Hey, part-time boss? Did you win the lottery? Persuaded Bill Gates to become a silent partner? No? We still have a microscopic budget and are barely getting by? Then why, for fuck’s sake, will you not open your emails?
Potential clients contact us via email. Clients looking for invoices you haven’t sent contact us via email. I come in two days a week and without fail I open your inbox to find dozens of emails you’ve never bothered to open. Many required a response by a deadline that’s already passed. My pointing them out doesn’t even faze you.
If you hate the idea of doing business this much, maybe you should stop doing business.
My co-worker, She Who Laughs Too Loud (SWLTL) has hit a new low, in my estimation (this probably proves how coddled and easy my life has been).
Scenario: my boss is pregnant with her 2nd child. The first one was 2-1/2 years ago. This is a small department, with 5 people in it, of which 4 are men. None of the men is interested in going to the big elaborate shower (and who has a big elaborate shower for the 2nd baby?). So we got this little email.
[QUOTE=SWLTL]
Hello Gents! Baby Boy (husband’s last name) is on his way..last baby time the Men all gave $10 bucks to a post baby spa day with a card with your name on it.
Drop it off with me if you would like to give:).
We will be giving it to her September 16th at her baby shower.
[/QUOTE]
No, I didn’t last time, and I’m not going to this time. In the past three days since this little gem came out, she has been dropping other hints since not all of us have ponied up (I only know the response of one other person, a new father for whom we did not have a shower, who shuffled over like a zombie with no sleep and dropped money on her desk).
I hate this kind of crap! My boss makes a hell of a lot more than I do, she has a live-in nanny working full time, and I’m supposed to give money so she can have a spa day? Give me a fucking break. I finally forwarded the email, with appropriately calm and measured comments, to HR. They will be contacting me on Monday.
Roddy
Well, well, well. I am actually proud of myself. At a charity “beep ball” game tonight, who did I happen to see but my ex-manager (who stuck the knife in my back) and my ex-VP (who instructed her to do it). I was leaving the game, walking with a couple of friends and the coach of our hockey team, who had played in the game.
I work in a tiny office, with the way my co worker insisted she had to have her desk, there is just enough room to walk between my chair and her desk in order to get to the door. Co=worker insists on playing her cdplayer radio. I don’t want to hear it. Despite repeatedly asking her to turn it down, she still is playing it. The boss has told her to use headphones of turn it down so far that I can’t hear it but she thinks I a deaf. (she says she is too busy to use headphones). I have started turning the volume to 0 when she leaves the room. Now if I could just get her to shut up!
This will all be changing in a few weeks when despite her inablity to work with her actual department mates, write ups for insubordianation and gossip, threatening the company and our immediate boss with lawsuits for not giving her her way over schedules and constant complaining. She will be given what she has been asking for. Our boss is being demoted, co worker will be given a plum job as customer service liason (they hate her as well), with normal hours in the main office and attending a meeting she has been miffed at being left out of. I think she will be sharing a cubicle with someone who hates her as well but she will be 15 feet from the big boss’s door. It will be interesting to see how this works out, she won’t be able to carry on long conversations with everyone in the vicinty about non=work related stuff, arrange the furniture so that she has the most space, play her music over and over again. Gossip to me (as much). I am sure everything will still be everybody elses fault but she will be out of my immediate air space.
When I dealt with a co-worker like this, who was unresponsive to polite (and even eventually not-so-polite) requests, I went online and learned how to construct a small low-power device that would broadcast on regular radio frequencies, for about a dozen feet or so. With a tuner, to adjust the station, and a control to adjust the type of noise it broadcasts: white noise or pink noise are pretty soothing & non-bothersome, or you can use staticky, annoying black noise, which will probably get them to shut it off themself.
Then I commiserated with him, saying ‘yeah, the radio reception down here in the basement is pretty bad. And all that new electronic equipment they’ve installed makes it even worse!’.
So I talked with HR today, our rep agreed that this particular baby shower may have gotten out of hand (although there is no policy against them per se, employees need to be careful about use of company resources, etc.). She understood my irritation about being solicited for money towards a gift for my boss, but she did not seem to share it. Anyway, she is going to talk to SWLTL (She Who Laughs Too Loud) in fairly general terms, for what that’s worth. And my name will, theoretically, stay out of it.
All in all, not very satisfying, but I’m glad I did it anyway.
Roddy
We got a new employee on Monday. While he seems to generally be a good guy, he was with his last company for over a decade, and he seems to be that oblivious person who doesn’t understand that we also have a culture of our own, and for him to come in and start telling us everything we should be doing differently is incredibly patronizing and obnoxious.
Helpful hint: Starting a sentence with, “Oh, I know you guys do that crossword thing, but” is never a good idea, especially when the sentence continues with what else you think we should be doing with our fucking lunch break.
Also, if you do not take my polite hints and keep telling me* that I should append my signature to every single fucking email I send, I might eventually break and explain to you that I don’t do it because the only people who append signatures to internal emails are FUCKING RETARDS, because they clog the shit out of the email chain.
*Three fucking times now! Told me in email that I should do it, which I politely rebuffed. Then told me again in a response to that email that I should do it. Then brought it up again in person to tell me that I should do it. I mean, please, could you be more of a clueless asshole? I told you “no” *TWICE *already, with a polite of why I’ve made a different decision, and you’re going to bring it up again?!
I wish people would learn this fucking etiquette lesson. Gifts in the workplace are given *down *or laterally, not up, except in the case of personal asskissing. Bosses’ Day is a fucking abomination.
This is beautiful. Too bad it only works for the radio part and not the CDs.
Dear Boss,
Setting goals is nice. Goals can motivate. Even setting goals that can be difficult to meet can be useful.
However, setting goals that are completely impossible to meet (did you really think I’d be capable of doing the work of 5 people today?!!) have the opposite effect and actually stress out and demotivate your team.
I know they taught you next to nothing about leadership at Beer Keg U. but criminey, this is just common sense and if you keep it up, you’ll have to find someone to do not only the work of 5 people but my work as well.
Signed,
Your Top Producer Who Is Now Polishing Up His Resume
Oh boy, more fun training stuff. Today was the only training I’m gonna get on the accounting programs before we go live on the new data processor. The trainer was so disorganized I don’t feel like I know any more about the accounting than I did before I sat in the classes all afternoon.
This training has been scheduled for a month, didn’t anyone think to make sure I had all the access I needed and that all the simulations were programmed properly? Oh and didn’t the trainer think she should get her notes together so she wouldn’t spend half the classroom time shuffling papers and looking for the right sheet?
There is no way this conversion isn’t gonna suck when we go live.
I want to pit my boss – the owner of the company I work for – and his wife, who is also on the payroll as the Human Resources manager. This is a very small company, only 7 employees other than Boss Man and Wife.
We had a hurricane over the weekend that brought lots of flooding and power outages. Where I live our power was back around noon Sunday, so yesterday morning I took the back roads and detours I know and drove in to work. It took me about an hour and a half. When I got here the office was not open and the power was out. So I spent another hour and a half getting home.
Why in the name of all that’s decent could Boss Man and Wife not have made seven phone calls to let us know? The excuse provided this morning was that because of the power outage the electronic records with contact info were not available. ORLY? They live within five minutes of the office, via roads that were not under water. Surely paper records exist somewhere. Failing that, the land lines were working. Call information and get the phone numbers. Complete bovine excrement.
To make it more ridiculous, a co-worker shared with me this morning an email she sent to Boss Man on Friday suggesting that contingency and notification plans be set up. Nothing was done.
See, your problem, MLS, is not understanding that your inconvenience is not THEIR problem. It didn’t affect them at all that you and possibly other staff were inconvenienced, so it isn’t a problem.
Uh, next time there’s a catastrophic hurricane in your area maybe you should call the office before driving in? I hope it wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows to say “Hey, this area’s been through hell lately, in case you hadn’t noticed. Is there even power to run the computers?”
Man, my suitemate has a terrible sense of smell.
her: sniff Who has fried chicken?
[pause]
me: (looks down at desk, back at her) Um, I’m eating a roast beef sandwich … ?
(There’s no other food around here, I promise. She smelled my sandwich.)
Well, except that to have any hope of getting in to the office on time, I had to leave well before the office would have been open. As it turned out, power in most parts of the town WAS on, just not in the small area where the office is.
I feel your pain. We have a major international corporation-wide change to the way people redeem their hotel-club membership points next week. All I can say in favor of this is at least they waited until after Labor Day weekend. I was informed last week that I’m the one that’s going to have to make sure the details are right for the people we have in-house on the day it goes live. That is, if the drunk monkeys they call an IT department don’t manage to fubar it.
I think some of those drunk monkeys made their way here in the guise of the trainers. Today the trainer spent most of the day on her cell phone trying to contact the home office (planet?) about more stuff that isn’t set up right. We go live Friday… send good thoughts my way please!
Totally unrelated gripe. I’ve been sort of looking for a new job for a while now, not really heavy searching, just seeing if anything interesting is out there. I’m on the verge of total burnout with what I’m doing now, and the stress of the system conversion isn’t helping things.
So I’m idly checking the ads in the Sunday paper when I come across a posting for an office manager. I’m marginally qualified for this, so I read on. This ad is very specific in wanting someone who is comfortable with technology and making a point to say they’re a paperless office. But then they want a printed and mailed resume along with a hand-written letter saying why you want the job. WTF?
