Yep, pretty much. “But you work on this all the time!” Yes, that and dozens of other parts. I need numbers!
Chump came in from customer service the other day looking for a folder he had left with me back in February. I told him I didn’t have it anymore; I had included all the information he had given me as backup for a report. I tell him this report and its backup are safely filed away; if he needs anything from it, he can go make a copy. “No!” he says, “I need that folder! I didn’t keep copies of any of the quotes or anything!” I reminded the Chump that he had visited my office months ago and removed said folder so he could scan the contents and save it to the network drive…wouldn’t that work? “No!” he says again, “I didn’t keep hard copies and I need that folder! What’s that folder there?” he asks, pointing to a manila folder buried on my desk. No, that’s a folder someone else left, I tell him. Besides, I wouldn’t have the folder anyway since its contents went into a report.
“Well,” he says, “it wasn’t a folder! I gave you a pack of stuff! It had a staple, and the quote was in there, and I don’t have it anymore!” So the Chump doesn’t even know what he’s looking for…WTF. I remind him again that anything he gave me ended up in the report…has he checked the report’s folder in the file cabinet? “Well…no.” He wandered off; I guess he found what he needed. Out of curiosity, I checked the network drive, and found where he had scanned every piece of information – right down to the sticky notes I had placed on some pages – and saved it to the appropriate place on the server. >.<
Hardly fair to call him a chump. He did scan it, and did store the scan in the appropriate place. (Just didn’t know enough to look there.) Most ‘chumps’ never even get around to doing the scanning, or just save it on their local drive only. At least he got some steps done correctly.
Yeah, he did manage to save it to the network drive…but then he forgot where he put it. The files were saved under the job number, just like they should be. I’m wondering if he also managed to misplace the list of numbers for the jobs he’s working on now?
Does he know the scanned files are a) retrievable and b) as valid as their paper originals (in many legal jurisdictions, varies by location)?
I’ve encountered quite a few people who did things such as:
have a folders tree where the final folder in each branch contained a (1) Excel file including the certificate form for a product
when they needed to produce a certificate, they would climb the tree, open the Excel, enter the data, print it out and exit without saving
then they would scan the printed page, send the scan to the customer and save the paper printout
if the customer needed a new copy, find the paper printout, reenter the data (so it could be printed with the new date) etc., but this time stamp the printout with “repeat” before scanning
if the printout didn’t come out all right (something too wide, typo, whatever), repeat, fiddling with the widths in the Excel until things looked ok. Note that, as the Excels always were closed without saving, “the certificates for some of the products never print ok the first time”.
That’s a relatively extreme example, but between those and all the people whose first action to read emails is to print them out, I get a feeling there’s a lot of people out there to whom computers aren’t so much black boxes as black holes.
So, as I was in the middle of a conference call with a toller, discussing recent problems, the maintenance contractors decided just then was when they had to start randomly drilling something in the roof above my office. Turned out to be a rather short call. It’s been about an hour going on now, and they’ve just started loud hammering and random banging to add to the mix. Joy.
The explanation we got was “they’re doing something on the roof.” Yeah, thanks for that astounding insight, Capt. Obvious.
The real kicker is that the documents in question aren’t even originals…they were either originally sent to us in PDF form (in the case of the quote), or they were copied from old manuals or other documentation. If this guy is so desperate to have his own hard copies, he can either print from the server or make his own copies from the filed report. No big deal, really.
There’s the very real possibility that he doesn’t know where the reports are filed though…
Found out two weeks ago that boss is leaving. He told us all in our individual meetings, so I find out on a Friday morning that I have a week left with him. I like most of my direct co-workers, but upper management has been such a PITA that nothing really effective gets done. Hell, we were over a year into 5S, and less than a half of the plant was finished. Half of that was almost guerilla-style implementation, because the hourly employees saw the advantages and all but begged for it, while Industrial Engineering wouldn’t be given the time to even train the peons what was expected and give them the support they needed.
Add on to that the joke of a document control system, lack of control over a prototype process, unworkable expectations (see prior rant about a paint system), and more headaches, and it was basically a wash, WITH my boss (whom I love dearly, and would follow to the ends of the earth if he asked). The final straw was being told there was no way I would be considered for the new Industrial Engineer position, as my degree isn’t in IE. Ignore the fact that I’ve been doing IE work for the last two years, revamped a number of systems, and saved the company something in the 6-figure-per-year range, and it was too much. I walked out of the conference room after the meeting, straight into grandboss’s office, and gave him my two weeks.
It felt good to laugh in his face when he asked me to stay on for another month to get the new line up and running. That’s an engineer’s job, not mine.
For now, I’m back to waiting tables while I figure out my next move. Not looking forward to trying to sell a half-gutted remodel if I decide to move, though.
Brand New Person I’m Training: Do you know the number for IT support?
Me: You just dial 54321.
BNPIT: What?
Me: You dial 54321, that’s all.
BNPIT: 654321?
Me: No, 54321. Just those 5 numbers.
BNPIT: Do I dial 9 first?
Me: No, just 54321
BNPIT: Do I need to dial an area code?
Me: No, just 54321
BNPIT dials 54321.
mmm
My life would be so much better if people would just read emails. I work hard to make my emails short, concise, and not confusing. It’s all there if you would just READ THE EMAIL. Don’t email me back and ask me a question that’s very clearly answered in my not-very-long email. JUST READ THE EMAIL. Don’t send me incorrect information because you didn’t read the email. JUST READ THE EMAIL OR I WILL COME OVER TO YOUR OFFICE AND BEAT YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH YOUR LAPTOP. READ THE EMAIL!!! :mad:
You should do what my manager a few managers ago would do. He would send an email; then he would call you to tell you he just sent you an email; then he would fucking read you the email. Hey, at least that way they can’t say they never saw it or didn’t know what was in it!
Lady, you’re nice, you’re friendly, you always have a positive attitude, but for the love of god you’ve been working here for years, you should know how a computer works.
I swear, this person is fucking ancient. She moves at a snail’s pace (my grandmother is faster on her goddamn walker). And her understanding of computers ranks up there with my understanding of the inner workings of Goldman Sachs. So she regularly needs IT support. And her calls always take forever. It’s actually kind of impressive how much support she needs to do her job, how many times we have to explain simple concepts to her, and how many truly bizarre errors she gets.
And despite the company purging god knows how many employees over the past year just to stay alive, she’s still here. I hope she’s as incredibly good at her job as one might assume from that. Because she’s a huge pain in my tuchus.
Better than what my current one sometimes does. One of the Truths of Life I’ve had to explain to him is that sometimes the electrons carrying his email do not move instantaneously, specially when he hasn’t sent it.
Ah, but that’s Truer than you may know. I regularly send an email to one of the guys down the hall, walk down to his office, and have time to review the contents of what I’ve just sent to him before it shows up in his inbox. I can sometimes do this with emails I’ve sent to people in the next building over.
Faster than electrons: that’s me. I need some sort of superhero outfit, probably.
So, yes, I do go tell people what’s in the content of the email I just sent them.
I suspect if everyone’s computers were constantly contacting the mail server to get their new mail every second the server would go down pretty quickly. I don’t know what the interval is, but I know delivery doesn’t happen right away unless the mail app happens to ask for it.
That’s every week with us, we start the week with an team meeting to discuss our plans for the week.
Hey boss, I want you to imagine something. Imagine that there’s this constant technobabble happening across the office from you. Something that’s above your pay grade, something you’re not instructed to know how to do, something that your boss doesn’t really want you to learn at the moment, and all-around just something that doesn’t really make too much sense to you. It’s literally above your pay grade.
Now imagine that this is going on basically all day every day, and you have your own work to deal with.
How long before you start tuning those other people out? How long before you need them to directly speak to you before you get what they’re saying? And yeah, if they have a direct instruction for you and you miss that, that’s not okay, no question about it, but just missing the background office buzz?
Now imagine that your boss gets really angry at you because you missed out on some piece of information that was going on in this noisy background and that was never explicitly directed towards you. Would that seem reasonable at all?
Yeah, I tunnel vision sometimes. But this is a situation where I need nearly all my focus to follow the conversations in the background pretty much at all. It’s not reasonable to give me crap over that.
Yeah, I once asked my boss “There’s a lot of chit-chat and gossip, some of it about me. Do you mind if I ignore it, and just hunker down and get my work done?” He dropped his pen and bellowed “Finally! Someone’s going to actually focus on stuff that needs to get done!”
I would like to send a “thank you” to those managers I’ve had who were capable of only needing a small status check occasionally. We had to prepare whatever documents and put them in shared locations, documents in progress also kept there. All work involved a document sooner or later. So, instead of asking “have you prepared the manual?” like my current boss does, they…
went to the place helpfully labeled “Manuals” and checked what was there!
Dear stupidass customer: When you stuff a bunch of stuff (or one coffee maker) into a duffel bag and then bring it to the register, I am going to pick it up and notice it’s heavier than usual. And do not tell me you don’t know how the stuff got in it.
Yep, pretty much. “But you work on this all the time!” Yes, that and dozens of other parts. I need numbers!
The files were saved under the job number, just like they should be. I’m wondering if he also managed to misplace the list of numbers for the jobs he’s working on now?