Yes, we can accept beverages from customers. Most carriers, myself included, look favorably upon this kind of generosity. 
Good idea, bad implementation. As a door-to-door carrier, IMHO, we should be allowed to sort them w/ residual (manually sorted) mail in office, rather than be required to juggle three bundles of mail while walking from mailbox to mailbox. On mounted (curbside delivery) routes, it’s a bit less tedious, but still we’re drawing mail from 3-4 sources rather than 2-3.
As a rule of thumb (for myself), anything that promotes needless complexity over practicality is generally inefficient. Make it easier to do my job, and I’ll do it faster, and with little to no griping.
Just now:
A: I’m going to the vending machine room. Anyone need anything?
B: {takes out her earbuds} What? Sorry, I had my headphones on and didn’t hear you.
A: What did you say? I heard something about headphones?
B: I didn’t hear what … wait, what?
tiny sigh
I turned around, and in my Patented Actress With Stage Presence Voice announced, “B, A is going to the vending machine room. She asked if you wanted anything. A, B was wearing her headphones and didn’t hear you, and then you didn’t hear her saying she didn’t hear you.”
A: “Poor purplehorseshoe.”
I guess I should 'splain. I’m a purchasing manager, and I quite frequently get offered free stuff. I never allow myself to keep anything (ethics you know), but when they want to give me a bucket of pretzels because I spent $500, well I say “Sure!” All this stuff goes to employees. I’ve only been doing this for 30 years. :rolleyes:
But the new… um… employer could not have me on a shorter leash. They have to micromanage everything. And if a free CD comes in… They figure I was scheming on how to get it out of the building. :dubious: I was very nearly accused of stealing the thing.
The thing about the pretzels, one group was jealous that the other group got pretzels. Then the boss caught wind and asked me why didn’t I just get a discount instead of spending money on pretzels. Again :rolleyes:
:dubious:
When doing political doorknocking in such heat, I have gratefully accepted cold drinks from friendly residents.
But that can lead to a bigger problem later, when you need to find an available bathroom!
Did you say fight crime? Sorry, I have to plug The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage; origin: here. You have to read more than the origin, though, or you’ll miss Brunel.
(Some of their adventures include workplace griping, so it’s not a total hijack.)
Fight crimes, do crimes - tomayto, potahto.
It’s ok. Since starting my new job, all my gripes have vanished overnight, but I still hang out here.
To the IT help desk: Please do not route the tickets I open to me. Yes, I know I’m listed as the technical owner of the front-end application for the system I opened the ticket on. But (a) the issue I was reporting was with the database back-end, which I have no responsibilty for, and (b) if I knew how to fix the problem, I wouldn’t open a help desk ticket about it, I would just freaking fix it. Thank you.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard all day, SCSimmons.
Some assnugget put water in the dish detergent dispenser in the breakroom. :mad: Guess I’ll start keeping a bottle of it at my desk.
I would deal with this by showing up with a fabric handkerchief, using it, and leaving it wadded up on my desk. When reprimanded for having such an unsanitary thing on the desk, I would tuck it into my bosom.
Heh. Same thing happened to me this week, more or less. I support end use of a piece of software, and the install package was failing without any kind of error. Said it worked, large chunks of it not installed. I told the users to put in a ticket because I couldn’t figure it out and the people who maintain the install package needed to be involved. Instead, it got assigned back to me.
Um, NO. Just no.
In my experience, Auditors are complete fucktards who must be fought for every inch. At two different IT jobs I had them telling my bosses that I could no longer be allowed to access files absolutely vital to my basic job functions. In both cases I was fortunately able to convince my bosses to fight this (and we won!) by asking how specific tasks would be accomplished (and by WHO exactly?) if these “recommendations” were followed.
Oh yeah, they’re almost always “recommendations”. I continually pointed that out. “So boss, they’re ‘recommendations’, right? As in not mandatory word of God, right? Then it’s time to make some counter-recommendations.”
Pumps fist in the air. Solidarity, Brother.
We are good at our jobs. We do the best we can, but stop with the lame ass jokes. Laughing at someone for suffering for a paycheck wasn’t funny the first time we heard that lame joke. After hearing it eleventy hundred times makes us have fun (to us) fanatasies about climbing a clock tower.
Out here on the central coast I got folks cryin’ when it reaches eighty.
I just tell 'em I grew up near Redding, that makes them clam up pretty well.
Co-worker has developed a yen for the cafeteria ice cream. Apparently there’s just not enough time in her lunch break to even start eating it, so she comes back to her desk with a generous cone and eats while pretending to work one-handed.
If anyone was wondering, it is humanly possible to slurp ice cream so loudly people two desks over can hear.
I’ll have to get back to you on if it’s possible to bludgeon someone senseless with said ice cream.
Start giving them an alternate ship-to address for the extra goodies.
PM me if you need any ideas. 
I have a new job, which is fantastic. I’m now at a large 24 hour a day veterinary hospital that (obviously) deals with emergencies and referrals. We have this one receptionist who seems to be just not quite up to par with everyone else, though.
When you page someone, you’re supposed to repeat yourself to ensure we all had a chance to hear (which she never does), so sometimes we’re left waiting for her to page again, or wasting time paging her back. Earlier this week, she gave me the wrong file for a dog (correct pet name, correct last name, but we’re talking about a name like “Max Johnson”, of which there are 6, so the wrong file). Yesterday was REALLY frustrating though.
As a 24 hour hospital, it’s not uncommon to get the Friday Night Transfers from clinics that have critical patients who need to be monitored and no overnight staff. One of the other techs took a page from her, and was told that we had two emergencies being referred from the same hospital (one hit by car, the other “covered in blood”) that’s only 20 minutes away. So we go into full on emergency preparedness mode - catheters ready, crash cart prepped, anesthesia machines checked, monitors plugged in and turned on - and our adrenaline is PUMPING. There are four techs and one doctor, so we’re running through scenarios as to who takes on what case first and how should we stabilize and all that.
So the first dog arrives (the hit by car), and we hit the front door with the gurney, out to the back of the SUV, and there he is … resting comfortably, IV catheter in place, leg bandaged, totally stable. We were SO confused. With a little bit of prodding and questioning, it turns out the dog was HBC at 2:00 PM and has been at the vet since then. So this was a TRANSFER of perfectly stable patient, as opposed to a REFERRAL of a bloody mangled half-dead dog.
Second one (“covered in blood”) WALKS in on a leash, a little lethargic. Turns out it had bloody diarrhea and had (as well) been resting at the vet’s office all afternoon.
Sure, our workload was a lot easier than we thought it would be, but boy oh boy did she cause a lot of unneeded stress, worry, and wasted effort by getting the information really really wrong!
A note to my “team mates” in Bangalore: there is absolutely no friggin’ reason to page me at 06:30 on a Saturday morning to check status on a two-week-old expected delivery ticket. The customer didn’t provide any tracking information and the receiving log doesn’t show any deliveries for them. (And you can check that stuff yourself, can’t you? I know you can.) All you’ve accomplished is waking me up out of a dead sleep and cost the company 15 minutes of overtime. Granted, that’s some easy money for me, but I’d much rather have the extra shut-eye.