can see everyone’s availability in the calendar when scheduling meetings! I don’t care if you mark me “required”, or flag it as high priority, or call me out with a specific action item to report on – if I’ve got another meeting then I won’t be attending yours.
I’ll admit, it is kind of fun when after failing to look at my calendar causes several rejected meeting invites, they finally call me to ask when they can schedule their meeting. And I point out my lunch time is free. Because I don’t eat lunch. But they do… and when that’s their only option, suddenly their meeting isn’t quite as urgent as they thought it was.
You should eat lunch [/mothermode] Or at least go for a walk. Or a nap!
Or read a comic book in your blanket fort in the bowels of the warehouse where even ‘Senior Señor’ the half-blind half-timer doesn’t clean and you’ve got a goodly stash of Emu Meat Sticks and Vernor’s Ginger Ale and sometimes you get busy with Plastic Man and Woozy Winks and it’s 1:30 already and you sneak out but no one’s ever seen you leave your Ware-Cave…
I’ve got hypothyroidism: I literally need to eat less than everyone else. And, in fact, if I do eat lunch I have to end up skipping dinner lest I get ill from overeating. So I don’t eat lunch.
Never getting hungry is the only good thing that’s come out of my thyroid crapping out, so I take advantage of it.
I interviewed for a new position here at my place of employment. The position description reads like:
Title
Specific Tasks include:
A
B
C
So I go into the interview today and I get questions on:
}
~
*
I mean, they’re not even in the same category. Do these questions have anything to do with the position described?
It was weird.
I could post a long list of minor and not-so-minor issues with my current job, management, business unit, and company. But for me, it isn’t even those day-to-day annoyances anymore. Honestly, anyone who works professionally for any large organization has probably the same gripes about the bullshit we put up with. I’ve been with this specific company 5 years now, 10 total if you include my time with the company they acquired which brought me into their company. I’m just tired. Mentally tired. I’m tired of the industry. I’m tired of the product offerings I work with. I’m tired of the clients and prospective clients. I’m tired of all of it to the point where I just don’t have much enthusiasm for it anymore. The hardest part of my job now is not having a negative attitude about it all. It is especially difficult because I am viewed as an expert in what I do and the products I work with. I don’t know if it is my role, or just the company, or the industry I’ve been working in for 20+ years now. Or all of the above. I just know I am tired. I know last night I had nightmares about my job and that’s a bad sign about my mental attitude towards where I’m at.
I have very strong interest from another company who wants me to join them. Same role, new products and in an industry I have never worked in before. Conversations so far indicate it would be an increase in compensation and an opportunity to build out a team reporting to me. I’ve worked with the CEO before and she is leading the push to hire me. Many of the people I’ve worked with in the past are there too (she recruited them in too). I have a lot of respect for all of them and the best years of my professional life were when working with this same people. The problem I’m facing is that I’m so busy in my current role that traveling to the other side of the country to do final in person interviews/meetings is proving to be almost impossible. And in the back of my head I’m wondering - will this re-energize me or after 6 months will I be back in the same funk and feeling tired and burned out.
So that’s my workplace rant for a Monday.
MeanJoe
Companies that hire you to upload all their sensitive data and who then refuse to let you get the extracts you need in order to verify that the loads have worked correctly because “it’s sensitive information!!!”
Yes, it is. And I already have it all in Excel, genius.
When I worked at the big box home improvement store any store-wide meetings were held at 6am Sunday mornings, before the store opened.
So apparently the tech recruiter field is now dominated by Indians. Ok, fine. Not a problem unless you’re providing me an english/american name like Mike Johnson and then have a seriously unintelligible accent. Which, yes, I’ve run into more than twice. I’m much more comfortable dealing with Anil or Satesh than a “Mike” who clearly is not a Mike. It is an honesty/integrity issue for me in that you’re trying to begin a professional relationship with a lie.
My real problem is that none of them have a fucking clue how to answer a damned phone and apparently their companies aren’t interested in teaching them.
Picking up the phone, pausing and then hesitantly saying “hello” is unprofessional. Answer your phone and give me your damned name (as in “Hello, this is Chimera”) so that I know I’m reaching the person who emailed me and not some random person in their office or a wrong number.
Uhh, you’re the expert, you should know this already. Look it up yourself.
Channeling my inner customer
The customer has noticed our morale swirling around the bottom of the bowl, and on Wednesday directed our Director of Maintenance to fix it. Problem is, the DOM, his shitty bipolar leadership style, and his inability to offer praise without first kicking us in the nuts repeatedly over trivial bullshit, is about 40% of the reason for our shitty morale. His boss, the new Program Manager, who still thinks he’s an O-6 and we’re his E-3s (to include UCMJ references and speeches about things that are “privileges”, rather than the contractually-guaranteed benefits they actually are), is another 40%. I’m fairly certain that not a damn thing is gonna change in any way that will have a positive effect on morale. I’m also fairly certain that anything that *does *change will have a negative effect.