Sounds to me like it’s that time of year to experiment with the properties of steam as they pertain to the neutralizing of Scotch Tape.
If I were you, I’d make use of that prepaid shipping label and send the entire box back to him with a note saying that you are neither Santa Claus nor the post office, and if he wants to give presents to people he can do it himself.
Can’t you just drop the boxes off at the front desk or in front of HR or something? When no one is looking? Of course not with the label or the box addressed to you. But it seems like you could make this someone else’s issue.
ETA: Otherwise, what Morgyn said.
But then we may not find out what was in the boxes. I liked the idea of opening 'em up, letting us know (and posting pics), and THEN dropping them off at the font desk. (Oh, with a note that the package got opened accidentally… perhaps by an anonymous postal employee).
But no matter what, we need to know what’s up!
Tomorrow I start week 3 on my new job. I’m going to be spending a fair amount of it flying solo - it’s just me and one other guy in the office this week, and between us we need to cover from 7AM to 7PM on 8-hour shifts. Only problem: I still do not have even a temporary key card to get in. Fun fun fun! 
I have the sweetest coworker you can imagine, and he’s driving me crazy. How in hell do you accumulate 20+ years as a tech writer by treating the computer as a glorified typewriter, not learning ¾s of the capabilities of the programs you’re using to create documents, and typing with only ONE FINGER? As an example, he won’t even use the cross-reference function in either Frame or Word. He types them in by hand and then forgets to go back and update them! He *says *it’s because he doesn’t like using the cross-reference feature, but I suspect it’s because he doesn’t really understand how to do it.
He told me a few weeks ago that he felt threatened by my competence with the software tools we use. This week we reviewed progress on documentation projects with our manager. I’ve produced a lot more documentation than he has, so now he’s feeling threatened by my production rate. I’ve been trying to teach him how to use our documentation software (FrameMaker, btw), and he’s seemed eager to learn, but Thursday he said that he’s falling so far behind he’s going to use Word because he can’t figure out how to use the stuff I set up to make life easier and more productive for us in Frame! Word sucks! It was never built to create and maintain long documents; he knows this. He got Frame before I came on board because of how badly Word was behaving. And now he wants to go back to Word because (you probably guessed it) it’s easier to use Word like a typewriter than it is to use Frame, even though Frame is far better suited for what we need to do than Word is.
<morose> I think I know one of the things he’s having issues with, and I’m going to try to address it tomorrow, but for heaven’s sake. He’s never going to learn how to use the program effectively if he doesn’t use it.
It shouldn’t fall on your shoulders. his supervisor should get him some training, even if he has to go to a weekend or evening class.
I’ve been this guy (even the sweetest part), and I finally gave in and spent 45 min. with a specialist over lunch hour.Suddenly I was able to do 500% more with the software (Blackboard… which I still hate, but now I can hate it while I’m getttin’ shit done).
Okay, so I clearly was not prepared for the reality of working on my new job. I assumed that such a large company would have its shit together when it came to IT support.
But no. It’s week 3, and I still have no way to get in and out of the building without getting a coworker to help me. This is a problem, because the stairwells aren’t “in the building”, so if I want to go to a different floor in this 3-story complex, I need a chip. Which I do not have. Because someone fucked up in ordering it. Because for some godawful reason they don’t order the chip before the coworker starts.
But that ain’t nothing compared to the email situation. Apparently, in september, the company outsourced its email server to a different part of the parent company. That’s… never a good sign, honestly - it puts an extra step between “requesting support for emails” and “getting support for emails”. But if the people at the parent company are competent and do their work in a timely manner, this is not generally a big issue.
Well, guess what.
The parent company support is not timely. It can take days or weeks to get support on issues that any competent IT team would be able to resolve in a matter of minutes.
The parent company support is not competent. In fact, I’ll go a step further - the parent company support doesn’t even qualify as “incompetent”. If you send them an email saying, “I need you to do X, Y, and Z”, they will do X and call it done. They apparently do this with such astonishing regularity and consistency that my coworkers have given up ever trying to get them to do a task with more than one step - instead, they open a ticket for step 1, wait for that to get done, then open a ticket for step 2. Keep in mind that these morons are also phenomenally slow. And if you give them that one task, they interpret it totally literally. If your email contains a typo, or even an obvious mistake, they will not check or correct it. They’ll just do it. Apparently one time, a coworker forgot to change an “XXXX@company.com” to “person.name@company.com” in the header, and as a result they actually changed the person’s email address to XXXX@company.com. That’s… that’s not “I’m bad at my job”. That’s “I don’t give even half of a flying fuck about my job, fuck you for trying to get actual work done”. That’s a motherfucking disgrace.
I love a lot about my new job, but this? This gets to me. This is the kind of shit that my old boss would have spent half an hour chewing me out over. Like, he’d fucking chew me out if I didn’t think ahead to “Oh, they’re asking for this step, so I also have to do these other steps not stated but kind of implied”. But here, it’s “We will only do one step at a time no matter what you say, and we will do that step exactly to the letter even if “to the letter” is patently absurd, except sometimes we will get THAT wrong too.” It’s actually kind of incredible.
What part of “credit/debit cards only, no American Express, no cash” is so hard that people don’t understand it? I prefer to do the “last cash” register line before closing so I don’t have to hear “But I only have cash (or"I only have my AmEx card”). Or even “But all I have is AmEx and cash. Can’t you take it?”
Since you like theguy, suggest to your manager that it would be worth it to the company to pay for some one-on-one training by a Framework expert. Then the expert can work with him on getting the basics down, and work with you on advanced features that you might not know.
Point out that a small investment in training (like 10 hours over 2-4 weeks) could give a significant boost in department productivity.
Oh, BOTH of you getting training is brilliant! That way it doesn’t seem punitive at all.
Today he tells me the issue is not what I thought it was, it was that he ran into issues with inserting graphics a couple weeks back when I was out sick and couldn’t figure his way out of his problems very quickly. We’re working through it. It’s not like he doesn’t have years of experience using Frame, but there was, I think, a gap in his experience between the old interface and a lot of the new features. His doc thinks he has Lyme disease and that is putting him under a lot of strain (especially since their initial “possible” diagnosis for his symptoms was cancer!). And he is apparently one of the people who has had cognitive difficulties associated with use of statins. He describes it as his brain being “fluffy”. 
I’m pretty much a power user; about the only things I don’t know how to do is writing scripts or using postscript codes in special frames. The latter is fairly esoteric, and there’s no real training available. Scripting isn’t what they’d call a frequent need, and there is, again, little to no training available.
The important part is that he agreed that we should both be using the same application to create documents and that Frame is the application we should use.
It’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit in my work area, and 83 degrees in the office of the one presidential appointee (out of the four we have currently) who least likes heat. I filed a facility request nearly two hours ago. When I followed up an hour later, I was told “Oh I thought that got fixed.”
It’s an old government building designed for lower occupancy, and it’s hard to maintain a steady temperature. When the sun shines the temperature rises remorselessly, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in pursuit of Sarah Connor. When the temperature drops, it takes hours before the building heat begins to catch up.
The heart of the problem, I think, is that we’ve been told not to call in temperature complaints unless the temperature exceeds certain extremes. Once the temp hits those levels, however, the mass of air in the building is headed in one direction (warmer or colder) and the climate controls cannot turn it around quickly. Only by perceiving a trend early and sending in a report before the temp gets too extreme can we maintain homeothermy – and that early action is what we’ve specifically been forbidden to take.
Hence most of the time it’s either waaay too hot or waay too cold ALL DAY and it doesn’t get fixed until after we’ve gone home.
Never mind that my very important clients are unhappy about it.
At least it’s a “business casual” workplace. I wonder if that includes “stripped to the waist and barefoot” like 17th-century naval guncrew.
Don’t bother calling building maintenance – you’ve been forbidden anyway.
Instead, call OSHA (or your state worker safety office) and report dangerous temperatures that threaten worker safety. They will respond, possibly by sending an inspector. Even if they just send a letter to your employer, that should get some response from them. [Note that OSHA guidelines for indoor office space calles for temperatures of 68-76 degrees F. Yours are well outside that range.]
I sent him an email saying that management could not accept his gifts and I was sending them back. The rest would be up to the individual.
He sent me and one of his other closest (ex)coworkers a $25 dollar gift card to Bonefish Grill (score!), a framed collage of pictures of the three of us working together, and a framed picture of sailboats that I took a couple years ago. The other co-workers got a variety of things that he thought they would like-snuggies, fishing gear, alcohol.
I looked at the stuff he was giving to the managers and it was the same sort of crap.
Pretty much everything that wasn’t alcohol or personal we decided to donate to a local orphanage.
One final thing was that he asked me to give the HR manager the card that was attached to the present. The card included a check for a largish amount of money (in the hundreds of dollars), which we think was the amount he stole that got him fired.
All in all a sad state of affairs.
Just to get a basic picture of if what’s going on here is “normal”.
Is it normal for a company to hire you, then not be able to give you basic shit you need to work (like, say, access to the helpdesk system) for more than three weeks after you’ve started? I’m honestly at a loss for words. I’m not exactly minimum wage here!
A long time ago, I worked for a imaging company that was NOT the big yellow brother, as a third party helpdesk drone. The path I had to take into the building was over a mile long, and involved a six story climb. I asked to use the entrance on the other side of the building, which was 100 feet from my office and only a 1 story set of stairs down. (Building was obsolete before the ADA went into effect) They couldn’t do it–seems there was no film to take the photo for the ID–the kicker was, THEY MADE THE FILM!
We shared a building with battery production, and each Monday we came back to desks covered with black dust. Change filters? Why would they want to do that?
Well, we have a new employee starting in January, and it only occurred to someone this afternoon to make sure IT is ordering a computer for him (big surprise, they weren’t). One of our managers has been waiting for a new computer for several months, and the new hire in customer service still doesn’t have full computer access.
Today was my last day working for AT&T after 36+ years. They sold our whole operation, lock stock and employees to an asset management firm. I still have the job as part of the deal, so that’s a plus. However, after more than half a lifetime of working for them, not a peep; no email, no phonecall, ***nothing ***from management expressing appreciation or even acknowledging my years of service. Fuck you, AT&T.
A co-worker called in for the week because he needed to make rent, which he intended to do by driving for a ride-sharing company.
He is no longer my co-worker.
I’m kind of sad about this, but mostly just bemused–how could he have thought not being available for any of his shifts this week would turn out well for him? (At least in terms of continued employment with the company).
I work retail, so no, we aren’t paid super well. He’d only been with us a couple of months, so I suspect the driving as a way to make rent had been his prior source of income. And frankly, as a co-worker, he was not great. An OK worker with some annoying habits. And apparently he’d been kinda feuding with our boss, which is just dumb.
But still, I’m always sad to see co-worker go, even when I think it was mostly a mutual decision.