Heh, hearing things like this are what make me want to work in a large faceless corporation
We’ve had the odd nutball here in the university, the baddest cow-orker we have on record did have what you might call a proper reason to be a cow-orker. She and her husband were on a return flight from holiday, plane crashed (in a rather infamous incident, it slid to a halt 100 odd yards from a motorway) but because they were at opposite ends of the plane, she suffered minor injuries but he died. Unfortunate, but as another staff member said after she left, we’re not doctors, if she needed help she should have got it instead of taking it all out on us.
Same thing happened to our company. In 1989 we were 10% CAD/90% hand drafting. In the next two years those percentages had reversed. We had a drafting department and lost almost half in that period because they were unable to adapt. Many of our engineers handed off the drafting and were unaffected, but I did my own so I had to learn or perish. It’s too bad, really; we lost some good people, but then again so did the buggy whip fabricators, and the steam engine manufacturers, and the slide rule makers, and…
We are moving to a new office; two months from now on Memorial Day weekend. Fortunately our bosses are giving us weekly cattle prods to get our files in order, toss out junk, in general get our lives in order. Nevertheless, I’ve been throught this before and I know that the last week will be absolute chaos.
Y’know, you’d think that would be a DUH moment, but it can happen. One place I worked at, we got moved to a different building. The Millworkers’ Union was supposed to move our stuff. Why, I don’t know, but we were told we had to box all our stuff, put our new cubicle number on it (we were given these early so we could do so) and then leave them by our old cubicle so they could be moved.
Computers were tagged, too.
Computers were put on the loading dock, to be sent in the next shipment, on Friday night.
We come in Monday, and lo and behold, no computers.
Our boss gets on the phone to find out why we have no computers.
After several hours, he discovers that the movers had, in their infinite genius, * thrown them all in the dumpster.* Twenty brand-new (as in less than a month old), $50,000-each HP-UX workstations. Gone. Took us three weeks to get them all replaced.
I’ve always been more than a little paranoid about someone-who-is-not-me or someone-who-is-not-known-to-me moving my stuff, after that little incident.
My mom was hiring an assistant one time and the various candidates were told to go to the HR department. Mom then went over and picked them up to take back to her office for the interview. When she met them she would just say "I’m here to pick you up for your interview.” and leave it at that.
So, mom goes to meet one woman who starts treating her like crap. “I’ve been waiting here for 10 minutes! My time is valuable! You better reimburse my parking! blah, blah, blah” generally being a snotty bitch. Imagine her face when mom showed her into the office and said “Lets begin the interview.” and sat down on the other side of the desk.
hehe. A couple of months later the (unhired) woman was featured in a newspaper article about how hard it was for qualified candidates to get work. <snerk>
I thought that you were referring to Kenn Borek Air,, who actually would have been able to fly her come hell or high sleet. (They were the guys who did the Antarctica rescue a couple of years ago.)
Yikes. That makes the incident we had a couple years ago seem trivial. Some application servers were being trucked a couple of states over as part of a datacenter consolidation project. Not some little mid-range Intel boxes that you could toss into the trunk of your car either - these were Servers with a capital Sun, err, S. IIRC, the ones in question were a pair of E25Ks worth about half as much as a house in California.
Server arrives at its destination and is rolled into its new home. Hey, where’s the disk array? A few phone calls later, it’s determined that the server movers failed to load two six-foot tall racks of disk drives out of the old datacenter. Nothing was lost or damaged, but the project was held up for two days while the disk arrays made their way to the new datacenter.
And this is why all of our customer-facing systems have hot backups.
My boss used to be on search committees for some of the higher-level management positions and I always asked him what kinds of clothes, shoes, jewelry, etc., the candidates wore, just out of curiosity. He’s the kind of guy that doesn’t notice that kind of thing so it wasn’t until much later that I learned that one of the candidates (female) for CFO wore 4" red stiletto sandals. At a relatively conservative institution. In New England. In the dead of a snowy winter.
One day a coworker and I were coming back from lunch and got on the elevator. The only other person on it was this blonde babe with a great ass. We were definitely checking her out, and were not terribly subtle about it. She got off on our floor. Ten minutes later, we were called into someone’s office to “meet the new supervisor.”
I still remember one fellow who sent my employer a resume a couple of years ago. We received over 100 resumes for one, entry-level job, so I sent out a form letter to 70 or 80 people thanking them for sending resumes, but telling them we weren’t interested. One day I came back from lunch to find that one fellow had called twice demanding that I tell him why he was rejected. He called back a third time and, this time, on getting me, reamed me out for rejecting him and, when I pointed out it was ultimately my boss’s decision not mine, told me that my name was on the bottom of the resume and I’d better tell him why we rejected him. My boss walked over to my desk during this call while I was trying to deal with him and heard parts of the conversation. After being thoroughly taken down, sworn at, and yelled at, the conversation ended and I pulled his resume. It turned out he was vastly overqualified for the job we had, as in 10 or 15 years experience for an entry level job. The really good thing about this? The job he was applying for was sales rep! :eek:
It’s amazing some folks manage to support themselves!
I don’t ever grade rants. I think it’s silly…but this rant deserves a 10 out of 10, especially the comment out the shell game.
As for the woman…this is why I go out of my way to be nice to people. I can handle my own travel arrangements & hotel accomodations, but just in case, I like to feel like I could call whoever it is up and they wouldn’t be thinking :rolleyes: but be ready to help me.
Wow, that’s pretty opposite of the experience I had. When I worked at a language school, we used to get resumes and cover letters written in pen or sometimes pencil or magic marker. On wrinkled notebook paper, with the little tear-holes still attached. With little correct grammar. And usually misspelled.
They invariably were applying for positions as English teachers.
Actually, I’d be very surprised if the computers landed in the dumpster. I’m willing to bet that they were sold or taken home as “something that fell off the truck”. I think that the movers should have been held accountable for the computers. Who knows, the computers might have miraculously turned up.
:eek: Wow. I just finished reading that and the associated link from Wade Nelson. That’s a sheer frickin’ miracle on wheels. Or wings, as the case might be. Thanks for the link.
I always thought it was an example of what you can do when you are sufficiently motivated to do something correctly the first time.
More on track … the move got fucked up. Of course. Very entertaining, but I’m pooped. Tomorrow I’m going to attempt to get away from all my troubles by going off-planet for awhile, but when I get back maybe I’ll continue with the Weekly Weirdness.
It looks like quite a few of us are playing musical chairs at work.
My coworkers and I are moving to another quad on Monday. It’s just down the hall, but it’s still a hassle. Fortunately the managers provided boxes and a cart so we don’t have to carry anything heavy (the techs will handle our computers).
Most of us moved our stuff over to the new quad today. One of my coworkers e-mailed me this morning in a panic. She’d planned to move her stuff in the afternoon, but she didn’t know if someone else would be using the cart at 3:30. Did I think someone else would be using the cart at 3:30? Oh, God! What if someone else was using the cart at 3:30? What would she do?!
I told her to go over to the cart and lick the handle. That way she’d be sure to have it all to herself.
(She’s actually a friend, but she has panic attacks at the drop of a hat. It’s my job to put each crisis in perspective.)
(They were the guys who did the Antarctica rescue a couple of years ago.)