“I need access to some of the databases”
“Which ones?”
“I don’t know”
“Well, we don’t give access to everything and there are hundreds of them, so we need to know which ones. Why don’t you ask your manager or a co-worker to see what you need?”
“sigh Why does this have to be so hard? I’ll call back later.”
Seriously, not hard for anyone but you, pal.
Oh, good. Due to the discovery of a technically improper notation on my employee review form back in 2009, I’ve been told to expect a step raise retroactive about three years. I am dumbfounded.
Basically, a step was withheld by requesting that my probation from my last promotion be extended. Unfortunately, per HR procedure, that can only be done within 6 months of the promotion, and that date had passed.
There was good reason to withhold the step, and there is a proper process to deny a step increase. If they wanted to correct the forms, I’d sign them. But apparently the problem was kicked around in HR and no one wants to wade into trying to modify the three year old review form, and the two year old review after it, and the one year old review after that, and maybe the most recent one, too.
So I’m going to be forced to accept a lump sum disbursement of significant size. They don’t know how long it will take to process. I think I’ll cut them some slack on that.
Oh, the horror! The horror!
Well very cool for you!
Our section’s tradition is that anyone who gets a promotion or other small windfall is obliged to bring in donuts, bagels, or other things, depending on the size of the happy surprise. I think I’m morally obligated to go for pizza or an equivalent. Although I’m not entirely sure that the folks in charge want details bandied about, so I may end up being coy about where my windfall came from.
He would love that. Seriously, he would start opening closet doors for me if I started reacting that way.
I don’t see him much at work, its just that work habits follow me home. Bill isn’t the first person to complain that I open doors, he’s just the most important one to complain.
My new shelving units arrived today. The exact ones we sent back last week. My boss, bless his heart, wanted to all me to move on with my plans and so gathered up some men with tools to “adjust” the shelving units to fit.
I managed to talk them into just putting up the units that I wanted to keep, then they started just tossing boxes on the shelves in an attempt to be helpful. :smack:
I didn’t scream or faint, and I don’t know how to have the vapors, so I distracted them by asking about ordering lunch for all of their hard work, and what do you all want? Then we went out to look at menus and the doors locked behind us.
This is a new job in a new state with a totally different culture than I’m used to, so stop mentally calling me a wimp and a sell out. I’ll get this figured out and I really don’t want to offend people in my first month.
Really?
You’ve posted gripes about this type of thing so often, I’m thinking of petitioning to become an Admin just so I can make it a Sticky.
Are you telling us it’s always been the SAME GUY? :eek:
I am so proud of myself. After enduring months of countless screaming fucking banshee children at my work and parents not doing shit about it, I finally worked up the nerve to yell at someone to keep their kid quiet (yelling so they’d hear me, not like I was flipping out on them).
And it worked! I think if you act like you’re in charge most people won’t challenge it even when in fact you have 0 authority over them. Ever since then they keep shushing the kid like more than even necessary and looked over at me all nervously when he started screaming again.
New method of assertiveness training: high-pitch scream in someone’s ears until they do something about it.
Screaming banshee children at work? Please tell me you work at a daycare! :eek:
Nope, a mall kiosk. I can’t even believe how many parents let their kids scream like that. These idiots seem to think they’re at Chuck E Cheese or something. I was always too scared to say anything but then I thought it through and realized, what’s anyone going to do about it if I do? Nothing, there’s no one who would care.
So now I suppose the employees of other nearby stores either love me for shutting up that little fucker, or think I’m a total asshole.
I was going to go with Machiavellian and cunning, personally. You got your own way, that’s the desired end result, right? 
I bet you got them to pay for lunch too.
Well, there goes my happy streak. A customer just contacted us looking for nameplate information on some motors that are installed in their own plant. :smack: To make things even better, the initial request contained no part numbers…just a list of installed locations and nominal ratings that match dozens of motors we provide.
Nope, different people. Always new people too. I’m telling you, this should be some kind of “We hired the wrong person” filter.
It’s a really stupid “annoyed frustrated impatient” attitude too. “I’m too fucking lazy and self-important to figure out or even ask anyone what I need access to, so just give me everything right now. Oh fuck no, I don’t have time to fill out your forms. God this is so annoying. Why do you make it so hard for me?”
Because you just know that if by some quirk we DID give them access to everything, their next lazy irritated obnoxious complaint would be that they have no idea where their data is and we should find it for them and do their job for them.
Because in the 11 months I’ve been here, I have seen that twice.
“I don’t have time to write database queries. I need you to write them for me!”
To which our response is; “Nope, it’s your job to do this and we very specifically DO NOT write queries for end users. If you have difficulty with this, you need to speak to your manager.”
Followed by “Tell you what. I’ll just speak to your manager for you…”
Well, if they push things like this, we tend to CC their manager on the email response. 
Funny that we never hear back from them after we do that.
Dear QA person,
Do not say “I have observed (totally innoculous) behaviour A, which may cause (really bad) behaviour B” where you mean “I have observed behaviour B which I believe to be caused by A”.
My temp agency is still stupid. My contract ended today, and their handling of letting me know that they wanted to extend me was…flawed.
Let me guess . . .telepathy?
It made perfect sense to me…
OK, so, recap:
A long, long time ago I worked for a very large company. I designed their to-be processes for one of the areas which make up Operations. Then I left; not for anything specific, simply because that’s the way their contracting works: mine was up and since I was going to have a month in which I wouldn’t have anything specific to do (HR/Purchasing thought, my boss had different ideas), off you go.
Now I’m back, implementing Ops stuff, including my poor, poor, mistreated design, which was made by an engineer for engineery-artisan types and has been in the hands of economists that have never set foot in a tool shed. I didn’t get any documentation (and boy, were they surprised whenever I quoted the original documents, which I happen to still have, as is pretty much SOP for consultants); most of the explanations I got did not make sense; I was forbidden from using things that I had designed for the whole company on account of “that was designed only for one of the subsidiaries”; whenever I wanted to test or get details on how to do certain parts of the work cycle which are unique to this location (which aren’t Ops properly speaking, but which Ops has to do) I was told “oh, forget about that, it’s not important” - it’s a weird process, it hadn’t been explained to me at all, it was untested, but hey, not important.
I finally got the missing explanation yesterday and let me tell you, it may make sense from the PoV of Finance and Costing, but for Operations, it makes about as much sense as making Dolly Parton stand on her head and sing. Burning at the stake isn’t enough for whomever came up with that shite, they should be sitting on the sharpened stake :mad:
Close. 
No, they used the extremely effective method of sending an email to me on my last day, when the company I’m working at has completely blocked my email access. I got the email late tonight. Fortunately I’m hip to their ways now, so I took it upon myself to investigate with my supervisor at the company earlier today.