I know of a similar situation; it happened to concern a Driving While Intoxicated incident, but the change would really mess up their process.
So some anonymous person leaked the info to the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They promptly got their widowed spouses to start calling the County Attorney. Then about 3pm, a friend who was a reporter at a local TV station called his office asking if they could film a response to the charges that he was ‘weakening prosecution of drunk drivers’.
Within an hour and a half, a high-priority email had gone out to everyone saying that “the County Attorney’s Office views drunk driving very seriously, and there were absolutely no changes to the procedures, despite rumors you may have heard” and that there would be a major meeting between the County Attorney & relevant staff at 9am the next day.
Amazing how fast a little attention from the news media can cause a change in an elected official (or even a complete denial that anything was ever changed).
Can’t decide if that’s better or worse than the two guys in the offices across from me… they have some kind of in-joke that involves them spontaneously bellowing “herrrr-URRR! herrrr-URRR!” back and forth. Sometimes they go days without doing it, but I’ve also known them to keep it going for nearly 5 minutes. One of my colleagues who is further away from these offices than I am casually confronted one of the bellowers a few weeks ago; the guy actually denied being one of the noise makers.
I found out at work yesterday that I will be joining folks from an office in another state on a trip next month to meet with our customer. I haven’t traveled for work in a few years, and in the intervening time they apparently have implemented the Travel Portal from Hell. I spent half of my afternoon yesterday trying to book flights and a hotel that would match up with their travel plans. Search for flights, pick an outbound and return flight that look good, and it tells me the selected flights do not meet corporate travel policy. I pull up the link to see what the policy is and it’s a page of complete gibberish about preferred airports, preferred airlines, countries I can’t travel to or from or through, etc. but nothing that gives me a clue why my selected flights were no good. (Apparently they were too expensive. Why not just tell me that??)
So then I notice that I can display flights by fare instead of by flight schedule. That gives me 25 pages of results, the first page of which are flights that are OK, the other 24 pages are all no good. I also notice that on this page they are grouped by round trip, not individual flight. But… I can’t select the flights from this page. I have to note the flights included in the round trip, then go back to the “display by schedule” page and sift through the 20-something pages of results to find those specific flights.
OK, flights selected, on to the hotel. Where do I add a hotel? There is no option to add a hotel. So I start over, thinking I should do hotel first then flights. I find the hotel we’ll be staying at, reserve a room… but then there is no place to add flights. WTF??? So I scrap that, start again, go back to the flight search page, and notice a little checkbox there under the flight search that says “add hotel”. So I had to go through the whole flight selection process again, then was able to add my hotel after. You know, why not ask me up front what all I want to include in my booking, then just walk me through each step? Yeesh. I’m just glad I didn’t have to reserve a rental car as well.
I was complaining about the travel site later to some coworkers and their response was “You think that was bad? Wait until you have to do your expense report.” :eek:
Shoeless, I do travel arrangements and expense reports for my company, and I feel your pain! Doesn’t sound like we’re using the same system, but no doubt they all have their own special ass-ache.
ETA: I’m actually reading the Dope instead of entering travel right now. FINE, I’ll get back to work…
I was told that I need to do some Professional Development, and I immediately thought of all the paperwork nightmares I went through last time. So I found a conference I can attend: cheap enough that I can pay for it myself, and close enough that I can drive to it. It’s worth $200 to me to not play bureaucratic games.
<sigh> I’ve had multiple contacts for the same position. The hourly rate has been quoted as between $35 (on the low end) and $47 (on the high end), but none of the contract houses is offering benefits of any sort. I could *maybe *cover the medical insurance (assuming I could find someone to offer me more or less affordable coverage with my preexisting conditions), but there’s also no 401K.
When did contract houses stop offering benefits? Is this the case for all contract houses, or did I just luck out?
Nava, if he’s insisting that you document it even though it’s not possible, I would write a one-pager outlining how to do it anyway - assuming the time-space continuum didn’t apply. I’d make sure to include outrageous-but-serious details like "turn the clocks back ten days and then… " and “expand $widget to the size of an elephant by adding three liters of water and then insert into five-ounce teacup…” etc.
The other day my day job had an all-hands meeting. The company used to have the small company vibe, but we’re doing a growth spurt and they’re adopting some large-company silliness. Like this meeting was held in a double-size hotel ballroom where they set up a stage with dramatic spotlights and played interstitial music and etc. It’s all very glee club, get-with-the-company-culture-peer-pressure-in-the-guise-of-fun-and-entertainment. My question is if this kind of thing motivates anybody else? It sure seems to motivate my coworkers; they’re all YAAYYY!
Me? I’m sitting there feeling really creeped out. It started with candid video clips of my coworkers saying what they loved about the company and their work, followed by a full hour of employee awards, “best team” awards and the president’s award. The awards also creeped me out because they praised the winners for selflessly setting their personal lives aside to make sure their jobs got done, working throughout the night, etc. Oh, along with the general popularity contest. It might be my cynicism, but I accurately predicted who won best team (the marketing team who executed a “brand refresh”) and president’s award (the manager of that same marketing team).
I’m sure it’s not sour grapes, because I won one of those smaller employee awards the second year I was here. I won it for “leadership” by agreeing to help a coworker finish an outrageously large task he was doing single-handedly. They praised me in front of everybody, including said coworker. Literally, I had done nothing outstanding. My unpraised coworker did the large majority of the work, and was really the lead on it since he showed me what needed to be done and how. That told me that those awards are complete bullcrap.
I got asked by the boss: “What’ll take to do this idea as an animated TV spot?”
Me: “Well, I’m not sure we can get this done in time.”
*
Boss: “What. Will. It. Take… to get this done on time?”*
Me: “We’d need a top shelf animation house if we’re going to turn this around in three weeks.”
Boss: “No, what’ll take for YOU PERSONALLY to do this idea as an animated TV spot? You’d do all the illustrations, and all the animating, by yourself. We don’t need to spend money out-of-house on this.”
Me: “Umm… I’d need to… buy animation software, and I’d need everything else off my plate. And I’d be putting in three weeks of 80 hours a week.”
Boss (gleefully): Then it’s a deal! Welcome to three weeks of hell!"
Lest you not grasp what a sociopath he was, keep in mind that he said all this in front of the client… (who was looking on in disbelief)
At my annual review last year, Dear Supervisor said I needed to focus more on my daily tasks and less on my projects. Ok, I’ve been doing that. Fast forward to today, when I find out that Dear Supervisor has promised the general manager of the company – who, in turn, has promised the customer – that I would have 56 pages of calculations and two drawings from a lingering project reviewed and sent to them by the close of business. >.<
My company doesn’t do awards (unless you count service awards), but corporate has come up with a new safety program. Every location has received a set of banners, each bearing the company logo and safety message, to be placed throughout the building. Attached to each banner are the names of the major departments. Whenever someone causes a serious safety incident, their department’s name will be removed from the banner. What motivation!!!
I quit on a day that the boss was in a horrible mood… I went in and gave two weeks’ notice, dreading those two weeks. Boss: “You think you can betray us by quitting and then stay here for two weeks?! You’re out of here *today!” *Me: “Yes!” (fist pump)
Boss has asked for a certain type of object to be Erased (what’s Not Possible is seeing an Erased object). Today he said he wanted its status changed to Unreleased, with screenshots showing how to Delete it.
I promise all those aren’t just the programmers coming up with multiple ways of doing the same thing, they actually behave differently. This guy isn’t particularly evil, but he may be the least efficient boss I’ve had. He can’t plan or even seems to think “this may need a plan”*, can’t track even with people sending daily reports (for the last week he’s been asking about the status of things I finished and reported finished weeks or months ago); in fact, he doesn’t even seem to understand that a plan has more than one step. Whatever has crossed his desk last has the highest priority; one several occasions, we’ve had to make a change from A to B, and later someone (who may not even be from the right team) would ask to have it moved from B to A, and anybody saying “but boss, A is how they used to have it and the majority of users didn’t like it that way, have we made sure they want it back?” is told “stop asking questions and just do it!”
When I joined he was the Master Data Coordinator. I asked for the Load Plan and he said “uh?” There wasn’t one. A normal Master Data Coordinator keeps The Plan open all the time or almost; their job consists of creating, curating, preserving, overseeing and forcing compliance with The Plan. I once asked one of them if he slept hugging a printout of The Plan and he mused “you know, that might be a good idea…”
Speaking of workplace ergnomics and workflow, apropos of nothing, guess who’s getting dicked around again?
So the IT storeroom used to be in the IT office. Which made sense - immediate access for inventory, and if we got a task where we needed to bring IT equipment to someone, we just picked stuff up and took it with us. Well, the higher-ups decided that they didn’t like the IT office having a wall of shelves full of equipment, and that it had to move. Elsewhere. And that specific elsewhere is two floors up and literally as far away as it is possible to be while still being in the same (very large) building. We have two dinky little closets to fill with stuff we need day-to-day, and the boss insists on them not being cluttered and seems to have little understanding of what we need regularly or how often we need things.
So today, literally the first day at work after relocating the storeroom, I get the call that we need 6 monitors and 3 PCs installed in another part of the building. So I trek all the way across the building and take a slow cargo elevator up two floors to get the materials I need, and find that the storeroom now has a lock that I first need a key for. So I go back and get that. Then I go back again with my cart full of crap, the long way around, around the other half of the building to schlep my cart full of crap into the tiny elevator to get to the other department’s floor…
Now, I don’t have all of the required skills they want, but the money is in my range. I’m interested, because I’m interested in learning those skills. I don’t want a job that requires all my current skills. I want something where I get to learn new things. Otherwise I’m going to be bored.
As I then pointed out to the recruiter on reviewing the entire job description and requirements, people with those required skills would cost around twice the money they’re offering, so hey, let’s see what they say.
