Your business needs a go-getter, an employee that doesn’t just wait around until that lotion is used up. No, a motivated worker would recycle that container NOW.
And not where anyone might notice it, in the dumpster.
I’ve been having a pretty shitty last three weeks. My mom has been in the hospital and now a skilled nursing facility for rehab where she is apparently being held hostage so they can get that sweet Medicare money. But that’s not my rant here. I’ve been super stressed dealing with all of this and somewhere along the way I really hurt my knee and am in pain all the time (I’m seeing a doctor Monday). But that’s not my rant, either. I’m just setting the scene.
A new department has joined our division. They began work right before Christmas. The first time I encountered the new director she was carrying a armload of books and walked up to me and said “open that door”. I did and she walked through without another word. Alrighty, then. At our Christmas party she came up to me and demanded “where is your badge?” It was on my sweater, hidden by a festive jacket I had put on. I said “it’s right under here” and kind of laughed it off and she walked away. That pretty much sealed my opinion that she is an entitled bitch. Still, we exchange pleasantries in passing and I didn’t give much thought to it.
So today, just as I was getting ready to leave, she came up to me and said she would like to ask me a favor. Could I be friendlier to her team? They said I never smiled and she had noticed that, too. My response was “what?” When she repeated her accusation that everyone thinks I’m not nice I said “I don’t believe it”. Any interactions I’ve had with her team have seemed perfectly friendly to me.
I will admit that I did not handle this well. I felt blindsided and attacked. I got very defensive. I told her that my mother has been in the hospital, I’m stressed and have not been feeling as perky as normal. (And for the record, she did not offer a word of sympathy.) She still insisted that I need to change my behavior. I told her that she has only been here a couple weeks and she doesn’t know me. That’s pretty much where we left it.
So fuck. I am a nice person and all my co-workers love me. But I totally blew this. And I hate that. I hate that I let her get to me. Did I mention that she was sweetly smiling during the entire conversation? And now, goddamn it, I’m going to have to apologize to her and I really hate that. She will definitely cause trouble over this if I don’t. She’s a director and I’m just a worker bee. Nothing pisses me off more than when people misuse their authority to be assholes. So fuck, fuck, fuck.
Then can you REALLY call yourself a vegan?
I keed, I keed. 
Customer-focused MEANS “Customer-focused.” And THAT means that you recognize CUSTOMERS wherever they show up. Even if they’re within the same corporation as you, if YOU require something only THEY can provide, then YOU are THEIR customer.
Maybe you could bring up this point at your training session.
Next time I’m in there alone the tube of stank is going to end up buried at the bottom of the trash can.
I hate quarterly quarterly taxes. Why the hell do they work the way they do? Why am i paying for hypothetical income i maybe, hopefully, possibly will bring in? As a freelancer i have no fucking clue what my income will be for the next three months. I have a good target and a bad target, but last year my bad target turned into my nightmare target because i got very sick, two projects were delayed, and one was canceled. And that happenned AFTER i had sent the government a check for what i was confident would be my good target, leaving me maxing out my credit cards to get by until i found more work.
Why cant i just pay for the previous 3 months? You know, where i know exactly what my income was. Motherfucker,
Does that just make too much sense?
… you’re supposed to pay on budgeted income? 
My two options are “actual invoices” (which many people turn into “actual received income” even thought we shouldn’t yeah yeah) and “eyeballed received income”; eventually the yearly reported amount has to be actual received (which explains why my local Treasury doesn’t yell too badly when they find someone using this for quarterlies, as doing so makes our accounting easier). The idea of paying on budgeted income has just made my wallet run out of the room screaming. It might need therapy. Does anybody know of a good financial therapist?
The US has some really, really strange laws. And the thing that keeps surprising me about American Exceptionalism is that for some reason people invoke it for things in which you are in fact not particularly exceptional while never thinking about it on others in which you actually are outliers. I’m so sorry, Kinthalis.
For federal taxes, anyway, Kinthalis seems confused. You pay “estimated” tax each quarter based on the actual income from that quarter:
Then April 15 of the following year you reconcile your actual tax liability with the estimated payments you made.
You can also take advantage of “safe harbor” rules in US tax law, and pay estimated taxes based on the previous year’s tax liability. No penalties or interest that way, even if your income this year is much higher.
One advantage of using safe harbor this way is that you only have to do tax computations once a year, and you’ll know beforehand exactly how much you’ll need to pay each quarter for the whole year. You can even schedule all automatic payments for the year through the IRS website.
Pretty sure you need to be within 90%, same as with W-2 withholding. A quick read of the form does say that farmers/ranchers need to be with 60%, which makes sense since they are basically working in commodities trading with weather impacts, so those estimates would be much harder to make accurately.
No, Space Vegetable is right. You avoid any penalty if you’ve paid the smaller of 90% of your tax due or 100% of your tax from the preceding year. (There are modifications for farmers and for high-income taxpayers.)
Yes, but… you’re American, aren’t you? The way you guys view contracts and the way Spaniards view contracts are completely different, to the point where our expression for “under the table” literally means “without a contract”.
The one instance I know where that part of the contract was breached was eventually followed by the same bitch breaching the contract with the end-customer who’d hired her. And I can call her a bitch because I’m one of the people she claimed didn’t know how to do the job when in fact all she was good at was, precisely, convincing people that only she could do it. The usual procedure here is to say farewell, the end-customer people work to get the budget for the hiring (which depending on corporate structures may even need Mothership Approval from a different country), and they call the consultant once the no-contact period is over and if budget has been obtained, asking “so, uh, hi, would you like come to work for us again, this time with no middlemen?”
There’s some information I normally ask for within minutes of joining a project; people who haven’t worked with my part of The Big Database before are surprised until they see the amounts of data I’m talking about. The fastabulous procedures we have in this project mean that, having joined in September, I finally got the data last week; barely on time to load it all before the Big Testing Period.
Today I discovered a huge mismatch between several parts of the data. Turns out that this factory uses a bunch of ghost duplicates of their “normal” data and apparently nobody had noticed in the two years since it was bought.
So now I’m both in a hurry (because we must load the data for testing) and incapable of doing anything (because we can’t load the ghosts until a bunch of related stuff is authorized and/or decided). Yay.
Please Diosito, let my next customer’s case of craniorectal inversion be smaller. Kthxbye.
The training session went… well? They seemed to be willing to work with us on a lot of things but they also knew NOTHING about how purchasing worked here. It was absolutely astounding how much they didn’t know. I was just blown away.
And I was also appointed to person from our group who would teach them how we buy things. Yay.
But that way can lie madness. People like to swing the “I’m your customer!” mallet to attempt to get other organizations to do their bidding.
Kinda late to this, but: wow. Your director sounds like a rude bitch. That is not your fault. Kudos to you for being much the bigger person by not only not falling for that shit, but actually considering an apology. It would be an apology made by you on her behalf. Hope things work out.
So many conference calls today. At least with my wireless headset I can take bathroom breaks during them. Don’t judge me, I keep my microphone muted most of the time anyway.
Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk
Might be too technical for most people, but the nerds on here will understand my complaint…
My response:
What I should have said:
Meeting at work. One of my coworkers had been setting up his new phone just before.
Someone asked a question and the new phone piped up with “I am sorry. I need more information in order to provide an adequate answer. Would you like me to search for [concept related to the question] in the internet?”
Hon, “we need more information” is what several of us have been saying for months 
Since I was sent here to elaborate (from the minirants):
A few times I’ve had projects which had some sort of ghost warehouse. It appears to be commonish when a factory has an offsite warehouse: the stock is managed by the factory, but you still need to ship it to and fro. Often, consultants (most of whom have never so much as sat in a forklift in their life) will forget about that warehouse and the factory will need to keep reminding them. And, because moving things there needs trucks, you can’t just treat it the same way as the on-site warehouses. Usually it gets solved by the time we go live, but I had a customer where the factory people got to the point where, every time the people from the Mothership explained “the logistics processes”, once they said “any questions?”, the response would come in a coordinated chorus of “WHAT ABOUT THE PINOS WAREHOUSE?” That you must obey the Mothership doesn’t mean you can’t tweak their nose, specially when they paint themselves such a big target (warehouse-sized, in this case).
My current client is kind of peculiar in many respects. It’s “copy everything from this system and paste it into this other one, except when not”; process changes have been designed by a guy with a background in programming and one from costing. The first one is a Can’t Delegate type: any decisions taken without his input are going to be wrong, but if we ask for his input it’s “why you ask me this? I know nothing about [field]!” Uh, because you’re the one who’s been telling me I must follow a boiling process, exactly like the Frying-Pan factory (which btw doesn’t boil jackshit). The second one is one of those micromanagers who Request and Require that anything affecting his field (so, anything) be approved by him but who can’t bother be timely about it. Oh, and we musn’t bother the key users; there’s questions we’ve been asking from the beginning and received answers such as “boiling! Like Frying-Pan!” Dude! That’s NOT! Boiling! Unless you consider that deep-frying calamari equals boiling calamari, in which case ok, whatever and may your calamari always be cold, rubbery and tough. Oh and apropos of nothing: if you don’t know a word in English? There’s a high probability that the English word will not be identical to the German word except for capitalization. Moron.
So, anyway. Anything we do in these projects is supposed to be tested in multiple phases. Thanks in great part to Mr Costing’s delays, and in part to the project lead being new and afraid to stomp his foot when needed, our first, second, third and fourth round of tests have merged. Yesterday the key users were doing some production simulations and were surprised:
- to discover that while they make things, other people can ship things off
- to discover that the new magic program which packages and ships things in one fell swoop does package things
- and send them
- to discover that where they used to have 16 “warehousing locations” (not physical warehouses like the previous cases, just labels which don’t match any kind of physical reality), they now have only three
and declared that we must have a separate warehousing location for intermediate materials. “We add this one and substract this one, it cannot be in same warehouse as other things. It must be separate.” “Oh, actually, SAP doesn’t care. We put it under the raw materials label because that’s easiest for master data upkeep, if you want to change it we’ll need to update [bunch of stuff].” “It can be in the same warehouse with other things?” “Yes.” “But we always had it in another warehouse. Because we add and take out.” (That’s true of your final products too, these simply ‘take off’ in trucks…)
Their Quality setup is a thing of beauty, not. There are things which have up to three separate inspection plans: daily, weekly and monthly. There are days all three are done. BTW, they pay per result. And those three inspections? Identical. Same sampling methodology, same inspection methodology, same inspections with the same validity ranges. Oh, ok, so you’re paying about 36 times for 30 inspections. Nice!