New and Unimproved Workplace Rants

The BBQ Pit
1861

Family lives more than a couple of hours away from me, and so with my old job, I used to just take off the whole week of Thanksgiving and Christmas for vacation.

However, being relatively new, I don’t have as much saved up, and so I arranged it that I would drive up to the family’s yesterday, and work remotely today and tomorrow. Also, to avoid the rush-hour mess yesterday, I worked 3/4ths of my usual job-length, and would make it up today and tomorrow.

Well, I deal with government officials. So, imagine how many e-mails I’ve had in the past 8 hours. And, so I don’t worry that people feel I’m “gaming the system,” I’ll be logged in for another 2 hours, and will probably be doing the same thing tomorrow. It’d be one thing if I felt like my presence was required, or if I could take vacation (certain benefits haven’t triggered yet), but between this being the end of the year, and the majority of gov’t officials basically telling me that nothing would be done until January because a lot of people with whom I would deal were voted out a few weeks ago, so they have even less motivation than they would around Thanksgiving / Christmas…

Granted, I know I’ve been somewhat spoiled with my prior arrangements, and people would kill not to have to be in the car for a (typically) 5-hour drive during one of the busiest times of the year, but my old system worked, dammit.

Stay the whole week of the holiday and drive back on Monday, when the majority of the commuters have already endured their slog home, half-asleep on turkey and mashed potatoes. Now, I’m going to have to wake up early Sunday to try to avoid my 4-hour drive becoming an 8-hour trip.

Yeah, my diamond shoes are too tight, I know. I just really miss my old arrangement. (And it looks like I’ll be doing it again over Christmas.)

1862

That should’ve suppress. :smack: In any event I finally got ahold of an actual person at the help desk. It took a awhile for him to get that I couldn’t access my email so sending an email wasn’t an option. Then he wanted me to use my personal email; which would be a huge violation of company policy. Then he kept trying to get me to accept a callback and insisting he need to do further research to escalate. I refused, and just told him over and over again that I’m not letting him off the phone until he fixes it. My manager was listening and found it very entertaining because I started to sound like a creepy calm serial killer. Finally he was suddenly able to do something he insisted was impossible and unlock my account on the phone so I could reset my password yet again. So far it’s stuck.

1863

We have been hit by the “lean” bug again.

When I came in this morning, everyone was frantically searching their records and SAP for vendors. See, while I am a project engineer, I have been given certain administrative tasks because I’m good at computers and the company decided that it was better to spread these around rather than have them be someone’s job (see post 1854 for details on that). When my computer was done doing updates, I was able to see what everyone was panicking about. Turns out, someone in procurement has decided that they want us to give them a list of all the vendors we use, right now, today, because, reasons, and that they may delete from the vendor database anyone we aren’t using.

Well Fuck. It’s my job to add vendors to the database when we need new ones and this rando in procurement is like, “Hey, why don’t you quickly make this list for me. Better not get it wrong or you’ll have to re-add anyone you missed!”

My first idea was to go to our system that lets me search vendors and to try to pull up a list of all vendors for our company code… Well, for some brilliant reason, I can’t search that way and I can’t export the results to a spreadsheet. So, instead, I made a list of all the vendors I’ve touched, 40 vendors in 8 months or so, and added it to the lists everyone else was making by pulling their PO records. I still don’t know if we got everyone on there but I’ll be paying the price if we didn’t!

Yay large companies. They never do anything for stupid reasons ever, do they?

1864

Heh. Getting people to Clean Up The List Of Vendors Damnit is one of the hardest parts of any SAP implementation, I’ve had a few instances where I helped the Purchasing guys by crosschecking the list of vendors against itself to eliminate duplicates (companies bought by another one, or which had moved and the client had the two records as different vendors…).

I’ve also had a few which insisted in treating certain products (which were made differently and had different specs, costs and prices) as a single one because “we must not have too many products!!!11!!!” and apparently none of the headless hens running around knew what did that mean. Those hens usually could not define “product”, for starters. That’s always fun, specially if you’re Production (aka the people who make products) or Sales (aka the people who sell those same things).

As in so many things, wisdom is in the middle.

1865

We honestly should clean up the vendor list. But we shouldn’t clean up the vendor list by emailing random people and telling them to make a list of vendors you use, right now, have it done by the end of the day, dang it.

Maybe Procurement could, I don’t know, maybe send me a list of vendors and have me check them and maybe give me more than 5 minutes to do it.

However, today is just gonna be an infuriating day. I also coordinate MOC tracking because, reasons. I don’t mind it too much but this site is also kinda bad at MOCs because we’ve used the process not to document changes but to ask Engineering to Do Things. We have a ton open because they weren’t actually changes but project ideas. However, corporate has decided we must use this new MOC process and here’s this new tool, start using it now. Our existing system actually worked pretty darn well (when used for changes, not just proposing projects), except that it was paper based. The best part was that MOCs were reviewed by a comittee and documentation was always put in one place. Now we have to use this new system with basically no training. I was invited to a training on MOCs 16 minutes into the hour long training and it tells us all about this new procedure of how MOCs will work except that I cannot tell how it supposed to work with the new software they have told us to use. For example, they listed off at least 7 roles in the procedure, but there are only 4 roles in the software. WTF. Also, they didn’t make the software robust enough to prevent you from putting the same people all 4 of those roles sooo, great.

I’m so close to losing my shit right now. So freakin close.

1866

I don’t think they’ve ever removed anyone from our vendor list…I’ve seen some truly ancient names pop up during searches. So you think it would be a piece of cake to add a vendor, right?

Me: “I need to have XYZ Manufacturing added to our approved suppliers list so I can order a product for a new project.”

Purchasing: “Have we used them before?”

Me: :dubious: “No.”

P: “Why don’t you buy from ABC Manufacturing, isn’t that who we always use for that product?”

Me: “We’ve never bought this product before, and I’ve already checked with ABC – they’ve never heard of it.”

P: “Doesn’t [fellow engineer] Bob use ABC Manufacturing?”

Me: “Yes, but he’s ordering a different product for a completely different application.”

P: “Why don’t you ask ABC Manufacturing to make the product for you?”

Me: “ABC doesn’t do custom orders.”

P: “So do I need to add XYZ Manufacturing to the approved suppliers list?”

1867

You’re going to need to get 6 competing bids before we can add XYZ to the database.

kthxbye.

1868

DON’T DELETE STANDARD PARAMETERS FROM YOUR SAP SYSTEM, YOU BLOODY MORON!!! That you don’t need it right now (or think you don’t) doesn’t mean your next factory won’t.

There is no such thing as a judge who understands what an enormous pile of imbecility that is, and internet access in jail blows goats.
There is no such thing as a judge who understands what an enormous pile of imbecility that is, and internet access in jail blows goats.
There is no such thing as a judge who understands what an enormous pile of imbecility that is, and internet access in jail blows goats.
There is no such thing as a judge who understands what an enormous pile of imbecility that is, and internet access in jail blows goats.
There is no such thing as a judge who understands what an enormous pile of imbecility that is, and internet access in jail blows goats.
There is…

1869

Day one of my new job. I am cautiously optimistic. This place seems to be running at a pace where I can stand out. That’s not a compliment for anyone involved, but it is very good news for me!

1870

When I open a detailed trouble ticket, don’t start off the interaction by emailing me asking me for information that I’ve already included in the ticket.

Network tech: What is the MAC address?
Me: MAC address was supplied in the ticket. It’s xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx.

This isn’t some help desk flunky reading from a script. He and I are both well trained and well paid professionals who are employed in our respective fields of expertise.

1871

There’s your problem. MAC addresses don’t have “xx” in them.
:slight_smile:

1872

Thing I said at work today regarding some new software that was apparently custom made for us:

Yes, that is what that word says, but it is not what they meant. The trick is to just go by what they meant, not by what they said. All these words mean nothing. And they don’t have any relation to any other system onsite.

1873

Ah, but, do we know what they meant?

Because I’ve been going crazy trying to find these “Production Orders” people here kept talking about and it turns out they meant “Sales Orders”.

I’m reasonably sure most of the people who work in either of those two functions worldwide would be between surprised and offended that anybody can confuse the two words.

1874

You go to your help manual or similar and find it in the glossary. Where if you are very lucky you’ll see something like:

Furble - See Wurble
…
…
…
Wurble - See Furble

At which point you still won’t know what the term means but you have discovered a synonym thereby doubling your knowledge.

And if you’ll excuse me I have a glossary I haven’t touched in 2 years to update :o.

1875

Oh, it gets even better…I was surprised this week when my supervisor assigned an electrical part to me. (I’m mechanical, and the order was signed off by an electrical engineer.) Turns out that he did it because someone along the way forgot to let the manufacturer know that we needed to approve a drawing first, and apparently I’m better equipped to handle the resulting shenanigans. Now the parts are here, we have no drawing, and management wants to ship before the end of the year. Oh, and the manufacturer needs about two weeks for drafting, which is putting the end of this project way too close to my end-of-year vacation. Speaking of which…

I’m supposed to move into a new office before the end of the year. YAY!! Except the guy whose office I will take is really dragging his heels about moving into his new office, which is quite a bit larger and has a window. I’m wondering if his manager has ordered new furniture for him – he doesn’t have much in his current office, and the furniture in his new office is crappy. I’m really not too keen on other people moving my stuff while I’m out; I really wish he would at least acknowledge the impending move and provide some dates.

1876

I’ll be honest with you. I’m still not entirely sure. But what I do know is that, during a training on the new process that is supposed to go with this new software, they mentioned a website where they have all the support documents. There I found some quick reference cards that FINALLY connected the real-world roles to the software permissions. It was really effing confusing. (I have 8+ real-world roles and 3 permissions I can assign in the software. We were all scratching our heads at that one.)

Btw, in the draft procedure they wrote for this new process, it does not reference the software at all. Only in these cryptic quick reference cards that no one talked about and that I only found because I’m a snoop and that’s what I do.

Now I get to write our site-specific procedure for this new process. I also need to spend about a gazillion dollars before the end of the year, write four appropriation requests, and finish designing some valve guards. I’m drowning just a little here.

1877

Hey, if the gazillion dollars doesn’t have boyfriends yet, I can invoice abroad! :smiley: That solves an appropriation request as well!

1878

Background: Back in February a guy I worked closely with for 10 years got fired. No one is saying why but rumor is that he was falsifying travel expenditures. The managers have been told not to discuss it with anyone. I still have some minor contact with him - mostly texts about college football. He has occasionally sent what I assume are drunk texts about how he misses working with me and a couple other people.

Today I received a couple of boxes at work. They are filled with individually wrapped presents for all of his old co-workers. Including gifts for the Executive Director and HR manager who fired him. In these boxes he had a card to me asking me to hand them out to everyone, with instructions that if they don’t want to accept them they can be sent back - he even included a prepaid shipping label.

Now, I like this guy ok. We traveled extensively and worked long hours together. So I know him pretty damn well. But this is not OK! There’s no fucking way I’m taking a present to our ED and saying, “Here, looks like Bob sent you a gift. Even though you fired him.”

Fucker did not need to put me in this position!

1879

What is glossary?*

One of the things that A Certain Dude did not like about my BBP (Process Documentation) was “the structure”. “Why is 3.1 after 3. and 3.1.1 after 3.1? I do not like this!”

He’s recently sent a document he does like from a previous project. Spacing varies wildly, everything is left-aligned, title formats are set randomly and the index (which hey, at least exists) is written manually. The page numbers don’t match; well, the earliest ones do, if you set the paper size to Legal. We’re in Yurop and A Certain Dude is German, but apparently he hasn’t noticed or does not care about the mismatched index.

Small wonder he didn’t like my document. The one he liked would have been rejected by my High School teachers and we hadn’t even seen a computer except in movies.

  • I do know it. But do you think Mr. “I do not like this!” does?
1880

Spend the gazillion dollars by designating the production of the site-specific procedure as a project requiring the services of a consultant. Then awarrd the consulting contract to yourself.

Even if it costs you your job, hey, free gazillion dollars, right?