C’mon, people! Nobody’s hoarding plastic forks at your work? (classic Shredder Guy reference, look it up, whippersnappers)
My work’s been less dysfunctional since my financial person said I can retire any time. 
I suppose I could regale you with tales of all the make-busy administrative AOTW* bullshit I haven’t been doing (but, to be honest, that’s been going on for years…).
*Acronym of the Week
Well, I spent 14SEP - 27OCT on FMLA leave, but I DID encounter a bit of douchebaggery last night.
Last fall, I put in for annual leave for the week that includes my 35th wedding anniversary (24NOV - 30NOV). While I was at it, I noticed that the week encompassing Thanksgiving was also up for grabs, so I put in for that, too (17NOV - 23NOV).
So, last night, Tommy comes up to me with a pile of leave requests, all filled out and ready to submit. Tommy asks me if I’ve cancelled my leave requests for the last two weeks of November, and explains that he “needs” to take off November 8-9, and could I cancel my leave for those dates so he can put in for them. Confused, I walk with him to the calendar posted with the already spoken-for leave dates, and show him that my leave dates do not coincide with what he told me he wants. Well, what I think he told me he wants. His Vietnamese accent is really difficult to decipher sometimes. I told him “Sorry, I wish I was in a position to help you out,” and go back to my work area.
Forty-five minutes later, my supervisor comes around and asks me if I had really cancelled my two weeks of annual leave in November. :eek: “No!” I tell him. “Tommy told me that you had cancelled them, and wants me to approve his leave requests for [what appears to be every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in November], but I can’t if you’re gonna be gone those days.”
It’s a little annoying. If he had bothered to confirm that we both understood what we were negotiating for, he might have found me amenable to his request(s). I might still give him some of what he’s asking for, but he needs to understand that I intend to let kaylasmom have a say in this. So now when I show up there on Wednesday night, we’ll need to start from scratch on this whole thing. I’ll probably want to know what he’s trying to accomplish with this.
I foresee hurt feelings from him on this.
I have a bone to pick with the bathrooms at my workplace. Every single one of them has a motion-sensitive light switch. You don’t turn it on or off manually, it turns itself on. And turns itself off.
Except some of them are really fucking bad at noticing that you’re still there, and have a timer of something like one minute.
Look, I know I take a little longer than average to do my business. My gut is kinda wonky and my diet containing entirely too much hot sauce probably doesn’t help. But c’mon, guys. There ain’t a bathroom in the building where I haven’t had to wave my arms like an idiot to get the lights to turn back on. :mad:
Now if they only had a methane detector…
Hey, while we’re on the subject of work restrooms… If you have 10 minutes available to do your business, check your email, text the kids, and call your friend, you can spare an additional 5 seconds to make sure the toilet has flushed properly – that is, there’s nothing left in the bowl but water – prior to exiting the stall. :mad:
Also, what’s up with the suspiciously brown splash mark that has appeared on the wall next to one of the toilets? The walls were just painted last year. What are people doing in that stall??
I’ve honestly kind of given up on complaining. Nothing seems to change here. Congrats on your new job though!
I do have one complaint for today though.
I’ve been working on improvements on one of the filling lines for the past two years. This filling line has issues partly because it was poorly made and partly because the product we are filling and the containers we are using, both factors outside our control, are just technically very difficult. This morning, they crushed some of the cans in the capping portion of the machine. I get a call to come take a look and, by the time I get out there (not 10 minutes later) everything is cleaned up. What am I supposed to do with that? I’ve asked them time and time again to leave me something, anything. Take pictures, hold onto the cans, leave the mess for the few minutes it takes for me to get out there so I can see what actually happened. There’s nothing I can do if there’s no evidence of what happened. Its like they are asking me to investigate a murder but they’ve cleaned up the crime scene, burned the body and all the witnesses can say is that the guy is dead.
http://www.bullshitjob.com/title/
Does anyone here have an actual job title that can be found amongst those options on the above site?
No, but only because the stuff I have between “Senior” and “Consultant” isn’t in zwei 
I recently got a new job, moving away from the dysfunctional place that I kept posting advice for (hooray!). It’s all good so far, except for one small nitpick moan: the culture seems to be that you take your lunch break whenever you can, so they always schedule meetings any time throughout the day. Which can also mean you don’t get a break and just eat in one of the meetings. Ick.
I don’t just need to eat, but I also appreciate a mid-day break from work and coworkers.
Can you put a daily meeting/appointment on your calendar that blocks out lunch (and call it something else)? Hopefully people will general honor your busy notification for that time slot.
“Don’t bother me please; I’m in an important meeting with this sandwich…”
I have a friend who regularly does that. He’s said that if not, people will schedule him for meetings at any time. (He works as a higher-up in IT for a global company.)
You’d be shocked to learn that he has a standing meeting on Fridays from 3-6. 
The great client I had at the beginning of this year included several people with daily standing meetings; six of them had a 1300 to 1500 meeting every Friday in the Corporate Meeting Room. After they finished, the CMR would smell suspiciously of beer* and contain unusual amounts of crumbs.
Yes, I may do that after I wait a bit to get an accurate feel of the culture. I don’t see many people eating in meetings, so blocking out time is likely best.
Also after thinking about it, it’s not eating that I need as much as introvert-recharging time around mid-day. I’m just fine eating while working at my desk, so it’s just meetings that wear me down.
I need that, too. At the last ad agency I worked at, I’d always take lunch from 1-2. Absolutely everyone else were gone 12-1, so I’d get an hour of uninterrupted work time (where I got SO much done!). Then, I got an hour-long break from everyone else, because no one could tag along or suggest a “working lunch” meeting.
Each of my projects tends to be from a different agency; there’s a few I’ve repeated. Years ago, the agency I was working for rolled out a New! Nifty! Snazzy! time-reporting system which had, shall we say, a few bugs. I wrote to my agent detailing a bunch of things that either creaked, were difficult to figure out, just didn’t make any bloody sense, and a funny that someone had apparently put in for testing and forgot to take out before go-live. He thanked me, as most people were saying “this is shit!” but not how; note that one of the things we are sick of in our own professional side is users who say “this is shit!” or “it’s not working!” without giving details :smack:
Having recently worked for that firm again, I can happily report their system is a lot smoother now. Also, when one of the other companies in the subcontracting chain required some documents their system wasn’t prepared to handle automatically, the agency already had a system in place for that. The whole reporting thing was as painless as I’ve had it.
The agency I have now has just rolled out a New! Nifty! Snazzy! time-reporting system. The contract, the emails, every piece of documentation and every instruction received from them indicates that if someone further up the subcontracting chain has their own time-reporting system, the system closest to the end client is the one that should be used. I did take a look at the agency’s timesheet system anyway and holy fuck* but do they blow a whole herd of goats. The agency is in the UK and the reporting system assumes so is everybody; the banking details have required fields which do not exist for bank accounts in the European Banking System such as, gee, mine! That’s just one detail of many, but I’d say it’s kind of an important one.
Yesterday they emailed us saying we have to use their report. I wrote back that one, according to the contract no we don’t; two, anyway I can’t fill up information which does not exist; and three, I could make the mail longer but hey it was a holiday and I didn’t want to spoil it for myself.
YOU need me a lot more than I need you, you bloody morons. Right now you’re in the column labeled “do not want to work for them again”, and come Monday I’m talking with the team lead (whose company is the one that pays you for my services, and whose timesheet is the one I’m supposed to use according to your own bloody contract you imbeciles) and explaining that if this doesn’t get fixed I may need to give notice. Cos I don’t know about you, but my momma’s daughter doesn’t work for free.
Many sympathies my dear.
A company that I was previously employed by had a decent time/ticket tracking system, but some very moronic policies required in using it. Foremost being that if you have 8 hours on the clock, you have to have 8 hours logged to tickets. This lead to some “creative accouinting” type entries. On the phone telling someone to turn their printer off and back on? That’s gonna be a half hour. Walk down the hall to replace the keyboard? Hmm… I left my desk so that took an hour. Everyone created tickets for themselves for “administrative overhead” ie bathroom and coffee breaks.
The department director once related that he had headed a conference call that lasted about an hour and several of the attendees had logged a full 8 hours for it.
What good is a system where it’s practically a requirement to enter bogus data?
Garbage in, garbage out.
I have a small follow up for my last rant, and it is mostly positive. I spent literally all of yesterday babysitting the line. I watched nearly every can that came off. It ran beautifully… except for that one can it didn’t cap that I ran back through the capping portion of the line that was rather dented and I didn’t catch… :smack: I caused it to crush 14 cans of our most sticky product. Good job on my part.
Today, though, there have been no complaints. They are even following my recommendations. It’s almost like they are awknowledging that I know what I’m talking about.
At my youngest brother’s job and since they implemented a time-reporting system:
Everybody works exactly 8 hours, everybody does nothing but work during those 8 hours. The contents of the coffee machine are clearly being drained by goblins and the toilet paper just spends itself. The Junior Controller offered to call an exorcist on the coffee machine and was told by the Senior Controller there is no budget line for one (read: Bro and his immediate boss).
One of the first paragraphs in The Firm (early John Grisham, decent legal thriller) details how the goal of the lawyers was to spend 10 minutes each on 6 different clients each hour. Because time is rounded up and billed in quarter hours, you’re billing an hour and a half every hour.
My rant is that back when I was billing 60+ hours a week (and hit 80 hours for three weeks on a big deadline), my boss said “I’m just not believing that you’re really working all these hours.” I got mad: “Because I’m coming in at 6 and getting three hours in before you show up. And I worked til 2 am last night!” “Well, I just don’t see that…” Idiot.
Epilogue: I realized I’d never get to know my kids if I kept that up, and gave three days’ notice (to take a job where they only required 25 hrs/week in the office. Yay!) Details upon request…