Another annoying coworker complaint. I’m glad I don’t have to work with him very much, but when I do, it makes me unhappy. At my job, I am the expert on one thing, and coworkers from all departments come to me when they have questions or need training. This person will ask me how they should do something, and then when I tell them what to do, they’ll come back with, “Well, what if we do it this other way instead?” If I wanted it done that way, I would have suggested that in the first place, dontcha think? :dubious: So now I have to explain to this person why we do it my way instead of his way, and it’s kind of odd, but that’s the way we do it, so just leave me alone because I don’t have time for this, thank you. And this is the kind of person who will argue that we should do it their way instead, which annoys me very much. I should be more grateful for every day that I don’t have to deal with this person. Go away and leave me alone. :mad:
Word from on high: You MUST install this power pad and start using the script writer! It’s VERY important you do this! Scripts are beautiful! Using scripts will give you fresh breath, shine your shoes, and dispense animal crackers!
Install.
Review available scripts.
Two. A whole TWO that are applicable for my job. One that writes a friggin memo to our clients and one that cleans up worklists. How this has been labeled as the second coming of Jeebus, I have no idea.
Rant at myself: why didn’t I take the time to tidy my office area when I first took this job? Since I took leave of my senses and registered to take the PE licensing exam in April, I decided to make some room on my bookcase for the all the new books I’ll be bringing to work once the exam is over. As part of this, I sorted through all the books I inherited from the previous inhabitant of this half office, and ended up removing over a dozen manuals and industrial catalogs that I haven’t touched in over ten years. O_o They don’t even apply to my job. One of my coworkers thinks the collection may have come out of the company’s “library” of old manuals. Nice. They’re now up for grabs in the common area of my department. Amazingly, I’ve only had to explain to one person why my department insists on saving ancient product literature.
So, with all the free space on my bookcase, I went on a scavenging trip through the office and managed to score a sturdy metal document organizer from the cube where the customer service people dump their unwanted stuff. Yay!
I’m working one day a week as a holiday cottage cleaner, to support my university habit. It’s boring work, but it’s convenient hours, decent pay, and almost everyone there is really nice.
Almost.
There is one, however, who basically stands there smugly doing nothing, watching everyone else and telling them they’re doing things the wrong way. She started 6 months ago, same as me, and she’ll tell people who’ve been there over a decade that they’re doing stuff like cleaning a mirror wrong. :rolleyes: She’s the slowest one there, and not especially thorough, but she’s apparently the only one who does any work.
I was supposed to be paired up with her all day. It’s not the first time, and the last time wound up with me just not talking for the last hour because I couldn’t quite trust myself not to tell her precisely where to go as she just stood there and watched me vacuum.
Today, she didn’t even bother with the ‘hello’, she just went straight into the complaining. After 5 minutes I’d already done 3 different things ‘wrong’, (two of which were purely a matter of her preference, and one was mindbogglingly petty) before I gave up, and asked her if she was planning to be like that all day. Apparently she was, and didn’t like having her plans interrupted, 'cos she grabbed the day’s schedule and stormed off yelling at me. Apparently I have a bad attitude, and she can’t work with me wipes tear with world’s smallest handkerchief
It was quite funny really, aside from the fact that it’s actually easier and faster to work by yourself than it is to work around her (as she stands there, watching you vacuum, complaining about how other people don’t do enough work), she’s managed to piss off everyone else there, so the only response she got from the other cleaners when she tried to complain about me was dead silence followed by one of them going to the office to complain about her. It was generally agreed that the dead flies which are weirdly common in that cottage are better company than her.
The only problem is, she’s… not exactly reliable, and I don’t know if she actually did all the other things on the day’s schedule, because she stormed off with it before I’d really checked it. I hope some poor visitors don’t show up to a half-cleaned holiday cottage.
Well, I’m back in the land of the partially employed, yay! I lucked into a part time job in a law firm that is practically perfect in every way. I work one half-day and one full day a week, and I was told there would be busy days and slow days. Four weeks into the job, today I endured the slowest full day ever. My main job is to answer the phone. It rang maybe 9 times, and one of those was a wrong number. I am also supposed to be at the ready to do any typing, filing, faxing, sorting, and other legal-secretary and clerical type stuff that may need to be done. Nope, not a darn thing was asked of me today. I spent most of the day studying my lines for my acting workshop scene - if I don’t have those lines down by now I may need to see a memory specialist. I’m not complaining, but I have forgotten just how exhausting it is to sit at a desk all day with nothing to do. Maybe in a few months’ time I’ll be comfortable enough to pull out a book or a knitting project, but I’m still too new at this office to feel OK doing that. Last week was super-busy on my full day, so I’m just going to go with the flow and count my blessings, and hope for busier - but not super-busy - days ahead.
I applied two fucking months ago - 1st week of January - and they finally deigned to send a formal offer last week Thursday. Their H.R. bitch called me twice today to say TONIGHT is my deadline to accept.
Because {{massive backchannel, I worked there 9 yrs ferfuckssake}} I know that I’m not only the top candidate, I’m quite literally the only candidate.
Why? Because: nine years experience at that $#&! place, plus I’m familiar with this particular product. And apparently, huge bonus, the only person who can tolerate the current product manager.
They sent a lowball salary offer {{due to interdepartmental shenanigans, downgrading the title was the only way to keep it safe from the I.T. poachings that led me to resign last year in the first goddamn place}} and as a “new hire” I’m losing 2 solid week’s PTO from when I left. It’s all of a buck-twenty an hour above my pay when I left. . . and on top of all these insults, now they’re playing hardball.
I wish I wasn’t so desperate for work that I can’t quiiiiiiite bring myself to reply with detailed instructions on where, precisely, they can shove their crappy pay & benefits** because yanno, burning bridges and all.
** srsly, stop talking about one of your major goals being “best place to work” designation, when you don’t have a 401 k match, and maternity benefits amount to, “Hope you saved up some vacation time!”
The “nice place to work” designation you slapped onto everyone’s home screen was a pay-to-play list and not at all an award. pukey smiley
I declined the offer. Scary, considering I have zero firm prospects right now, but … it felt good. It felt right.
Hey, good for you!
Waiting for you to post “Well, they’re offering me a ridiculous amount to come in two days a week because they’ve realized it’s the only way to keep things together til they find someone.”
Maybe she prefers being alone on the job because she can’t exactly eat the dead flies while you’re watching, now, can she?
Is her name Renfield, by any chance?
There’s a final LOL to this whole saga, and it’s too funny - to me, at least - not to share.
When I declined, my email included the following…
“… The pay was much lower than I expected, and any benefits offered to new hires are too meager to offset losing the small gains that my previous seniority had earned for me.”
The reply from H.R. was, and again, I’m quoting:
“… We’re disappointed, of course, and if there’s anything we could have done to change your mind, I’d love to know.”
I’m fancy with words, and great at shit like B2B and B2C, but communicating what’s inside my own head to others (e.g. “humaning” not to be confused with adulting) eludes me. But I feel as if I clearly gave not 1 but 2 reasons, did I not?
“Yer payin’ crap for this specific job, and company-wide yer benefits suck donkey balls just kinda in general.”
^^ was my intended message, but that’s from earlier, more therapeutic drafts.
Maybe you should ask HR if they have an opening for a reading comprehension specialist.
This maternity benefit thing reminded me of the all-hands meeting we had last month. Overall it went well, but in the Q&A portion someone asked about the possibility of offering maternity/paternity leave. The HR VP yakked all around lame reasons why they couldn’t and then justified it lengthily with stories about how she raised three kids while working at this company. (In other words, it was good enough for me, should be good enough for you, so shaddup.)
I have a new workplace rant. So we’ve been given the dictate to move to Agile/Lean software development. I am in agreement with this move, just to get that out of the way. We’re also getting coaching, which is a good thing. The bad thing is that all of the business analysts are also required to do non-software related work that we’re being forced to jam into Agile. Think contract acquisition or business proposal kind of work, and think long term planning. Like we document things our external customers request, and then engage in months to years of campaigning and consensus building to get buy in.
We’ve been telling the coaches this since day one and I’m not sure but they may have finally understood. The problem is that we just got handed a hard deadline (as in the stand up in front of 40 - 60 people and make a presentation kind of deadline) that is just shy of 4 weeks away and we’re all starting from zero on the legwork/research required to not embarrass ourselves. But the process of learning Agile - and cramming our non-software work into Agile - has been so painful that this week they’re doing more coaching. Which means that I have three days completely sucked up into meetings with no time to do my work. It also means I only have really 3 weeks to prepare for that presentation deadline. And yes, I’m one of the suckers who gets to stand up there in front of those people. The other two suckers are relatively new hires who have never done it before.
Cross your fingers for me that we get it all done in time!
One more, perhaps more of a question than a rant. So the product manager assigned one of our “resource managers” (just a people manager) to be the product owner for one of my scrum teams. For those who aren’t into Agile/Lean, the product owner is the person who prioritizes and grooms the backlog of work. This person is such a space cadet. She can’t keep two thoughts in her head for more than a minute. As a result she prioritizes a few tasks and then calls it done. Then we get to the sprint planning meeting which is supposed to be fairly quick, and we end up grooming the backlog together as a team, resulting in having to schedule another meeting to finish up. She’s just doing a bad job as PO. By comparison, in between all my back to back meetings today, I prioritized, assigned and groomed more tasks for the sprint than she did all last week. Why isn’t there a way to call out when someone is bad at an assignment/role and then assign someone else who will do it better? Ugh!
So this morning somebody quit by sending a mass resignation email to the entire company. The word fuck was used a lot; including in the subject line. Admittedly it was funny watching an entire office full up people all look up from their computers almost in unison. The really funny part is the way the email trailed off at the end it almost seemed like they were being pulled aware from their computer as they were typing.
Another interesting thing about this culture change that my company is going through: I’m taking advantage of it to fix things. Specifically, using it to call out poor behavior in a diplomatic and constructive way. The interesting thing about it is that so far I’ve called two managers out on their bullshit (tactfully, of course, and constructively).
They opened the door by requiring our entire team to attend a training class on how to give and receive constructive feedback. That was a response to some personality conflicts we had as we formed the team, some general bickering between my coworkers. That seems to have settled down but what the managers don’t seem to have realized is that a fair amount of the conflict is resulting from their own poor behavior. For example, one manager who lashed out in a very defensive way in a meeting (astonishing that she’d do that in front of witnesses, really), so I called her out on it in a private email. And today I requested a face to face 10 minutes in private with another manager. She had requested one of my work from home (for medical reasons) coworkers to report to the team every day that she’s working from home. That’s petty enough, but it was none of my business until my coworker did report that in this morning’s scrum meeting and that manager was the first and loudest uproarious laughing. It was unkind at best, toxic high school behavior at worst (I did NOT say that part) and exactly the kind of thing to cause conflict on the team.
I’m enjoying this so far (building my assertiveness skill), but if I report here in a month or two that I’m job-hunting again, you’ll know I overstepped. 
On the other hand it does seem like I’ve been doing an awful lot of managing up lately!
Any followup to this? 
I know; I was filled with envy for alphaboi867 when I read that. 
My office’s parent company recently acquired another company similar to ours, with the exception that the folks at the new office just love clicking on every single link or opening every attachment in every single email they receive. And if there’s one thing they love more than clicking links, it’s entering their user name and password when directed by any random prompt or web page. :smack: This behavior has prompted corporate to take action by requiring two-step authentication every time you log into your computer. Yep, even if you walk away for ten minutes and the computer locks itself, you still have to go through the two-step process to log in. Not sure how this is supposed to address the problem of oblivious employees falling for phishing scams though.
Bonus points for including a transcript of the email, or part of it, or even an “in your own words”… but we at least need to hear your coworkers’ reactions to it.
Ooh, extra super mega bonus if you get in touch with the ex-employee and pass on how/what they’re doing. I hope the answer is “Awesome! Already found a better job.”
We care, man, don’t leave us hangin’.
Well, I was just told essentially that asking questions means I’m incompetent.
I asked what I should do about something, and was answered, look for another job if you don’t know.