That would be the pleasant way to do it. She doesn’t want it to be pleasant.
Egg-zackly.
If you ignore your experts’ advice (including that one you’ve been friends since you were teens), you waive the right to whine about the consequences, damnit. :mad:
I hate helpless coworkers.
Not even truly helpless, they can do things, they just expect me to do them because its just so HAAAAARD.
Exhibit the first: postage rates went up this week. We have a postage machine that needs to be updated. We received a postcard informing us of the update and when to do it, oh a month ago.
It ended up in my bin (it had my name in it, no big, but all the mail in my bin is another rant) and I placed it in the bin of the person who uses the postage machine everyday so she would be aware of it and update it.
It ended up back in my bin, I placed it back in her bin, and it ended up in my bin again this time with a snarky note from her manager saying ‘isn’t this yours?’. So I shrugged my shoulders and went on my merry way figuring she would update it when it asked her to when she mailed something out.
I go to do my weekly mail and discover it had NOT been updated! Yay I get to stand here and update it. When I ask her why she didn’t do it, she said they (her and her manager) were told it was my job.
‘When was this?’ I say. ‘I was not informed of such.’
‘Oh we were told awhile ago.’
I’m wondering if awhile ago was when the layoffs happened and I ended up doing the receptionist’s work until things settled and automated stuff was put in. I am in a very different position now and no longer do things related to such unless it happens to effect me or my work.
Exhibit the second: We have spreadsheets, one which is updated by the person in my former position. She CONSTANTLY wants me to help her with items relating to that position. I was happy to help early on, but it has been two years now since I sat in that chair and she should be perfectly capable by now.
She just emailed me to ask where the new spreadsheet was for 2013. With my boss’s blessing I emailed her back saying she should save the old one as 2013, delete all 2012 data she entered and bob’s your uncle. Okay, I didn’t say bob’s your uncle but you get the picture.
She went and complained to her boss, while my boss was there, saying that it was my spreadsheet, my responsibility. Except you know, she is responsible for the data in the spreadsheet and I only use it for some info that she is supposed to give me anyway.
This is the same spreadsheet that she complains I didn’t train her how to use and it’s so HAAAAARD and she got one of the office Excel Gurus to adapt to make it easier for her (which I must admit is neater than my clunky pivot tables but I’m not well versed in sumif and I have taken a look to learn what he did).
My boss is rubbing off on me, I no longer have patience for learned helplessness and am doing my best to not facilitate it like I admit I probably have in the past. But damn it’s annoying.
You should totally have said “and Bob’s your uncle” 
It may have confused her, she almost got offended when I once taught her a quick and dirty way to do something..
You really do. I support this attitude 100%.
I also hate “helplessness,” Flutterby. I run across this in courses I take occasionally - you help someone with something they’re stuck on, and all of a sudden you’re their personal, constant tutor. Piss off! I’m trying to take a class and learn here! Bother the teacher who gets paid to deal with mooches like you!
My current assignment is a real dog - only one week left. I hope this one doesn’t get extended - I don’t like it there. The company sucks, the work kind of sucks (I don’t mind it, but eight straight hours of editing documents is killing my body), the commute sucks - the people are the only good thing about it.
Poke…Poke Everybody is either having a blast, or locked in the store room hiding.
Nah - I quit my job - it suddenly got a lot less annoying. Not a gripe to be had.
Just don’t wanna bore y’all. After all, “I hate assholes who come in with war tales* or moronic questions, or asking for information which they will proceed to reject no matter what it is, when you’re up to your neck in work” is not exactly news. Neither is “different countries have different laws! Amazing!”
- specially when the tale is patently false. If the signage was all in Basque, you were not in Pamplona. If you were in Pamplona, the signage was not all in Basque. You may not even have been in the same province Pamplona is in when the cops took away your car for parking illegally.
I’m pretty happy with my new job too.
The only problems I’ve had recently is that I didn’t personally measure the rooms before ordering the shelving units. I stupidly trusted the measurements I was given. Of course, they were off. By 2 inches. The shelving won’t fit and has to be returned and all. So, I’m still wading around in piles of boxes.
There are the engineers, though. Nice guys, totally clueless about filing systems. I had to have locks put on the doors to stop them from going in and digging around. This is actually causing a small problem with my personal life.
Bill likes to open doors for me. I am used to opening doors for everyone because I’m the only one with the keys. I was trying to break my habit by dropping my keys in my purse. This would make me slow down to look for them, so Bill would be able to get to the door first. Now I have my keys on my hip again and we race for the door, me not thinking and Bill determined to get there first.
Every time he opens a door for you at work (well anywhere, actually), put your arms around his neck and give him a big sloppy smooch. Make sure you pop your foot.
I suspect that he’ll eventually stop opening doors for you at work.
Or, you could just tell him that treating you like you’re on a date with him while you’re at work makes you feel like he doesn’t take your job seriously.
I still don’t have an office partner, I got quite a nice raise at the end of last year, and I have a nice collection of interesting podcasts. I’m actually OK at work right now.
We have an all hands meeting today. They’ve rented out the local hockey arena and are flying people in from across the country. Every local employee is required to be there for a 2 hour meeting from 11am to 1pm. We are required to arrive between 9:30am and 10:30am.
The note I recieved Monday said “No outside food or drink is allowed to be brought into the ACC, food will be available for purchase from the concessions. Parking is available in the area at the employee’s expense.”
SERIOUSLY??
So yesterday something happened and someone made enough noise that we got a followup email that grudgingly allowed that they would reimburse up to $15 for lunch (only if it was purchased during the event) and 2 subway tokens. Mileage and parking was still the employee’s responsibility should they choose to drive.
And this morning is the coldest morning in Toronto in 2 years. Minus 24 when I left the house (colder with windchill) and heading for a high of minus 11. I have layers on layers on as I suspect that sitting in a hockey arena will be cold. This better be an amazing meeting.
My supervisor at my current assignment is one of the worst instruction-givers I’ve ever had*, but she is a very nice lady, so I’m working with it (and she’s doing two peoples’ jobs, so she’s very stressed and busy).
*Not only does she give terrible instructions, but she blames us when we don’t understand her! But in a non-asshole way; she just doesn’t realize that she didn’t tell us to do the thing we didn’t do in the first place.
Wow. That’s well up the asshole scale for employers.
Well, if we’re anti-ranting, I’m starting my easiest semester ever.
I had a tough fall semester. Maybe it was the high number of psychotic students… (seriously–had a delusional schizophrenic who’d come stand a foot from me as I was lecturing-- my elbow would hit her as I was trying to write on the board-- I’d tell her to sit down and she’d start yelling at the class "I know you’re all talking about me!).
And, I got out of jury duty! Didn’t have to soak my camo tactical vest in cheap vodka; all it took was being vocal during voir dire. Nobody else objected to the defense trying to influence the jurors by asking all of us loaded questions, so I asked if that’s permissable… and was “struck” by the Defense Attorney.
*::whew:: *I’m teaching a technical class where a sub wouldn’t know how to make the advanced stuff understandable.
You know what dude? You are not special. You are not unique. This is not (Gasp!) the very first time something like this has ever happened. We work together like this ALL THE GOD DAMNED TIME. You do not have any special requirements/special needs/special situations that any of the others don’t also have. We’ve made this work this way for lo these many years. Why, now that it’s your first time dealing with it, do you feel a need to send SIX long rambling emails/requests for meetings/diatribes about something that is SOP only because YOU don’t know how it works? “Do you guys do this stuff this way?” would have sufficed. Going on about our job duties and who is responsible for what was way beyond the pale, you dolt. I was so tempted to hit Reply All with “No Shit, Sherlock”. On top of it, you’re a condescending douchebag. I can tell THIS ain’t going to be fun - hopefully this is a one-off and I won’t have to deal with you again in the forseeable future.
And I woke up in a good mood today. Shit. There goes THAT.
Apologies if this doesn’t make much sense - I’m pretty PO’d right now.
My new boss texts me every day after five to “find out how my day was” (at least it’s not just me; my counterpart gets it as well)
Sigh. He can’t use a spreadsheet. He can’t tell the difference between “reply” and “forward” on his email.
He spends all his day thinking up ways he can download the actual work on to someone else.
I suppose I can be happy that this is going to be a much bigger problem for HIS boss (my former boss; we did a re-org and added a layer of management) but it’s still no fun.
This isn’t a complaint about my specific workplace, but I have to attend a lot of webinars for my job, and could someone please create a rule that says only people with pleasant voices can host webinars?
I’m listening to one right now – thank god it’s an archived recording – that I can only take for 2 minutes at a time because the woman’s voice is so goddamned annoying. Terrible voice, terrible accent, terrible habit of making one-syllable words into two syllables and stretched out (all of her "and"s are "a-YUNNNNND"s)…just awful.