Our immunoassay autoanalyzer has several robotic arms that pipette and dispense samples, buffer, etc. Like any moving part, they occasionally need replacing. A clue is when they stop moving smoothly and start making loud clunking noises. The women who run this thing all day every day and are sensitive to its quirks, inform the service engineer (a contractor) what the issue is. This guy is incapable of allowing either a customer or a female to tell him something. He insists it’s the humidity in the room making the arm move badly and he can’t do anything until we get thr humidity adjusted. Now, we actually have six of these instruments and only one is malfunctioning! Nonetheless he insisted he could do nothing until we revamped the HVAC system -not a small matter, it’s an old building. And I heard him telling his boss on the phone how stupid we all were and that we wouldn’t listen to him when he keeps telling us what the problem is.
Well, we installed a building-wide humidifier and got the humidity up to where he wanted it. And guess what-the arm still didn’t work! He then informed us it needed to be replaced. Exactly what we told him two weeks ago.
So he did that while we complained to his boss about his unprofessionalism and his delaying our production. He apologized to me, but with a bad grace-I could tell he had been told to. I let him know I did not appreciate his refusing to listen to my techs when they told him what issue they were seeing and delaying getting our production because of it. He STILL tried to tell me it was the humidity. Fucker would just not admit he was wrong.
I quit.
My new job pays an extra thousand a month and presumably the boss isn’t a goddamn monster.
Good riddance.
We have the typical open-concept office. Only HR and the highest of the high-ups have offices with doors. There are several small conference rooms scattered about where you can go to have a private meeting if you want to. One of my co-workers who works with some sensitive data got HR’s blessing to commandeer one of the conference rooms and use it as his office. So what does he do? Leave his door open and put his phone on speaker so the whole freaking office can hear. I’m wondering how long that will last until HR puts a stop to it.
May your new job also not involve forced socialization on work trips. Amen!
The nice thing about medical contractors is that their bosses are very sensitive to warnings that their contract is unlikely to be renewed due to poor service. My last job was at a hospital where some equipment was serviced by a contractor because we didn’t want to deal with it. One of the techs had a habit of disappearing to the offsite parts warehouse for half a day when all of his predecessors was never gone for more than a couple of hours. The second time our boss talked to his boss he was promptly reassigned and we had another person working onsite.
ETA: Congrats Budget Player Cadet! You know the new guy is responsible for donuts the first day, right?
Our lab manager dumped an old bacteria sample down the drain this morning. I walked into the building and was immediately assaulted by the stench. Then assaulted by some awful scented Febreze (I believe it’s called Angel Butt) that someone used to try to cover up the stench. The smell migrated up to the second floor as well so someone else decided to try to cover it with yet another awful “air freshener”.
And none of this would have happened if the bosses would approve the damn fume hood we’ve been asking for!
My habit is to read the content here, and only check who’s posting if it’s ignorant or brilliant. I read this and thought “Wouldn’t it be great if this was BPC with a new job?” Bingo*! *
Huge congrats. If you’re like me, you should notice renewed patience and motivation as the old job recedes into history.
Thanks, guys.
Projammer, good advice, I’ll get on that. 
My company (with global reach) has been in the process of replacing Outlook with GSuite programs / sites. I only mention global so I can stress that this has been a transition that has happened in phases.
On conference calls, you’ll hear other locations bitch and moan about the difficulties they’ve had with the change. Beyond just a learning curve, people who switched over 6 months ago are still having issues.
I’m fairly tech savvy, so I thought it might just be a combination of the typical learning curve with the fact that these old dogs are having to learn new tricks. I’ve used GMail (for personal use) since it was in the Beta Invite phase, and I really like it.
We switched over last month, and holy shit.
Before, if I wanted to save an attachment, I could either just drag and drop it into the folder where I wanted it, or save it in a single step. Now, I have to download the image, and then go to my downloads, and then open it and save it to the folder where I want it to be. And that’s after scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the thread to get to the attachment itself.
Same thing goes for saving e-mails. Instead of just dragging it into the folder from the mailbox, now I have to print it to PDF and save it like that.
I’ve given up trying to organize my e-mails with the “label” system, so where before my Inbox was always empty but I had 100’s of subfolders that had the correspondence properly sorted, now my Inbox is a free-for all.
And don’t get me started on how many calendar issues our team has had with scheduling meetings or seeing who has / hasn’t accepted. It’s not uncommon to get 5 invites for the same meeting, because the sender isn’t sure if the invite has gone out.
The only reason I can figure out that we made this unnecessary switch is because the company was tired of paying the Outlook license fee for all the employees, and this was cheaper.
GMail is great for personal e-mails, but if your boss / company ever suggests switching to it, be afraid. Be very afraid.
But, but, but, It’s Free…
You have all of my sympathies, all of them.
Former company went the same way. Except that they did it as part of a sucking up exercise to Google. The thinking being that if we used their service they would use ours. It lasted a year before we switched back to Microsoft.
Its almost as if nobody at Google had ever worked in a corporate environment or had any understanding of it at all. There was much rejoicing on the day I was told I could stop trying to compose and format complicated docs using Google tools.
I’m responsible for two chunks of work, in a job where Chunk1 should be pretty much “copy from system A, paste into system B” and Chunk2 should be “copy from system A, tweak, paste into system B, tweak more”. It’s a company that has Inhouse Support: normally, while the business people tell us “I want to eat chicken”, inhouse are the people who decide whether the chicken needs to be roasted or fried.
We don’t have access to system A; need to keep asking for screenshots and extracts, and can you please redo the extract with these other filters. Well, ok, I’ll get paid for twirling my thumbs and playing on my cellphone. I’ve made a purpose to watch at least two educational work-related videos every day, at work of course.
And ChunkA has an inhouse person who’s responsive and professional and nice, but ChunkB is being treated like a hot potato. Contradictory instructions, nobody is responsible and several of the responses have been snarky enough for the Pit. Yesterday I straight up asked “ok guys, is one of you going to tell me how to cook this bird, or do I define it myself?”
I grow increasingly convinced that the time allotted for a meeting is akin to a bucket, and the actual duration of the meeting is like water purposed to completely fill the bucket and overflow just a little.
Doesn’t matter how big or small the bucket is; it’ll always overflow.
Because the company I work for wants to be “lean” and what not, they have been centralizing a lot of services. Things like HR, accounts payable, and master data have all be outsourced and we have been given a few “business partners” that work as liasons between the companies. This is going about as well as you might think and has had some perhaps unintended consequences. Since the outsourced companies only “execute,” all the administrative work has been spread out among everyone else.
Yesterday, I was trying to put in a change request to create a new spare part material number in SAP. As a Project Engineer, I’ve only done this once with a bunch of help from the now disbanded location Master Data group. I pulled out the manual and followed it as best I could, filling in the information needed to create the new material. A lot of it didn’t make sense but I did my best and based it on the previously created spare parts. I got the change request back today because I made a mistake. I go in to make the change and hit submit. The system tells me no errors were found, then lists a bunch of errors and closes the change request without saving my changes. Apparently, that’s how it tells you its angry. Why on earth does it do that?
“Hi, yes, nice change request. No errors found… except for all these errors. Also, I didn’t submit it or save it. Please do everything again.”
The second time, I checked it a ton of times, fixing errors that came up that seemed to mostly be due to my own ignorance about how this thing is supposed to work. I think I have it right now??? Who knows, the system said there weren’t any errors found but its not exactly trustworthy. And I don’t have anyone local to talk to about this so I just kinda have to hope.
Abso-friggin-lutely. It was certainly that way at the World’s Second Best-Selling Jet Airplane Company. Used to frustrate me: Okay, we’re done, let’s go back to our desks and do something productive. But nooooooooo.
I’m currently working on two parallel pieces of a project. One of my “reviewers” is great; he’d provided the documents he had on the subject, plus his own review, I did my own review without looking at his and we almost matched word for word, he’s been very responsive to all questions and requests… generally a very pleasant person to work with.
The other part is being a total PITA. Hot potato, nobody is responsible, the manager for that department lives in “lalala I can’t hear you” land, and on the reviewers part when I’ve had a response it’s been along the lines of:
Q: you tell me you want the pasta grilled, not fried, and to do it like in Site B, but in Site B they fried it. So how should I do it?
A (after the potato has gone through so many tables it’s at room temperature): oh yeah, in B we fry!
NO! RLY? You don’t say! I would never have noticed, never mind that the overheated oil can be smelled from here!
Today I got a review which says “I don’t understand why is 3.1 below 3, and 3.2.1 below 3.2…” Because that’s how document levels work, you illiterate imbecile.
So a password I need to access multiple computer systems (including our timeclock) expired Saturday (because of the weather I had to leave early Thursday & didn’t come in Friday). I wasn’t able to reset my password online because the system wouldn’t accept my security question answer so I had to call our parent company’s help desk. That was pointless because I couldn’t get to a person and the IVR kept insisting I very my mobile phone number when I’ve never been issued a mobile phone. :smack:
Eventually my manger has me email said help desk for a manual password reset, they immediately respond the email has to come from a manager “in the proper format”. I forwarded that to my manger to responded “I approve whatever Alphaboi wants”. So then they call me at my desk and give me a temp password so I can log-in and reset my password. While I’m doing this the help desk rep is reading scripting trying to educate me about using the portal instead of calling or emailing them. I stopped him to point out I need a working password to access the portal; he didn’t have any response and continued with his scripting. :smack: But I was able to change my password. Then my new password expired this afternoon and I have to start the whole fucking cycle over again. :mad:
Also a bunch of my team members keep making up their own email templates for escalated issues instead of using the ones that leadership created (& have all the info needed for the request), and violating HIPAA rules in said emails. And doing other shit that would take too much time to explain why it’s wrong to outsiders. On the good side I managed to surprise my urge to kill all day.
To the guy who did the “maintenance” on our printer yesterday.
I know the computer sends you a signal for its routine maintenance, so we had no idea you were coming yesterday. You’re a super nice guy and work quickly so you don’t hold us up and we appreciate that.
But.
None of us has a clear line of sight to the printer so we didn’t know you had left. Do you think it’s too much to ask that you stick around for 2 minutes and let us print something to make sure everything is working before you leave? I don’t know what you did to the printer, but it is convinced there is a jam in tray 2. There is no jam, but we can’t clear the message or change to tray 3. So the work of 5 people over several hours is piling up because no one can print. Our supervisor called someone to look at it but og only knows when that will happen. Thanks, dude.
By finally letting it out to play?
nm