Things you've been surprised you've had to explain at work

In My Humble Opinion
423

When I was working for a defense contractor one project was a one-off, classified space computer. It needed to undergo oodles of environmental and other testing so one of the side jobs was building a rid to monitor and control it. It was a two-bay 6-foot high rack on wheels with off the shelf components on it like a digital volt meter, a printer, a keyboard and some other stuff I forget.

The engineer who’d designed it and assembled it announced it was ready to try powering on and I quipped, “I’ll be standing over there, then.” Ka-chunk went the big switch on the side, Ka-pow (with a flash) went something inside the rack and everything went dead as the wall breaker tripped. “Geeze, [name], I was only kidding. What happened?”

It turned out he had the mistaken impression that, on the mains, neutral and ground were the same. Luckily the main box was not plugged into the rack but there was a couple days delay while we ordered and replaced a couple items. Never send an electronics engineer to do an electrical engineers’ job.

424

You’d be surprised how many people are surprised at the register on the
last one……I’ve had to explain to young salespeople multiple times that a 30% + 10% discount is NOT the same as a 40% discount — and I think once I honored an underquote when a salesperson made that mistake.

425

The first one is a ~17% discount - not as good a deal as it perhaps looks like, but not bad.

The second one is an additional 6%, so yeah, that is pretty much aimed at folks not knowledgeable in how fractions work.

426

That depends on how you specify/word it, so you have to be careful.

427

An additional 14% off, where I used to work.

428

Ironically I would implement that as:

First 30% off brings you to 70% of original price
Second 20% off brings you to 56% of original price. 20% reduction applied to the previously reduced price.

Hope I haven’t been doing it wrong all these years. I used to create the price files for POS (Point of Sale) systems for a retailer and used to do commercial pricing for a telecoms company.

I never even imagined that the 20% would apply to the 30% first discount.

Some customers did think this would result in a 50% discount from the original price. In retail this causes arguments at the cash register. In commercial sales this is all specified carefully in the price section of the quote/RFP/contract so that there is no ambiguity.

429

Speaking of percentages, lots of people don’t know that there’s difference between “percent” and “percentage points”. These have two different meanings:

  • An increase from 5% to 6% is an increase of 20 percent
  • An increase from 5% to 25% is an increase of 20 percentage points

Many people will mis-interpret something like “Eating hot dogs on a weekly basis increases your chance of colon cancer by 20 percent”. If the base risk of colon cancer is 5%, many people will think that means the higher risk 25%, but it’s really just 6%.

430

I need to return my degree and stop doing arithmetic here.

431

If you need to store terabytes of data, the time to tell me was two years ago when the project was first proposed, not now when the data has started to come in.

432

Unfortunately, the clerk then catches all the grief when the customer doesn’t see the discount they were expecting.

Goodwill claims that their clerks get on the job experience that they can cite when they apply or employment at a regular retailer. It appears that being a “flak catcher” is part of that experience.

If the store really wanted to be honest about it (yeah, I know) the sign would be: “ALL SALES ITEMS WERE 30% OFF , NOW 44% OFF”.

435

I would think a $10.00 item under this sign costs $5.60 before tax: 10*(1-.3)*(1-.2) = 10*.7*.8 = 10*.56 = 5.6. (If the salesperson quoted me $5 I would take it but in my experience such a sign will simply read “Clearance: half price”)

The subject in the sentence is items or sales items, so I expect the additional 20% off to apply to the item and not to the discount.

~Max

436

I think the nuance was that he was an IT graduate and should have known these systems existed and how to use them for this purpose.

437

I can’t count the number of systems that I’ve seen that use the same data but it needs to be entered more than once. Things are getting better, but there is absolutely no reason to think the data entered in SystemA is going to generate reports in SystemB format if someone doesn’t tell you that.

Now if you noticed that the data was the same in both, you might ask the question - but whoever assigned him those reports to do should have explained what needed to be done (and what needed to be done only once).

438

I’m embarrassed to admit I got caught up in this myself last week. I was in a store buying some books that were marked as 50% off. There was also a sign advertising these books as being 65% off. It was not clear which of these discounts was in effect or if they both were.

So I picked out the books I wanted and went to the cashier and asked. I was told that the discounts were not cumulative; I would only receive the higher discount of 65% but not both. Okay, that’s fair.

But the cashier rang the books up in a peculiar way. She would enter the original price, discount it by 50%, and then discount it again. It seemed to me that the prices she was getting as a result were too low and I suggested she was doing it wrong and applying both discounts instead of just one.

To my credit, I was arguing that she was charging me too little rather than too much and I explicitly said this. But she said this was the way it should be done. So I let it go and paid the price she gave me.

I was wrong. I was doing the math in my head and coming up with the wrong numbers. When I had a chance to stop and do the calculations I found she had charged me with the 65% discount she had said. The resulting prices just seemed lower than I had predicted.

440

But midlifecrisis’s post said this person was filling out the reports manually, which I took to mean they were doing it all on paper and then entering the results into the computer system when they were done. Rather than just entering the figures into the system and letting the computer do all the math.

If this was the case, an IT graduate should have realized that doing all this math on paper wasn’t necessary as soon as they opened up the app and saw what information it was having inputted.

That said, I’ll readily concede I am not generally familiar with these systems and would not call myself an IT expert by any stretch of the term’s meaning. The systems I used to work with actually did require you to do all the math by hand (or by calculator) and then enter the results into the computer system. This was also the way I did my tax returns up until two years ago. But I’m a dinosaur not somebody who was hired on the basis of being an IT graduate.

442

At my first job in IT the IT manager there didn’t come from a technical background (but was a great boss).

He assumed laptops had better graphics cards than desktops because you could run two screens on them at the same time (by connecting an external monitor). This was back when it was unusual to connect more than one screen to a desktop.

443

I once got a bill that included the item: “time spent writing this bill”.
Yes, of course it was a lawyer. That was the last disagreement we had.

446

I wasn’t the one to explain this, but it went down really well:

We had some turnover at work and my coworker Carl ended up as supervisor in charge of the group.

Carl quickly hired an old friend of his to fill the spot he had just vacated and, while Jeff was certainly qualified and knowledgable about the technology he was working with, his work ethics sucked. Jeff was constantly coming in late due to heavy morning traffic, leaving early to beat the evening rush hour, calling in sick due to migraines, allergies, family members’ illnesses, and so on – that or he was working odd hours (like starting at 10pm) and letting people know that, since he had worked all night on some obscure networking problem, he was going to catch some sleep during the day and would therefore be unavailable. During the time he was in the office with everyone else, he was telling jokes, pulling practical jokes and pranks, reminiscing about fads and television and jokes and pranks from decades gone by, singing just loud enough to distract the rest of the group around him, or (during his more focussed moments) whispering or mumbling to himself about the steps in his process or plans or lists or whatever he was working on. I never could prove it, but I was pretty certain Jeff was exploiting the company’s Exempt Workers policy## by (for instance) starting at 10pm on a Wednesday and working until 2am Thursday and counting that time as having worked for four hours on both days.

Anyway, it was mid-November and Jeff hadn’t slacked off for a while when he suddenly announce to everyone within earshot, "Geez I’m exhausted! I need a vacation – hey, I wonder if I have any PTO$$ accrued. Then he checked the payroll system and realized he had saved up two days worth of time to play. Then he looked at our group calendar in Outlook and said, “Hey, guys? Would any of you object to me taking…umm…the last two days off in two weeks?”

Rob, who sat behind him, was the first to respond, “Umm…that shouldn’t be much–”

I quickly whirled around in my chair and the movement caught Rob’s attention. I winked at him while projecting my voice through the cloth cubicle wall that separated me from Jeff and said, “Wait a minute. I was planning on taking that off!”

“Oh, you were?” Jeff asked and I could hear him clicking away to see if he had missed anything on our group’s personnel calendar. There were only five of us, including Carl, so it wasn’t difficult to see all the entries.

“Yeah.” I whined, “I’ve been planning to take that time for a few months now.”

“Oh.” Rob chimed in, “Well, Grestarian does have seniority over you – I mean I think Rick and I can handle it 'cause it should be pretty slow, but if he’s gonna take it you probably should come in those days.”

“Yeah,” Jeff argued, “but I don’t see anything on the calendar. You snooze you lose, buddy. I’m gonna take those days!”

“Naw, that’s crap, man!” I protested while hearing Jeff quickly typing up a Request for Time Off into the payroll system, “I’ve been planning to take that since Easter!”

“Too bad, pal!” Jeff called back to me, “You snooze…” and I heard him loudly punch Enter to send his request for our manager to approve, “You lose!”

“Wow!” Rob marvelled, “That’s pretty cold, Jeff.”

“Seriously,” Rick chimed in for the first time that morning, “that’s pretty low.”

“Hey,” Jeff argued, “I saw the calendar, I saw his name, he’s got nothing blocked off. I just got through the process faster. Maybe he should have put in for it last Easter like he said.”

Rick and Rob shook their heads and sighed, I made a few grumbling sounds and went back to work.

Half an hour later, after our boss had returned from a meeting and was catching up on his emails, he opened his little office door and called out, “Jeff, come talk to me.”

We all knew what it was about, and Jeff proudly stood up and walked toward Carl’s office while saying “Hey, I called it! There was nothing on the calendar yet, so I booked those days.”

“Well I’m not going to approve it.” Carl replied very calmly.

“Aww, come on!” Jeff insisted and his voice, which was usually pretty loud anyway, was carrying beyond the five of us and catching the attention of the rest of the department, “Did Grestarian rat me out? You’re letting him pull rank?”

“Rank?” Carl asked.

“Seniority, whatever.” Jeff replied, “But there was --”

“This has nothing to do with Grestarian.” Carl clarified, “I’m just not approving your request.”

“Dude!” Jeff argued. By then he was standing at Carl’s door but was arguing loudly enough for everyone in the department to hear, “I’ve got the time, I need the time, and I --”

“Dude!” Carl drowned out his friend, “You can take the time, but why are you insisting on burning PTO on days the company’s going to pay you anyway? That’s Thanksgiving weekend!”

There was about five seconds of absolute silence as the revelation sank in. Then everyone in the department started laughing. Jeff blushed – probably from head to toe – and walked out of the office. Five minutes later he walked back in and admitted, “Wow! You guys got me good on that one!”

—G!

I can’t explain the time it takes
to make you understand…

–Robin Zander (Cheap Trick)
Never Had a Lot to Lose
Lap of Luxury

##work 4 hours or more and you get paid for a whole 8-hour day, largely because we know most of our exempt people eventually have to put in 18 hour days to handle emergency situations
$$PTO = Paid Time Off

447

At my job it was required to work 40 hours a week minimum unless they had a valid medical or personal excuse, mainly because once you hit 40 hours in a week you basically “earned” all your benefits including PTO and sick leave.

A coworker tried really hard to only work 32 hours a week (missing one day a week) because and I quote “If I work 32 hours a week that’s considered part-time and I’ll get more money from my spouse in my divorce”. Obviously that request was denied.

448

One youngish secretary started at my office, and worked on an hourly schedule. She started coming in a half hour early and leave later than usual, just to get the extra hour or so of pay. Eventually they switched her to salary and she started coming in later and leaving early.

This is turning into New and Unimproved Workplace Rants