You’re just about to leave the motel when…
“Hey, can you stay, we just booked people into 18, 21, 4, 12 and 6 and they haven’t been cleaned yet since the netballers left this morning.”
“The whole teaching staff is going to be trained in this new way of teaching reading.”
Translation: “Everything you’ve been doing up until now has been useless and it’s amazing your students learned anything.”
“The robot’s down.”
‘I did it perfectly and it doesn’t work!’
I get this from both my advisor and students. With the advisor - it comes up with pretty much anything computer related. With students - it’s usually in lab (most often electronics) and it just never dawns upon them that if it doesn’t work, perhaps they did something wrong. It’s so much easier to help people when they at least acknowledge that they are a factor in the situation.
enduser: I didn’t get my daily reports. Can you resend them?
me: *goes out to check the server. * It’s down. AGAIN. It crashes 7 days a week at no specific time, so for the next 3 hours, we manually transfer files.
“Yes, I just opened up a ticket…”
“Ok, what’s the number?”
“1293841290384-908z12kl9290384-908”
“Ok, I see that the ticket is not in my queue, you’ll have to call the queue that it belongs to.”
Repeat about 100 times daily.
phone rings at 7:09 am (we start work at 8)
“So, uh…am I in a little bit of trouble, or a whole lot of trouble?”
“Go on”
“You know that well you told me not to licence?”
“Yes”
“I did.”
Way back when I worked in fast food, there were lots of things I hated to hear. Just as my shift was about to end, a manager carrying the schedule sheet would approach me and say, “Joe Slackenoff called in sick. We need you to stay and cover for him.”
Back in my days of working as a retail monkey, the single most annoying phrase any customer could ever say to me was, “Do you work here?” Apparently, my NAMETAG with the STORE’S NAME on it wasn’t enough of a clue to these morons! :rolleyes:
At my present job: “We’ve had to make some more budget cuts and…”
I work as a systems admin for a regional educational service agency. We have a financial system that all of the area public schools log into and use on a daily basis.
The thing I hate to hear the most is one of our secretaries calling me saying, “Noone can get into the system.”
This usually means that my morning will be shot trying to troubleshoot where the problem is.
Yuck!
Yup, that’s the one. Just shift it to 17:29 (we leave at five thirty) I’ve been asked to put a (software) release together by a project manager bang on leaving time Friday (needless to say he didn’t have to hang around for it). This is not a five minute job, I had a restaurant meal booked in London, 75 miles away*****.
If you’re the last to leave any last-minute calls will get routed to you. I got a 17:30 call from my immediate boss asking me (as the only person in the department he could get hold of) to attend a Monday morning meeting at another office hundreds of miles away (3+ hours by car a bit less by train******)
If the phone rings last thing Friday - let it ring.
Not something you hear but. . . You come into work and there’s a flipboard standing in reception with the message “Everyone - meeting room 1 at 10”. This is how they announced the last two rounds of down-sizings. Not a good way to start the day, wondering if I’ll be joining you guys in retail etc. and having to deal with ::Hammer Horror style scream:: the public :eek: :eek: :eek: You poor bastards.
*****I’ll let someone else describe the British motorway system
******And the railways
Not completely work related, but I am required by work to get an HIV certificate every year to renew my work visa.
The clinic leaves a voice mail Friday night, “This is the xxxx clinic. Please call us Monday morning”. The person has that grandmotherly, slightly worried, but caring tone of voice. Nothing else is in the message… Gee, thanks for that. I hadn’t planned on having fun that weekend anyway. Not that I had been doing ‘much’ 
that should have caused me to worry, but ya never know.
I call them back on Monday. They want to know whether to send the results to me, or my office. :mad:
Why the %@#! don’t people say “please” anymore? When people say “I need you to do this,” it sounds to me like “gimme”. Sometimes I answer " If you want me to do something, ASK me." Self-centered jerks.
“I have a special project for you…”
An actual one from this week: “The new California regulations prohibit our technicians to do anything with quantitative tests, so technologists are going to have to take over doing RNA preextractions.” AAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHH!! Damn you, California!
“HFEs aren’t working multiplexed.”
Hmm. Something tells me these aren’t going to resonante very well with most readers. Here’s one that’s a bit more universal:
“XXXXXX is still here,” where XXXXXX is the name of a certain person.
Any greeting that expresses fervent, heartfelt gratitude that I’m there. Whenever anyone actually says they’re happy to see you, it’s because everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket. ICU will be crammed full, as will the isolation ward we use for overflow ICU, and sometimes we’ll have animals in portable crates set up in the treatment area. The whole place will be a shambles, nothing will be restocked, and we’ll be massively behind on treatments. Alternatively, things will be fairly caught up, but we’ve got three dystocias, two possible parvos, and a bloat on the way, and the lab equipment is all screwed up.
I also hate it when any of the doctors or our head techs say they need to speak to me in private. Apparently I’m the only tech on the staff with enough spine to actually tell someone when I have a problem with something they’re doing or not doing, so I and a few others have gotten blindsided with reprimands during some of these private conversations. My first thought is always, “Oh shit, what did I do? Who have I accidentally pissed off?”
Oh, and don’t even get me started on “Well, my [fill in relationship] is a doctor/nurse/EMT/candystriper/hospital administrator, and she said that I should…” Yeah, my husband’s a doctor, too, and I’ll be the first to tell you he knows dick-all about veterinary medicine. Let’s make a deal: if he/she won’t tell us how to treat your cat’s lily toxicity, we won’t tell him/her how to treat your hypertension. We also really hate medical advice from people who “watch Emergency Vets all the time.” The one I really hate, though, is the medical advice from backyard breeders. We had one puppy hospitalized for parvo, when the owner called and said her breeder had advised her to take it home and feed it ice cream, because the IV fluids we were giving would make the puppy sick. The vet on duty actually told the woman, “Hey, if you want your puppy to die, you go right on listening to your breeder.”
{very tense man-voice} UMmmmm Yes this is Coucilman Everyman in BigCity? Well the boys down at the City Shop were doin’ a little cleaning and there’s been a… (muffled explosion in the background) um… a small spill."
Heard this morning, 8 a.m. :
“We could both lose our jobs over this.”
(Even though I had covered my ass on “this” a month ago and should have been in the clear.)
"Hey, we want to start using (insert flavor-of-the-month distance learning/course collaboration software here). How many courses can you convert for us by August?”
“Fed Extension 6:30, 6:45”
The earlier we get that call, the more we are likely to get, and the longer the extension is likely to be.
“I had an accident on the way to the bathroom.”
“So and so just threw up in the breakroom.”
“I don’t have my bus ticket. How am I going to get home?” (Especially wonderful at 4:00 P.M. after said person has been here since 8:30 A.M.)
“Did you mail my check? I didn’t get it.” “Yes, it was mailed to <insert address>.” “Oh, that’s not where I stay, that’s just the address we tell people.” AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!
I work with people with developmental disabilities and those are just a few of the gems I can get during the course of a day.
“Timmy’s mother just called. He has (pick one) head lice/scabies/ringworm/chicken pox/pink eye/or some other nasty contagious disease.”