I am not looking for advice. I’ve figured out how to deal with my little bundle of joy. But since misery loves company, I’m hoping for some good tales from others.
My particular individual is, in my opinion, in need of medication. Bear in mind that while I’m a temp and I’ve just been there 3 months (3 to go) I have worked in the field for 26 years, so I’m no dummy. And I’ve been fortunate to have bosses who give me an assignment, a deadline, and then turn me loose.
Not this one. She will give me what amounts to extremely simple tasks, but she expects them to be done exactly as she would do them, even tho some of what she does is wrong. (Not just a personal opinion - I can point in the relevant instruction where I’m right and she’s wrong, but she refuses to budge.) Anyway, she also wants me to talk to her and her alone. Apparently I can’t be trusted to question the person requesting the work to ensure I know what is required. She’s gonna shit a brick when she finds out I did just that when she was out the other day, and now I actually know what I need to do…
If it matters - we do engineering drafting. I was an engineer for 26 years, and I’ve done a few drafting gigs since retiring because it’s easy and fun for me. I know the rules about dimensioning and labels and notes - the requirements manual is pretty clear.
Since I am a temp, my approach is to minimize my one-on-one dealings with her, and I think she has adopted the same idea. Sometimes I can go for days without seeing her. What I don’t understand - not too many folks have anything good to say about her, including her boss, yet she’s been there for 12 years. In fact, I was brought in to beat down the backlog that has accumulated because she hasn’t been able to handle the load. I’m NOT gunning for her job (even tho she thinks I am) but honest-to-goodness, I don’t see how she’s kept on working there. Most places I’ve been would have canned her. But that’s another story.
Be glad you only work with one her and aren’t living with three of her.
I worked for one once but fortunately he was the BIG boss and I had two layers of supervisors between us. Once a week though there was the dreaded meeting where he would call us in his office, one by one, to report on what we were doing.
Only the questions he asked were so damn stupid and they had nothing to do with the job we were doing.
One of his bright ideas was to give us a quota on how many lines of code we produced each day. WTF??!! Programming doesn’t work that way.
However you want 1000 lines of code a day, I can give you 1000 lines of code a day. 999 of them won’t do a thing but he’d never know the difference anyway.
Once, I had to work on one of his old programs, it was a simple backup/restore with the option to journal. It took him (remember those old printouts on the green and white paper?) SIX pages to accomplish this. SIX friggin pages of nonsense code sending you all over the place to do a simple read/write program.
He also liked to sneak up behind us to see what we were doing and wanted to install cameras to make sure we were really working. He wore enough cologne that sneaking up on us wasn’t an option for him. If our fingers weren’t in the keyboard typing then we weren’t working.
One day he called me in his office to yell at me because all I was doing was starring into space and drawing pictures on a piece of paper. No I wasn’t, I was diagramming how I wanted to code a program. I knew exactly what I was doing and the reason my programs always worked and I was the only person never called in in the middle of the night or on weekends (as he had noted in the previous meeting) was because I designed my programs BEFORE I coded them.
Anyway, my mouth eventually got me in trouble with him and I knew it was only a matter of time before he found an excuse to fire me so I moved on.
One of the guys I worked with was a young Hot Shot who couldn’t program his way out of a paper bag, but he was the BIG bosses golden haired child. Hot shot was always late getting his programs done and when BIG boss would ask the reason he’s give him some kind of made up technical answer that was total bullshit. Hot shot was creative in that respect.
Anyway, one day Big boss was putting me through the Weekly Inquisition and I blurted out something about how if he could believe all the bullshit HotShot was laying on him he didn’t know enough about programming to understand what I was doing.
Upside was that GoldenHairedChild didn’t get away with shit anymore and he quit shortly thereafter because he couldn’t take the heat. However. since i was the one who pointed out the the Emperor was Naked, the heat soon turned onto me.
Then I got a nice check from them after I turned them in for all the labor law violations. To bad I couldn’t prove the sex discrimination. This company was so bad they actually had ‘file clerks’ on staff who were really there to ‘entertain’ the out of town VIPs.
Small wonder Grandma was feeling like shit today, she’d just flown back from her gig in the States! Damnit, Grandma, leave some jobs for people of working age!