Anyone want to bitch? Big, small, in-between irritations?
I’ll go first; there is an issue at my temp placement with breaks (as in, no one takes any). Let me re-phrase that; no one but the smokers take any. :mad: (I don’t smoke.)
You could start?
Yep. And management are all chain smokers, and consider smoke breaks to be necessary, unlike breaks to go to the bathroom or to eat.
OK, that was weak of me.
Here’s a real gripe.
You, Mr. Client, do not speak English, other than at a very basic level. Nor are you qualified in the particular technology under consideration. Yet you chose to write a patent spec in English (not your native language which is Japanese) to be filed in the US, and you want me to go though it first to make sure it’s all in order. Fine. I can do that, because…
I graduated at the top of my class at university in (mainly English) linguistics, I have formal accreditation in the field of technology in question, and a law degree that’s yellowing at the edges, with a license to practise, just to back up my 15 or so years of on the job experience in IP. So that’s why I get kind of annoyed when you…
Send back my finalized draft with a shitload of red-ink corrections and, let’s be honest, rather arrogant, assertions that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve only read your first page so far and already I’m fuming. You’re not that valuable of a client, you know?
Protein domain X does not “fail to” include substance Y, it “does not” include substance Y. I changed your wording because “fails to” implies a defect or something unexpected, but what you want to convey is a simple expected and desirable state of domain X not having Y. You tell me that you have seen the language “fails to” in an US Office Action many times before and therefore it’s perfectly fine terminology to use when filing at the USPTO. (Practitioners who know the relevance will be banging their heads against the wall at this point).
What to do with you, Mr. Client? I’m still not sure.
This organisation is so reliant on powerpoint yet not one single person knows how to create an effective presentation. It’s the usual ‘this is what I’m going to say so I’ll write it all on the slides, presentation done!’
Dear absentee cafe’ owner, I know I’m a newbie cook, but your soups in a bag suck, the front entry is filthy, and the GD doorway to the kitchen is not a frcking broom closet. Also try some music besides comtemporary Xstian, spice up the menu and you may find yourself with a real lunch rush once in a while.
Nothing major, but a temp who joined our desk about six weeks ago is really getting my back up lately.
I used to do the things he does, but have now moved to working on things in a completely different department. In his first week, I walked him through what his usual workload would be and answered his questions; he emailed me a few days afterward with another basic question, which I answered.
Since then, he has been peppering me once or twice a day with questions about who to send things to, whether his working style was correct, whether or not he was “on the right track” with things, etc. I have been forwarding these to his manager, who is the one they should be going to in the first place, and she has answered them for him.
This week, he sent me an email reading (paraphrased),
"Dear Judith,
Where did this report come from and who wrote it. Track changes are not on and it makes me very irritated when I can’t see what changes have been made. Please can you make sure track changes are on in the future."
I replied, including his manager as a CC, and said I didn’t know who wrote the report but I was sure his manager (you know, THE ONE WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE MANAGING HIM) could sort him out.
He replied with "Dear Judith,
Please can you not forward emails like that on to my manager. It makes me look very unprofessional when I say I am irritated."
Hey, here’s an idea, mate, if you think something will make you look unprofessional, don’t say it in a company email to a colleague! Not to mention that he SHOULD be sending these emails to his manager in the first place, because I have nothing to do with his job or department any more and have no power to actually solve any of your problems! So stop pestering me about it!
Fortunately everyone else I work with is lovely, so it’s not too bad all things considered.
I have worked about 20 hours of overtime this week coordinating the installation and reinstallation and reinstallation of the latest version of code delivered on my project. Yesterday we finally found a work around to the huge new error they introduced that allowed us to at least get testers into the environment and working. By the end of the day we discovered that instead of closing defects this version was supposed to be fixed we were instead opening new ones.
Basically I drove my team like mad to find a solution for a piece of code that the vendor couldn’t possibly have done the most basic quality control on. I am torn between who needs beating more - the vendor or the business group that is supposed to be managing them. If they don’t straighten up I might just take out both of them.
I wouldn’t mind traveling for week every week if I got to go interesting places, but no…I have to go to the same crap-hole town week, after week, after week because some idiot got fired, and I have to fill in “temporarily” until a replacement can be hired.
I’m not too optimistic about it, either. There is another guy who works down here “temporarily” and he has been here for over three years…just “temporarily.” So now there are two spots to be filled, and technically his spot was open first, so there’s a good chance that if they ever hire someone, he is the one that gets to go back to our main facility first.
No one wants to work here. People apply, and they get interviewed, and get toured of the facility, and they see it’s not a great town, middle of nowhere (but none of that "small town middle of nowhere"charm) and don’t take the job.
There are maybe two decent places to eat here; the rest is bland diner food that looks and tastes like it came from a nursing home cafeteria, and then a couple crappy chain restaurants (there are a few chains I don’t mind, but the ones here I don’t care for at all.)
Oh, and the hotel I am forced to stay in is terrible. The internet craps out all the time, half the rooms smell like cigarettes (despite being non-smoking…) and every week something goes wrong. Usually just a minor thing, like my room key card not working after the second or third day (that happens almost every week…I’ve been here for maybe eight weeks total and only once have I had a card work the entire time.) But other things go wrong, too. One time I was given a room, went there, and hey, someone is already here! There’s a suitcase and a laptop! Good thing they weren’t in there at the time…like I was one time! I was in my room, (chilling in my underwear, no less) and the door opened and a guy with a suitcase was like “oh…sorry, guess someone’s in here already!” Yeah…someone is! I’ve complained about it to the gal who does our hotel reservations, but she has no choice, because the university I work for has deals with certain hotels, and barring something major, I have to stay in certain hotel chains if I can.
This exact same thing was happening at the restaurant I worked at when I was in high school. I said something to the manager about non-smokers not taking breaks and he said, “so go take a break.”
In the hospital lab where I work, we’re been working so short for so long and it’s really wearing me out. We’re understaffed, and someone’s been off sick for a month, so we’re trying to run things with too few people. There are supposed to be 6 evening people, plus two people who stay till 8:30. Right now we have 4 evening people, plus the 8:30-ers. The place is cracking down on overtime, telling us to make do with who we have for now, and the open positions are all frozen because we’re not allowed to hire anyone new due to the budget. So… we’re screwed. They know we should have more people, but they’re not giving us more people. And you know, we’re doing a damn good job of working short, but it’s exhausting everyone to their limits. Everyone is getting progressively more tired and cranky.
I hope it ends soon, but the heart of the problem is never going to go away. It’s similar at all the hospitals. It’s only going to get worse. It’s a much deeper problem with the profession itself and the lack of recognition and respect it gets. Nobody thinks “hey, I’ll be a lab tech when I grow up” because they don’t know such a thing exists and medical technology programs are being shut down in schools everywhere. A huge number of seasoned techs are approaching retirement and there are nowhere near enough new graduates to fill the vacancies. You’d think this would mean we’re in huge demand, with hospitals offering bonuses and juicy salaries to the relatively few techs out there, trying to entice them. That happened with nurses a while back, but that’s not happening now with labs.
The lab is important to a hospital. Most medical decisions are made based on lab results, and without us there to run the instruments and read the slides and count the cells, you don’t have any results. We are the ones telling the doctors whether you have strep throat or the flu. We see the bacteria and white cells in your urine that tell the doctor you have a UTI. We’re the first to see the leukemia cells in your blood. We make sure you have compatible blood available in case your surgery gets complicated. But the average Joe has no idea who we are, and the hospitals tend to keep us in the basement and forget we’re there until it’s time to deny us a bigger budget.
I love what I do. I like where I work. I make a difference every day and I’m proud of myself. I am just so exhausted by it lately and it’s discouraging.
What the fuck, you fucking ignorant rednecks out in Wyoming calling me for yet another password reset. Yes, I know your job entails wandering the wilderness and climbing power poles and has little to do with computers, but jesus fuck having to listen to you grunt while you hunt and peck 8 characters is just disgusting. THEN, having to hold your hand (thankfully not literally) while you try to figure out another password that you haven’t used. And no, we turned off the ability to use “password”, “your last name” or repeating characters so stop trying to make it one of those! And for what? All so you can read an email. whee.
Small but irritating complaint.
The business unit of the company I work at moved to a new office bulding on November 1. At the old building, the bathroom sinks had these really terrible faucets. The pressure was weak, and they were spring-loaded, so you push down and they’d run for a few seconds and automatically shut off – inevatably before you were done rinsing, so you’d have to use your soapy hands to push the lever again. I hated those faucets.
So we got to the new building, and I was quite pleased to find that the sinks had those long curved gooseneck spouts with good strong water pressure, and big paddle-handled controls, separate levers for hot and cold. They were great.
But only five days in, we get this e-mail:
The faucets in the restrooms at [new building] are manual. Please remember to turn off the water by turning the handles to off. Many of us are familiar with the automatic on/off water faucets, but in [new building], the faucets are manual so make sure you turn the water off before you leave so that we can save on our use of water. However, starting Monday, November 8, for approximately 2 nights, facilities is upgrading the fixtures. … The reason for this is to maintain the [company] stance on being environmentally conscious. The new faucets are hands free and generally better for the work environment and earth environment.
Fuck. Sure enough, by Wednesday all the fixtures had been replaced by those hands-free pieces of shit where you have to hold your hands in exactly the right spot or they’ll shut off, and worst of all, the pressure is now barely more than a trickle. It’s especially galling that they used the word “upgrading” to describe swapping out really good fixtures for crappy ones. I’d rather have the stupid spring-loaded ones back. :mad:
Being called in after about 3 hours of sleep because someone on the previous shift decided they didn’t want to do their job and now I have to do it for them along with my own work.
Being the only one that seems capable of doing any of the work the job calls for because nobdy else seems to want to do it, yet whine and cry because they can’t have the overtime that I’m being forced to work when I rather be at home with the family during my off-time.
Being charged 5 hours of time to put in a new hard drive for a computer that crapped out. I had to call a new company since our old tech (who was great) moved out of state to be with his girlfriend. Called a local company who totally ripped me off, handed me a bill for more than it would cost to replace without giving me the requested estimate and the darn thing doesn’t even have all the programs reloaded so it is still not working.
I am very cranky over this but less so than the person who hasn’t had her computer up and running for three days now.
I love my work and have full respect for my superiors, says the guy who registered using his real name.
Actually, one of the contestant on Jeopardy is majoring in medical laboratory science and wants to be a lab tech. It was college week and she’s a student at the University of North Dakota.
So, there’s one…
Yeah, but all her lab reports will be in the form of a question, which’ll get tiresome fast.
My boss is bugging me about putting the new cover sheets on the TPS reports.
The thing that I love the most about this email is not just that he’s griping at you, but that he’s griping AND he’s ordering you to fix something that you have **nothing to do with **. And he expects you to fix it! And that then his problem is you forwarding on a work email which shows his rudeness, NOT that he was rude! 
My workplace annoyance would be people the fact that our thriving company has been bought by a rival in a hot, southern state. And they are starting the slow process of moving all the departments down to their state to be near the rivals headquarters, all while downsizing sections of our company and grabbing certain assets.
And we’re supposed to be happy and upbeat about this great opportunity.
Plus, their executive administrative assistants use a pre-created email signature of an italicized, bolded ***‘Thanks!!!’ *** for every email. I hate multiple exclamation points.