Sorry, I didn’t mean you. The Ferret is not **Ferret Herder **(or should I change her to Not Our Ferret as in the MMP?)
offers you a treat of choice by way of apology
I am tired of the dumb ass republicans at work. I hear them say things like “What’s the big deal with more CO2? The trees will drink it in and make more oxygen for us!”
How about an experiment? You drink water and produce urine right? So if I attach a firehose to your mouth and turn it on you will drink all the water down and pee it out with no bad effects, right? What, you say you can only handle so much water at a time? :smack:
Every single time our network homepage has any kind of political article on it all the comments are so far right my monitor tips over. If the news of the day was about how Obama went to the bathroom people would comment “On MY dollar? I’m not paying for him to poop! I bet he used more toilet paper than he needed to!”
Will these people retire already and go away??
Oh for the love of shit. On the other hand, at least they understand some basic science. The wackaloons I work with want all the trees around the building removed because of the aphids. (Which are seriously the least offensive bugs around, except for the stupid sticky stuff they leave all over the place.)
Some of them. One guy commented on an article and denied that CO2 was a greenhouse gas. It’s one thing to believe that humans aren’t contributing to global warming. It’s another to believe it isn’t happening. To say carbon dioxide isn’t a greenhouse gas??
I managed to NOT responde with simply the following:
You gonna believe that left-wing commie dictionary site?
True that, Cat, I bet there’s some right-winged anti-RationalWiki site that says . . .hold on . . . wait a sec . . .
Nope, Conservapedia admits it’s a greenhouse gas. They say “The global warming theory is [a] liberal hoax” but they got something right at least.
This was just the motivation I needed to e-mail that recruiter again.
Sigh.
The correct number of managers looking over one’s shoulder at any one time is one. (the optimum number is zero, but sometimes some micromanagement is inevitable). Petty bickering between overstressed managers is not pretty, especially when 4 of them are looking over your shoulder at the same time.
Actually, bickering overstates things, but it’s been a long two days. And I fear the afternoon tomorrow will be long for the opposite reason–nothing to do, because everything has been done in anticipation.
(We’re expecting a VIP tomorrow first thing–it makes life misery for the management, and not necessarily a lot better for us peons.)
My current customers were used to thinking of Excel as publishing software: they used it to make the certificates of analysis pretty, but not to store or analyze data. Analytical results that did not need to be certified existed only in paper notebooks; if an old certificate needed to be reissued, the notebook needed to be found and the certificate rewritten. Information about internal specifications (analysis which would not get certified) was spread between those same notebooks, internal procedures and people’s heads.
So yeah, they’re being a pain in the ass when it comes to creating a form to print certificates of analysis. “Oh, another blank line here”. “This line should be a slightly-bigger type.” “This other line should be in italics”.
It also took them over three months to understand that they did need to fix typos in the data themselves, neither Excel nor I were going to do it and yeeeah, the computer sees “pH” and “PH” as different things. I’ve had other customers who were going from “blackboard” to “megadatabase”, but who were conscious of what an enormous difference that was; these do not know a thing about data analysis but believe they do - argh!
At work I have to work with a bunch of very similarly-named files with a lot of abbreviations in their filenames. It gets confusing often.
And my boss admonished me for not looking at someone - which sounds strange, but I’m shy and socially awkward.
Other than that, it was a good day at work.
You may remember my griping, several pages back, of my law firm’s new paperless goals.
All day long I print out my attorneys’ emails, together with their attachments of large draft documents and redlined comparisons. It results in cubic yards of filing, which is tough enough to deal with. Now, however, I must also look at, title, count the pages of, and put a bar code sticker on every single document so that it can be scanned.
My job had changed from secretary to a printer/titler/scanner of documents. The paperless edict and accompanying additional work meant that the filing task that used to take an hour a day now takes several hours.
But wait! The office manager has said that our first software sucks (just like we have been griping about). He said that he was duped into our being the first law firm in the country to use this particular document management/scanning software. Now we’re going to switch over to some other software. This new one will be a breeze! he promises.
I’m not holding my breath. Whatever the new software, I still have to go through this tedious, never-ending avalanche of titling and counting every bit of paper that crosses my desk.
Anyone use NetDocuments? That’ll be our new system. Whatevs.
Today is Hawaiian Shirt and Crazy Hat Day. What in the actual fuck?
[OT]
OMG, lady!! I haven’t seen you in forever!!! I just checked out your blog and holy gorgeous kid, Batman!! But she’s about 5 years older than I think she should be, based on where she was fixed in my mind. [/OT]
Sorry, gripe away, peeps. Work suxxxx and all that.
There’s a heat wave here on the East Coast. Being good corporate citizens, my company’s building for the last two days is trying to reduce electricity use to ease the load on the local grid by turning off most of the overhead lighting and raising the thermostat so the A/C doesn’t kick on as often.
Which is fine, but what that means for ME is that it’s freaking DIM in my cube, and it’s too damned warm in this office.
<shakes fist at weather> BREAK ALREADY, DAMN YOU.
She’s six. She starts first grade in September. I don’t want to talk about. It gives me agita. She’s TAAAAAAAALL. And smarter than most of the people I work with.
We JUST got an email about this. “Please be responsible and turn off any lights that aren’t in use. Failure to do so may result in Facilities having to turn up the thermostat so that we do not overburden the local electrical grid.”
I’m actually OK with this, except for three things: (1) we have these “special” windows in our building that are photograde or some such, that get darker in direct sunlight so that they ALREADY don’t have to turn the A/C up too much, but my window is on the south side of the building so right now they’re basically black all day long, and (2) they just redid the roof last year and allegedly put a whole bunch of solar panels up there so that allegedly we can run the A/C off solar power alone, and (3) are they REALLY suggesting that they want us to work in the dark AND the heat? Because: NO.
(I exaggerate, but not by much – they send out quarterly “energy saving statements” and it always includes bullet points that say what they will be setting the temperature to to “accommodate” other electrical usage. Which includes the additional power that we’re using to run 15 giant servers that were just installed, plus the additional A/C that they need to run to keep the server room cool.)
When I read stuff like this, my blood pressure starts to go up. They’re emails and attachments! Save them electronically! Back up electronically with multiple redundancies, but don’t print that shit out (aimed at the attorneys, not you).
I probably said that several pages back, too. 
I don’t even want to know what the paper budget is where I work. All day long I fill out files on our online contracting website, print them out, and put them in a tray for someone from the imaging department comes to pick them up. Then the imaging department scans the contracts and emails them to the insurance agencies. I then get an email saying the scanning is done. The paper contracts are never seen again.
I’m not looking to put the nice ladies in the imaging department out of a job, but holy hell redundant much? It would take me five minutes more to save the contract files to my desktop, then attach them to an email and send it myself.
I did 30 contracts this week, and that was a slow week. 30 contracts at about 30 pages each, and I’m one of six people in my department, and there’s probably eight other departments that use as much or more needless paper as we do… you do the math. That’s a lot of paper. :eek:
I’d like to see this happen, too. The problem is that my attorneys are older and/or technologically challenged. They can’t be trusted to move their emails into folders themselves, nor would they let a secretary do it for them as they’d fear never finding them again.
Also, after the email and attachments are printed out, they often hand-write comments onto the documents while negotiating changes on the phone with opposing counsel. Although the unwritten-on email and attachments must be scanned and saved, it’s especially important that the hard copy with handwritten notations be scanned and saved. It’s a record of negotiated changes.
All this scanning and saving is in accordance with the new guidelines set down by office management. They left open the option of also keeping hard paper files if the attorney so desires, and all five of my attorneys have opted for the additional hard paper files. They all still only look at the hard paper files. So I’m labeling, scanning and saving for nothing, as they don’t know how to search for .pdf files on our system.
That is indeed the problem. You haven’t described anything that can’t be done electronically (documents can be annotated electronically, PDFs can be annotated, etc.) if there was a will to do it. They just want a hard copy in their hands, on their desks, to write on, because that’s how they’ve always done it.
You know, while I sympathize and I’ve been teaching people for 25 years how to convert from traditional to digital workflows, sometimes you have to weigh the return on investment of the cost of the time for people to do work twice, vs the impact on the productivity of the people you’re trying to retrain. Given the billable time and accuracy of using known traditional methods, it’s often worthwhile to pay for the resources in one part of the workflow to redo things.
If it were all about efficiency, we’d all be typing Dvorak by now.
My current project requires us to take minutes of every meeting, which have to be printed, signed by the customer (initialing every page; this has never been a Spanish custom, so we had people asking a zillion times “but what do you mean, initial?.. But just my initials, not a signature?.. But why?.. Well, I don’t get it, but if you say I have to do it I’ll do it, but I just don’t see why do I have to write my initials in every page”) and scanned.
We’ve been making the boss take the papers to file them away 
If they’re that important, hey, we can’t just use them as notepaper, right? So there, have another pile for the office, have fun with it.