Today we came in to an e-mail which is has parts excerpted below:
<<I am writing to express my continued overall disappointment with the way that MY PROJECT uses the HIS DEPT facilities. Earlier in the week while waiting in the coffee room to use the coffee machine, I witnessed a MY PROJECT team member spill their sugar on the table and then walk out.
We wasted ten minutes at the start of our 2:00 meeting yesterday, cleaning the conference room of food scraps and re-arranging tables and chairs. And of course, the kitchen now had food trays shoved everywhere.
Honestly, I hope your project goes live early so you can claim success and all leave the building. In the meantime, I have a large barn where you are welcome to have your luncheon meeting. Perhaps the barn animals would not notice the mess.* >>
Now, there is no excuse for the conference room being left icky. I don’t know what happened there, as there is usually someone responsible for cleaning it up. So that is upsetting. And I heard this e-mail is out of character for the writer. But likening us to barn animals?!?
The best we could come up with was to print out pictures of various barn animals and put them on our doors.
The sad part is, he and his department have no problem helping themselves to the leftovers in those food trays. I felt petty, but I took back the cookies I had left in the lunchroom and offered them just to our project, so that his department wouldn’t scarf them down. :rolleyes:
Or, apparently, for leaving the leftovers behind as a ‘kind gesture’.
Taking them to the staff lunch room might be a kind gesture, depending on where you work. Leaving them behind is never a kind gesture, it’s just an act of rudeness.
“I shared my leftovers with you” is no excuse not to clean up after yourself. That absolutely would not fly at my workplace, and I can’t imagine too many places where “I left you these used, dirty dishes - which you’ll now have to dispose of/wash - as a favour” would be acceptable.
You’ve noted that an angry email is out of character for this manager. He’s brought your attention to some specific occasions where his department’s conference room has been left in an unacceptable state. It’s fairly clear he’s run out of patience with an ongoing problem that he thinks *your *team should have noticed and rectified already … which they would have, if they were using his facilities with any sort of respect. That means returning it to the state it was in when you arrived - if not better. Chairs should be pushed in, tables should be wiped clean (NOT onto the floor), rubbish should be put away, all food should be removed. End of story.
The fact that the response to his email was to mockingly decorate doors with barn animals instead of responding in a reasonable fashion, deliberately exacerbating the situation, pretty much clinches it. Your team has showed a lack of respect to his department by misusing the facilities, and now they’ve shown a lack of respect to him personally.
**
Your team needs to grow up.**
Thanks for the responses. We didn’t actually decorate our doors, we were just thinking of ways to respond immaturely to an immature e-mail. The fact is we all have equal status as employees and to call it their area might be a stretch. It’s disconcerting to know people don’t want us here in general, when we all work for the same institution and we had no control over where our offices were put.
Even if it’s a common area, leaving it in any state other than tidy is rude and inconsiderate. If it’s an area he and his team were accustomed to exclusive use of before your team came on the scene, it’s bound to be inconvenient for him at a minimum to work around that even without needing to tidy up after your team whenever he wants to use the area. The fact that you admittedly leave the area messy when you’re through, leaving him and his team the chore of cleaning up after you is way beyond thoughtless. In other words, I think you guys might have made yourselves unwelcome.
From his email, it sounds like you guys have been regularly leaving the conference room in a shambles. I’m having a hard time blaming him for being annoyed about it. He’s not your maid. It also sounds like you guys are temporary features of the facilities - guests, if you will. Even if you’re also valued parts of the organization for which you work, you’re only temporarily using the facilities that are permanently associated with his department. Politeness dictates that guests leave things in the state they found it.
The only reasonable and polite thing to do in the face of his email (if what you’ve stated is true and there’s nothing else going on) is to immediately, sincerely, and abjectly apologize for being inconsiderate. That’s what adults do when their mistakes are pointed out to them.
Is it really an immature email? Sounds like he’s had to put up with a lot from your project team in the way of untidy habits. Leaving a conference room in that kind of state is just rude, you should at least have someone look around to ensure that it’s in the state you’d like to find it next time you come to use it.
If you’d turned up for a conference and had found the room in a mess and you know it was his dept that left it like that, what would you have done? I bet you’d have fired off a similar email, especially if it wasn’t the first time you’d been left clearing up after someone else.
No, you need to go and apologise to his team and make sure your crowd learn how to treat others with a bit more respect.
Don’t believe for one moment I condone messes left for other’s to clean. Neither do I think the email was a good idea. They should just tell them to their face to clean up the mess they made a minute ago, and plot revenge secretly in the bathroom escalating the war that has started. After all that’s what makes the workplace so pleasant for everyone there. Follow the red instructions for a bad outcome.
Sorry, gigi, but I have to agree with the others. I have similar issues with my office area - we have to share some spaces with people who are not with “our group” and yes, we all work for the same company and should share, HOWEVER, I’ve denied them use of our facilities after they f-ed it up. Sorry.
You all need to apologize. Sincerely, and immediately.
If this was the first warning or email on the subject then the last sentence was out of line. If it was a follow-up to a previous request thelast line was probably appropriate. If it is an email response to numerous requests, then it was too kind.
Gangster Octopus covers everything perfectly. And, I have no patience for the mistreatment of common areas in the workplace.
That said, the original e-mailer sounds like a complete horse’s ass. I got nothin’, but hope the thread reaps some amusing replies in the spirit it was started, gigi.
It was definitely the first one. As I mentioned, there is usually someone assigned to clean up after the lunch meetings and I am disappointed this didn’t happen this time. To the best of my knowledge (and word travels), there haven’t been incidents like this before.
It’s also tough because it is a common area but the lunch is supposedly just for our team (although the leftovers do become available ). That’s bound to make the people who have been here all along resentful. We’re on a special project but I don’t think any of us feel any entitlement about that, certainly not to trash an area.
But things like leaving sugar behind could be perpetrated by anyone. In fact the same gentleman emptied the coffee machine and didn’t refill it. This is the kind of petty crap that comes to light after an e-mail like that.
The shit has hit the fan today as a few people mentioned things that have come up missing and everyone is chiming in with lost lunch and worse stories. Security is being alerted as some stuff was taken from locked offices. :eek:
I still think the barn thing was a little over the top. :o
The leftovers are taken into the lunch room and an e-mail goes out to let everyone know they are available. They stay there until about 6:00 when our (the project’s) big boss cleans everything up before she goes home.
Hi user, thanks for the heads up. To check your email, I need you to send me a message. Don’t reply to this message, but create a new one from scratch so I can see that it’s working.
-User
Original Message:
rummunkey@placeofbusioness wrote:
Hi user, thanks for the heads up. To check your email, I need you to send me a message. Don’t reply to this message, but create a new one from scratch so I can see that it’s working.
I apologise; I misinterpreted the wording in your initial email. I see now it could have gone either way, but I didn’t notice that on first reading.
I know the feeling. Because of a massive shortage of desks I ended up being put in an office with a team completely unrelated to my area of work, and literally the furthest possible distance from my own manager. For a couple of weeks I definitely felt like an interloper, but it’s been a year now and I’m such a fixture in ‘their’ area that I even got told I had to join them for the end-of-year lunch today.
So it does get better, given time and a general resistance to provocation.
You (by which I mean your team, not you specifically) have to accept that they were there before you and their way of doing things is the way you have to do things. Once they’re content that you know how to follow their rules and are respectful of them, they’ll be more flexible in their outlook.
(Humans really aren’t much different from the other social animals when it comes to their ‘packs’ - except that you can generally rely on them not holding you down and tearing your throat out … well, except metaphorically. )
Yes, it’s tough. I feel like I want people to like me and barring that, to bear me no ill will. It’s hard to be disliked simply for having joined this project! Not that there’s an excuse for what he was upset about, but I’m sure it was magnified in his mind because it was “Them”!
If that was the first mention of the problem, then the last line was out of line by him. He sounds like sort of a pain in the ass from the tone of the email, but it could have been frustration over an ongoing problem, ya know?
Maybe he’s the territorial type! Lord knows we have them at my office. The lady who sits next to me is still pissed (over a year later) that the firm moved me to the desk next to her (which was empty and she was using it as auxilliary space.
Now, there is no excuse for the conference room being left icky. I don’t know what happened there, as there is usually someone responsible for cleaning it up. So that is upsetting. And I heard this e-mail is out of character for the writer. But likening us to barn animals?!? 