I think I’ve shared this one before, but it sounds like a good time to trot it out again.
At a hospital I used to work at I arrived one morning to a report that a water line had broken in a ceiling above one of our computers. When I arrived to assess the damage I found out that it was actually a sewage pipe that had broken and flooded the department. DIRECTLY above one of our workstations. So I gloved up and borrowed a couple of biohazard bags and bundled everything up. I was just thankful I didn’t have to handle disposing of it all because we couldn’t just drop it off at the local e-recycler with our usual delivery.
Last Friday, our busiest day. I clock out at 5:40 to catch the 5:45 bus. I clock out.
On Sunday, my register is off $100 and change. I am furious. Everyone knows I do not make those types of mistakes. Permission has to be granted from the top man in charge before I’m allowed on the register.
In reviewing the cash register’s receipts, it’s discovered that at 5:47, an employee using the universal code goes on my register, rings up a huge order, and reports the customer paid $100 in cash, and the rest on a credit card.
Go to the videotape. It clearly shows me leaving at 5:46 without going on the register. The person who did this is a new employee who did not realize they were being taped, and no money is shown changing hands.
I am still furious. And they universal code has been disabled on my register. To get in, you have to use my code. GOOD!
If I started delineating the fuckery that’s going on at work right now I’ll be here indefinitely.
I’ll make it short but sweet: Have the chance to change departments. Managers of both are toxic in their own ways. Coworkers in one department are absymal in that they’re either too unmotivated, too bossy, or too “helpless” to do the most mudane of duties. Coworkers in other department are so overburdened with the work load that they’re lucky they can look up every so often. TPTB is encouraging me to stay with the abysmal coworkers “because there’s opportunity”. What’s unspoken is that “We haven’t been able to hire an assistant for that department so we turn to you but you have to show us you truly want it.” The money would be nice but supervising those coworkers would be enough to make me want to shoot myself. The overworked department supposedly doesn’t have enough payroll to have me on a FT basis. Hmm.
My company recently received a drawing and a 75-page design calculations package from a vendor. The typical process is for engineering to review the entire design package, send it to the customer for approval, then send approval to the vendor once the customer has given their OK. This project is one I think I discussed earlier in the thread… there’s a small issue in that the customer’s design specification violates the Laws of Thermodynamics, so (understandably) our vendor has issued everything in draft form until we can get the customer to tell us what is actually acceptable for their system rather than what they want.
Yesterday, the project manager approached me and demanded that I issue the design package to the customer for approval. I told him I would be glad to, as soon as I reviewed it. This didn’t set well with him or his manager, who both wanted the document released immediately with no engineering review, so his manager came over and bitched out my supervisor. My supervisor decided it would be fine to send the document to the customer with no review, since it was just a draft. Whatever. I made sure all 75 pages were marked (rather than just the first page, as the vendor had done) and sent it on its merry way.
Turns out that this customer won’t review drafts…they won’t even open the document. :rolleyes: Oh, and I had to practically beg the project manager to send me the most recent revision of the calculations.
I’m somewhat eagerly awaiting the kerfuffle that will erupt in customer service when our dear customer actually reviews the proposed design and realizes that it’s not exactly what they asked for, because then our customer service manager will show up to raise hell with engineering, and someone will get to explain to him why hot water won’t cool hot air, that my company has proven on paper that the customer’s plant will run just fine without this device, and that it’s entirely possible that the customer has had a completely useless device installed for decades.
Tomorrow the coworker I’ve been covering for at work comes back after a 3-month FMLA leave. She has to be put back in her original position even though the boss really wanted to keep me in it because coworker had been unexpectedly missing 1 day of work approximately every 1 to 2 weeks for quite a while now (the FMLA leave was necessary due to an acute injury, not related to the reason for the frequent absences). So this kind of sucks. I was enjoying the work in a way, even though it is kind of repetitive and not all that exciting, really. It just kind of feels weird to be “kicked out” of it after at first being told that I might stay in it. Now I will be relegated to a substitute when/if the coworker’s frequent absences start again.
I and a couple of other coworkers really worked hard to get me trained for this. The work is not that complicated but you can’t just walk in and start doing it, either. It took some real effort on all our parts to get me up to speed, even though the work is similar to what I already do.
I’m all for workers’ rights and FMLA is one of the very few we have in the US (Trump is probably coming for it next once he finds out it’s a thing), but at the same time it DOES suck not only for the employer but for the employees who have to cover.
First day back at work after a weeks vacation; I had to reboot by computer 4 times, but eventually got a new mouse from IT. :smack: I’m already planning my next vacation.
We had someone out for 6 months on benefits. Company policy is not to backfill as long as the person is still on the payroll. That meant the rest of us had to change our shifts and work extra weekends to cover. Since he was a contractor, he was let go when his benefits ran out and it was another 2 months before the company hired a replacement. It was a drag but that’s what happens when the company has minimal staffing.
And now I’m the one who’s out on benefits for a couple of months. I’m damn glad I have company and state benefits to cover my paycheck during that time. My coworkers might rightly gripe about the extra work, but they can take it up with management.
(Related rant: It’s been two weeks since my surgery. Not a call or even an email from my boss to ask how I’m doing.)
I’m in the security biz, and it used to be that the holidays we get overtime for if we work them(I think there are about 5) were also days we couldn’t get vacation time for. A little while back they expanded that to exclude from vacation plans the entire weeks that include Independence Day, Christmas and New Years. Recently, they threw in holidays we don’t even get paid time and a half for. The new “No Vacation Time” list includes:
The whole week of New Years Day
MLK Jr. Day
Washington’s Birthday
Memorial Day
The whole week of Independence Day
Labor Day
Columbus Day
Veteran’s Day
Thanksgiving Day
The whole week of Christmas Day.
If you’re out on FMLA, your boss might not be allowed to call you. I’m not sure if that’s part of the law or just on a company-by-company basis, but when our people were out, all communication had to be between HR and the employee, not boss and employee. I guess it could look like the boss is pressuring the employee to come back.
I was on FMLA three months last year, at the prompting of my Company’s HR people, not my boss or the owners and leaders of the Company. My explicit instructions were that I would communicate with the HR manager and her representative only. However, my boss was the one who brought HR into it; he, also, was instructed to go through HR if he wanted to communicate with me.
When I was out, recovering from surgery, I called in to work, to let some fellow employees know how I was, and ask how things were going.
Then they hesitantly asked if they could ask a work-related question. So I said sure, and spent about 20 minutes on the phone explaining how some programs worked, and where they ought to look for that problem. They were very grateful.
So I told them I was just laying in a bed, bored as hell. Call me if they had any questions I could help with. Except that if our conversation went on for a half hour or so, I might fall asleep on them. So then they called every day or two. Sometimes with a question, sometimes just to fill me in on the latest office gossip.
I had the good fortune to have 3 TIA’s while on a business trip for the company’s annual training meeting.
The last thing you want to open your eyes to is your grandboss, her boss and the Uberboss. My boss had managed to get himself canned, or he would have been there also. They were willing to move mountains to keep me happy, probably figuring that it was cheaper than getting sued.
So I’m about to get back from a two-week vacation and my boss and the other senior IT staff member start in on this whole spiel in our shared group chat about professionalism and that we should keep working hard, and how he doesn’t quite understand how we get all our work down with all the time we spent on youtube and twitch and whatsapp web. This was clearly a stab at one or both of us junior IT staff members, as we were the only other people in the chat. It’s also stupid, passive-aggressive bullshit - if you have a problem with how we use downtime at work, why don’t you talk to us about it?
It’s also profoundly unfair - there has legitimately been a lot of downtime for us, because sometimes, when working as IT support for a company of this size, there is downtime, and we aren’t generally assigned large projects we can work on in that downtime. So our alternatives are bullshit busywork (why yes, I’ll spend another afternoon in the sweltering heat recounting the uncooled IT storeroom that nobody except me even pretends to care about 99.9% of the time) or finding other ways of occupying ourselves while we wait for support tickets.
One of them made a big gag about how we never ask the boss for other tasks - which is straight-up bullshit, I ask so often that it becomes annoying for the higher-ups, because (and they know this) I am super fucking anxious about this kind of shit. I have some serious imposter syndrome shit going on, and I am constantly worried that I’m not doing enough, that I’m forgetting some important task, that my work isn’t good enough (the fact the only feedback we ever tend to get from the boss is “that’s not good enough” doesn’t help).
I’m not even back yet and I already wish I had stayed in Maine.
Two weeks ago my work laptop got some system updates and rebooted. When I logged back in all of the user profiles were deleted. Public, Administrator, and of course the most important one, mine. And because I work from home, there’s no network drive to have everything backed up on.
Today there was another update and reboot. I’ve been looking at the splash screen for an hour now and I’m pretty sure it’s not going to come back.
I am amazed that Micro$oft has yet to be hit with a huge class action lawsuit for the steaming dumpster fire that is Windows 10 and it’s required updates.
