I’m sorry about your cashiers, Dr. G, hopefully they will land someplace else soon. And may it be better than working for your former employer! Maybe they can use you as a reference?
bouv, good luck with your whatever it is!
I have to go take a math test at a fence company tomorrow. It looks like the position is part back office and part counter sales, and I’ve got experience in both areas! Keeping my fingers crossed on this one!
Dr. G, that was awesome. Sorry for the collateral damage, I’m still snickering with you.
Go bouv and Cheez_Whia.
I really don’t have anything to share in this thread anymore. I love my job, my minion is wonderful, my boss is wonderful, and while Bill and I have learned that we are too old to have sex on desks, we can still have lunch together. Not to mention that there are no rats. That’s pretty important.
I am still rather annoyed about the shelves.
Cheez_Whia I now feel obligated to tell you about the time that I went to a fence store and asked to see how chain link fence was made. I just happened to run into someone who so happy and proud to show off the toys that he took me through the work area (with hard hats and safety glasses and ear muffs)
I hope that if you get that job, you will be as happy and proud as that guy was. The chainlink machine was amazing, btw.
Thanks, flatlined! I don’t know if they manufacture anything on site there, but they have a lot of vinyl fence displays in the outside yard. I’m sure they sell all types of fencing, including chain link. I have to reach back pretty far on my resume for this, but it ain’t rocket science. If they are OK with a 55 yo female, I should do fine!
Oh, that’s easy: One fent, two fents.
Didja take the test yet? Keep us in the loop (or the chainlink)!
I’m learning at my current assignment that I just friggin’ HATE two-way radios! Foremen from the manufacturing floor come walking through the office with their radios on at shop floor levels, and I just about jump out of my skin when the radio goes off with a mega-blast of static, and working in the safety trailer, people are always coming in and turning on the radio and leaving it on, so I hear conversations that don’t pertain to me at all (as well as the annoying clicks every time someone starts talking) all day (unless I get up and turn the damned thing off again). Sigh.
And the idiots keep leaving the trailer door open, too - it sticks a bit, so you have to make sure it swings shut. It’s still winter, you fools - shut the damned door!
Make up a sign and post it on the outside of the door:
THANK YOU FOR CLOSING THE DOOR BEHIND YOU
THANK YOU FOR TURNING YOUR RADIO DOWN TO INDOOR LEVELS
Then make up a sign and post it on the inside of the door:
THANK YOU FOR CLOSING THE DOOR BEHIND YOU
TURN YOUR RADIO UP TO SHOP FLOOR LEVELS
Oh, yeah, took it on Wednesday. 
Yep, I can still add fractions and I remember how to multiply. I may not hear anything back for a while, since they want several candidates for the position.
They have an actual showroom upstairs above the warehouse! Very cool!
Look out. Science is working on making a rat king. That’s not exactly what they’re saying they’re doing, but mark my words, pretty soon everyone will be checking job discriptions for those important words: no rats.
My hours have been slashed down to about 10 hours a week.
I work for four hours without a break in the morning, and four hour without a break in the afternoon. We rarely have internet, but yesterday we did - I was taking a mini-break and surfing the web for five minutes, and you know what happened - my boss strode in and saw what was on my screen. Thanks, Internet Explorer - when I clicked “close,” instead of closing, you gave me a pop-up window to make sure my ass got busted (and later it occurred to me that minimize would have worked better).
Yeah, of course it was my own fault for surfing for five minutes instead of working for eight hours straight. Bite me. 
And you’re supposed to LIVE on that? :eek:
They’re paying you $100/hour, right?
Assuming you have only one browser open at a time, have a memo open in Word (or PowerPoint, or something office-y) behind it. That way a simple ALT + TAB conceals the evidence.
Also you don’t have to fumble with the mouse to target one of those little icons in the top corner of the browser.
Not to hijack the griping thread, but I had one of those days as well this week.
Last Saturday morning, I was awakened at 11AM by one of my clients, a construction contractor. I am under contract with them on a project but I’ve never worked with them before and I don’t know them really well. So, having been awakened from a dead sleep I didn’t have my filters on and I reacted in a less than polite manner::::::::::STRIKE ONE::::::::::
I am specialist in a few brands of automation equipment used in expensive residential construction. Even though I am usually hired by the contractor the job requires extensive coordination with the project architect, and the client was calling to schedule the first in what will be a series of these meetings. On Monday, I schedule the appointment.
So I get to the jobsite and see the cluster of boss and architect types gathered around something on the floor, so I walk over to introduce myself. As I approach I step on one of the tile samples they have been looking at and it breaks ( loudly )::::::::: STRIKE TWO. I’m sure at this point everyone is wondering who in the hell is this slatternly klutz they hired and why.
So we ( the head of the construction company that I snarled at Saturday AM, the principal of the architectural firm and some assistants) sit down at the table and begin to review the project, I answer their questions, go over the processes we will need to complete in the next few month and make a few suggestions. Then the head of the architectural firm says, out of nowhere:
**" I REALLY like you". ** Every time we use these products I feel like I never know what is going on and we can never get a straight answer to our questions. I’m really glad we found you and I think we will be working together alot in the future.
( I’m parphrasing except for the short first sentence).
And with 2 strikes and the bases loaded, she hits it out of the park:::: HOME RUN::::
Now everyone is happy, my contractor client is reassured in a major way and we are all joking and laughing about the Saturday morning phone call and the broken tile.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled bitching, and I’ll post a few cow-orker related gripes shortly
I have two monitors at work and about a dozen or so windows open at any given time. When I surf the web, I deliberately keep that browser window less than full sized so that when I hear someone coming, I can just click on something else and have it pop up over the browser window. Outlook is usually good for that, since I have it running full-screen in the background.
Good job, Ann!
Way to go!
My rant: The cafe/coffe shop on the bottom floor was closed this morning. This was a problem for me because my minion makes terrible coffee and I’m a coffee snob.
The gossip mill says that they were closed because of a sudden rat problem. The RatKing’s curse is following me. :eek::(:mad:
From what I have heard, they haven’t nuked the RatKing’s lair yet. That’s probably for the best, radioactive RatKings might mutate into something even worse.
Yeah, I know alt tab - I just panicked.
Ooh, can I steal this?? The crazy IT woman three cubes down is always having loud conversations with her boyfriend and her kids on her cell phone, and it drives me batty. The other morning she bitched at her boyfriend for 23 straight minutes before saying “Look, I’m not trying to upset you, I’m just being real about my feelings.” I had to cling to my chair to keep from getting up and slapping her.
I had a shitty, shitty day at work today. My supervisor all but accused me of being either stupid or a liar, got miffed with me for doing things she had never told me not to do, gave me yet another couple examples of her terrible instructions, and got snippy with me over doing something exactly as she had told me to do it. I don’t know where the fucking letterhead came from; I didn’t put them in your fucking documents; they were like that already, and the question I asked you was if you wanted me to take the letterhead out of all the documents, not go on a witchhunt for who put them in there and all but accuse me of doing it.
Then I found out that my stupid temp agency hadn’t checked in with the client at all (and vice versa), so I couldn’t enter my timesheet online because I’m no longer in the system because they thought I was done on Feb. 20th, and I had to borrow someone else’s computer to go online because as usual I didn’t have internet, in spite of my temp agency requiring timesheets to be filled in and sent in online. Fuckers.
So my stupid agency have now talked to my stupid supervisor and one says I’m extended until the end of March and the other says I’m extended until mid April. I sent my temp agency an email saying I’ll work there until the end of March, then I’m done with those ignorant fucks.
And my back is fucking killing me because of the non-ergonomic station I type at for six hours a day, and my wrist is fucking killing me because of the other non-ergonomic station I type at for two hours a day. :mad:
I can eek by because I don’t have many expenses. I think they slashed my hours out of jealousy of such. They have to pay alimony, for drugs, and all of those other big expenses.
Not so much a rant as a “SRSLY?”, but only because it was the last day.
Back in July I got hired for a project Aug20-undefined because the final date was supposed to be end-November but expectations were that it would be end-January. Travel times blew up and up, and we ended up traveling from several locations in Spain to northern France every Monday, back every Thursday. The project got delayed even more, partly because of the customer’s Mothership policies and attitudes, partly because the same on the local UFOs part, partly because our Project Manager (PM) wanted to be busy in January and be able to take February off (rather than be free for Christmas and get a new project with the new year), partly because of the incompetence of our Team Manager ™, who is a nice guy but about as useful as teats on an axe.
I got to spend the last five weeks in Northern France. Staying there rather than spending over 24h traveling each week was my choice, I was able to do so in what’s called an apart-hotel here (hotel room set up as an apartment, in this case a studio, with a kitchenette) so I could cook my own meals.
The hotel was reserved until March 1st. Unlike previous stays, which were paid by TM on his corporate card (that is, directly by his company), I had to pay for this one. The two coworkers who came in for one week each also had to pay for theirs.
The car turned out to have been reserved until February 28th: we found this out when we picked it up and TM said “well, just pay for the difference”.
I never received the return ticket. I’d asked for it, no response. Yesterday at the airport we checked in case it had been reserved but I hadn’t gotten it, I wasn’t in passenger lists.
That’s going to be an expenses account to the tune of 850€ for the car’s insurance and extra day, plus 1700€ for the hotel stay, plus 600€ for a firstclass ticket in yesterday’s last flight, plus several hundreds worth of gas, and they could easily have saved almost a thou if they’d done things right. Way to go, guys! And boy, am I glad that I keep my piggy fat, specifically for months like this 