TPTB spent last year investing a lot of time and money improving the building: adding on to the materials lab, putting new cabinets in break room and lab areas, installing new appliances in all break rooms, etc. For some reason, the new desk for the front lobby didn’t arrive until yesterday. It’s a very nice looking piece of furniture, and is certainly an improvement upon the fabric-covered beige monstrosity that used to greet visitors…but it’s small. Small enough that they had to locate a potted plant to cover the footprint of the old desk. Like the desk it replaced, it’s essentially a corner desk, with a 90° angle; however, both sides of the old desk were considerably longer. The new desk is also barely deep enough to accommodate a monitor and keyboard. In the words of the receptionist (who also works with time cards, payroll, and office supply inventories, among other things), the desk was designed for someone who does nothing but answer the phone all day. Whoever gave the OK to buy this desk either forgot to measure first, or clearly has no idea what this lady does all day.
Hey thanks HR for letting us know we could take our laptops home and work from home today if we wanted to since Hell has frozen over. Too bad you didn’t send the email out until well after 5pm yesterday when nearly the entire company had already gone home!
“Take the Browns to the Super Bowl.” 
We deal with lots of date codes where I work. One in particular that keeps popping up looks like 3700. Some people look at this number and say “three seven zero zero”; others say “thirty-seven hundred”. According to the test technician who showed up in my office today, these people must be referring to completely different date codes. :smack:
Nope, this isn’t a misunderstanding about American English.
Two of my co-workers are driving me up the wall.
CW1 -
"Bill"splains everything. All the time. To everyone. To men. To women. To his superiors. To the people who designed and built the thing that he’s explaining to. If there’s a meeting and Bill is there, Bill will start explaining things. I’ve mostly learned to live with it. But this week, I really needed other people to talk; Jim and Sally had made a decision, one that Bill had no way of knowing, and I needed to know what decision they had made. And Bill started in. I said “I really need an answer from either Jim or Sally.” At which point, Bill started whining/yelling “I can’t even ask a question?” (BTW, no one who ever says that is just asking a question.) And then kept bulldozing through his explanation of something tangentially relevant which did nothing for me because I already knew what he was saying and didn’t answer my question. I needed Jim or Sally to answer. He finished with, I kid you not, “I don’t know why we had to go over that in this meeting.” We didn’t. He just wouldn’t shut the fuck up and listen instead of needing to talk all the time.
CW2 - Cannot accept the fact that he is not perfect. We have 8 problems to go through. 1 of them is because he made a mistake. Instead of working on solving the problem, he keeps interrupting, needing to prove that it wasn’t a mistake and if it was, it wasn’t his mistake, and if we actually looked at it closely through a certain lens, he is right in August, at 2:32 pm when it is 80 degrees. (Of course, as we need this to work all the time in all temperatures that doesn’t matter). He will not let it go in meetings. He will not let it go in email. To be clear, no one is saying “John, you fucked up.” (Though he did. We all do from time to time). The fuck up is not why I’m pissed. I’m pissed because I can’t deal with the repercussions of the fuck up because instead of working the problem, he can’t admit it exists and can’t let anyone else discuss it without interrupting loudly and longly and attempting to prove himself perfect.
It’s been a week.
Ask him how he woiuld write down (or key in) each of those date codes.
That may be part of the problem… All the paperwork has the date code already typed in to prevent the use of any other date code on this job.
Rant from yesterday: I had a very frustrating day, culminating in another department’s manager yelling at me because my department’s priorities don’t align with his. One of my coworkers knew this, and looked particularly disheartened when she came to inform me that yet another department’s manager needed to speak with me immediately. Well, fuck. So I went to see the manager in question… It turns out that he had picked up a variety of trinkets on his last trip overseas, and was summoning people one at a time to select something from the stash. Nice! But my coworker thought it was absolutely hilarious that I had assumed this manager wanted to speak to me about some problem with an order. Way to break my trust in you, coworker. :rolleyes:
I’ve probably said this before, but I’m so very tired of other people trying to do my job. I was out of the office for several days for a health issue, and I came back to an email from a coworker who’s working in a project with me trying to take over my part of the project. She has consulted with friends and family members [!] and wants to totally redo everything I’ve worked on. I wanted to turn right around and walk out the door. I would so love to hand the whole project over to her and let her go her own way, but I can’t do that. We’re having a meeting tomorrow, and I’m sure that’s going to be tons of fun. I am not looking forward to it.
Why are you bugging me about this work that’s been sitting unfinished since MLK Day? You put me on Special Projects at the beginning of December, remember? At which time I specifically asked when I was supposed to do that other work and you gave me a non-answer!
I have a meeting at noon today. Signed out a conference room for it.
Today at 11:00 I hear noise in the conference room so I go in to see what’s up.
It’s our Deputy Director setting up for a meeting. Here’s how the conversation went.
Me. Do you have the conference room signed out? Because I have it from 12:00-1:30.
DD: I think you know the answer to that. (I do know. He never signs it out.)
Me: Well I have a meeting in here in one hour.
DD: How many people are in your conference? Can you use the smaller room?
Me: 7. How many are in your meeting? Can you use the smaller room?
DD: I’m going to have a thousand people on the webinar.
Me: How many chairs do you need? Because I’m going to be in here from 12:00-1:30.
Then I turned and left.
Motherfucker can’t figure out how to use his computer and can’t figure out how to tell the Admin to sign it out for him.
Fuck him.
That’s when you ask “How do you think your webinar will sound if people wander in one at a time from 11:55-12:10 asking some version of ‘Oh, I thought the _____ meeting was here. The schedule says it’s in this room. Let me check. Yes, Outlook says it’s here. Do you know where it is?’
Is that really the impression you want to give out to the thousands on your webinar? That you don’t know how to reserve a conference room and you’re not important enough to have someone do it for you?”
I’m a stickler for meeting etiquette also. I’ve noticed that some of our senior execs are still operating under the “we’re a small company, so we just do things ad-hoc” mentality. I’ve scheduled meetings with people only to have them no-show because the VP called them together for a chat two minutes before my meeting. I try to be respectful of people’s time and not schedule too many meetings, so having to reschedule when this happens makes me grind my teeth a bit.
It’s budget time!
My boss calls me in to discuss my time allocation for the next fiscal year. I like my boss (not the deputy director I bitched about earlier).
Boss smiles and says “Let’s see, I have you allocated for 60 weeks next year.”
I looked it over. “You forgot the Indiana project. I’m supposed to put 7 weeks into that.”
“OK, so 67 weeks.”
They wonder why I get so worked up about hiring someone.
And no, I won’t put in that many hours. I just go home. Which my boss knows and is ok with.
Do you get paid for all 67 weeks?
Also, have I just shown that I bill on a time basis?
An attorney finds himself at the Pearly Gates talking to St. Peter.
Attorney: I don’t have any memory of what happened. How did I die?
St. Peter: You died of old age.
Attorney: Old age!? I was only 45.
St. Peter: No, that’s not possible. According to the number of hours you’ve billed clients, you had to be 103.
No. I get a set salary.
If I am exemplary I get a better performance review and a better raise - if we are getting a raise. Last year that netted me $8 per MONTH. :rolleyes:
Still trying to wrap my head around this one…
Last week, I took a box of stuff that needed to be returned to corporate out to shipping. I showed the guy in shipping the old packing slip, letting him know that the parts needed to be returned to this specific person at the corporate office. Not a problem, he said.
This morning, I was surprised to receive a package from corporate. I opened it, and found the pile of stuff I thought had been shipped back last week. Hmm. I went out to talk to shipping, and the guy seemed to be under the impression that it was a brand new shipment. As far as I can tell from the UPS tracking info, I think he thought the old packing slip I gave him was a return label. I’m still not clear on how UPS processed it like this though.
I reused a box for shipping Christmas presents one year, and missed taking off the old label.
Just before Xmas, there was a knock on the door and there was the UPS guy with my box (you know how old this story is because the UPS guy waited for me to answer the door).
I was confused, and showed him the label sending it to MN. He showed me the label sending it to MO. We stripped off the old label, and he put it back in his truck. Unfortunately, it was never seen again - no delivery in MN, and everyone up there though I’d blown them off.
I sometimes wonder how often it ping-ponged, since it took about two weeks to get back to me.
Yep, I’ve been through that before too…I had made sure to remove every label before taking the box back to shipping. Based on the otherwise very detailed tracking information, it looks like the box just sat on the truck for its second journey, and never made it to the local sorting facility. Supposedly it’s on the way back to corporate now (for real this time!).