It’s been forever since I’ve seen that show – but I think you may be right 
At least writing a rant has lit the fires under me about getting more resumes out and ringing up more connections. If nothing else, this job has introduced me to all the town managers and business owners within a 30 mile radius.
I’ve been circulating resumes and had an interview today.
Taking a day off from the job I already have and getting dressed up and driving out to your location and filling out enough paperwork to buy a house and answering asinine mindfuck interview questions and getting an immediate offer is all fine and dandy,
BUT IF I KNEW YOU WERE PAYING $11/HR WITH NO BENEFITS WE COULD HAVE BOTH SAVED HALF A DAY
I used my vacation days the first week of September to attend a music festival(which was awesome, btw.) One of my supervisors noticed something curious in the attendance book tonight - I’m apparently supposed to be on vacation again this week. I don’t have anymore vacation left, I don’t have anywhere particular to go or anything special to do, and even if I did, I wouldn’t use more vacation so soon after I just used it. Now I have to call my manager before work tomorrow to tell him I’m actually not on vacation again.
Mine isn’t a rant about colleagues, but about customers.
I work in an outfitters that also provides the uniform for the local private school. It is fairly time consuming in the summer, but it gives a guaranteed income for the shop.
However this summer I have had people rich enough to be able to afford to send their children to a school where the fees are £11000 a year, go to the second hand shop instead, and tell this to my face.
The worst incident was a parent demanding a refund on items that we had previously reserved (and could have sold to other customers) because she had found it cheaper at the second hand shop and “I’ve got three children, so you can understand.” Only to turn around and start chatting to her friend about how they were looking to buy another horse!
We have also had parents go over our heads and ringing our suppliers direct to complain about what they perceive as late deliveries, and being very nasty towards them, which could potentially put our shop in a difficult position. Fortunately our suppliers are nice and very understanding and haven’t held it against us.
I am aware this is a slightly petty rant, but it is annoying after all the work we have put in to get everything ready for this summer and to make things easier for the parents, to have them be this rude to us.
Yes, I know the company picnic is this afternoon, and the games and activities are important. But it’s not only unfair that you’re practicing the minute-to-win-it games beforehand, it’s unfair that I’m doing all the fucking work for the department because you’re screwing around. I’m glad that soda can exploded all over your desk.
Our company picnic is coming up and I don’t want to go. The only advantage would be to get out of work for a couple hours. The disadvantage is that it’s like 15 miles away from the office, and several more away from home. It’s boring, I don’t care to spend time with anyone there and I never win any of the prizes. Yup, this year, I’m staying at work. Have fun, y’all.
Wow, you guys get to take off work to attend the company picnic? My company expects me to give up a Saturday. (No, I won’t be attending.)
I don’t think this is a petty rant at all. These customers sound like assholes. I will NEVER understand why people think it is OK to be rude and nasty to people from whom they are expecting service. I mean, some salespeople are jerks too, but it doesn’t sound like that was the case here.
Thursday 1st October 1998. I could either go to the corporate party or work my evening shift in a call centre. Either way we got paid Tough choice. Especially when I was on leave the Friday, not returning until the Wednesday. And I was working my notice, due to leave the 16th, and all the references had been signed, sealed and delivered. What had I got to lose?
The party was a sit down meal in an aircraft hangar, with one bottle of wine between two. Plus another few bottles given to us because the table to the left were all drivers. Plus some more wine cleared off the table to the right of us because they never turned up. Plus some drinks tokens that could be redeemed at the bar. Plus as much booze as you could blag from the senior managers. This evening would go down in Scottish history as one of the few occasions where a group of Scots found themselves with so much booze they didn’t know what to do with it, and by late evening were actually refusing the free bevvy. :eek::eek::eek:
The entertainment was a standup comic who was only memorable for the fact that he ripped the boss up mercilessly. And we had a reasonably famous 80’s singer who had a respectable back catalogue, followed by a disco where anyone that was still standing found themselves disrobing to the tune of “you can leave your hat on.” for those who remember “the Full Monty” we salute you.
Somehow I managed to get up for my weekend trip to London later that morning, whereupon I collapsed across two train seats and only woke up when I passed the wall that would be imortalised as Platform nine and three quarters.
These are the parties of old. The parties that get spoken of in hushed, reverential tones. The parties that sections 9 to 11, 15, 18c-18h and 24f-m of the staff handbook nowadays expressly forbid.
Up the workers!:D:D:D
So, I work in product management for a large company that supports health plans. We get regular notices from the government to tell us to do different things with reimbursement records. Submit them, adjust them, delete them, shove them up our asses. Whatever.
But the thing is, the department who’s supposed to be doing the job of queuing up these notices and doing something with them just…doesn’t. Instead they whine. “But it’s haaaard! We don’t have the resources! It’s not fair.”
Are you fucking kidding me? Stop whining about resources. If you need them, hire temps to get you through and put more people in your budget. And don’t tell me this is rocket science. I know it’s more work than your average data entry tech could handle, but I’ve done it myself and the guy you hired earlier keeps telling you it’s not that hard. So fucking figure it out. The last time I sat down with your VP to figure out a staffing strategy for your department (one that I don’t work in), we put together a plan. That NONE of you followed. So this is in your court.
THEN, after the government submitted multiple deletion notices on many different things, we get another notice. “Oopsie! All the reimbursement requests you submitted from May on that we rejected? Yeah, our data was wrong. We shouldn’t have rejected. Our bad. If you want reimbursement, you have 30 days to resubmit everything you’ve submitted since May. TTFN!” So this is MORE work that you won’t do.
So, we get shit on by clients and by the agency if we don’t do what we’re supposed to. I get that. Then we have an internal department whines instead of doing it. Then we get additional notices. It’s a terrible situation. And I’m so fucking tired of getting on client calls and giving bullshit answers to explain why you didn’t do your job. Federal deadlines aren’t optional. And our clients won’t accept that we didn’t get reimbursement for this shit because it’s hard. They don’t care that the government messed up. The government is above its own law. So figure this shit out. Now.
Motherfucker. My best work friend just turned in her notice. She got thrown under the bus for something that wasn’t her fault so she basically gave them the ol’ middle finger and is going to work for her husband’s auto repair shop next month.
Thing is, I was there when the incident that she was blamed for came to light. It was the guest’s fault. It was totally the guest’s fault, but Big Boss mishandled the situation. He took the blame on us instead of turning it back on the guest where it should have been. Now he’s about to lose the best person he’s got at the hardest shift to fill.
Oh well. At least I’ll see her whenever I get my car worked on. He’s my new I Know A Guy for car repair.
I’m told the Musicland corporate parties could get pretty out of hand. I didn’t go to my first one and I regretted it. They had a semi-famous band (can’t remember who, it was 20 years ago) and reportedly, this beautiful large chested woman I worked with got so drunk she stood up on the table and danced topless. With no recriminations or punishment after the fact.
Went to the next year’s party and it was ‘scaled back’ (no band, not as much booze) and nothing really exciting happened.
Damn.
Only worked there the two years.
Dear Manager:
I hope you realize that just because I didn’t argue with you doesn’t mean I think the policy you are trying to enforce makes sense.
Policy–if you have checked out an expensive piece of equipment, you must also keep a small piece of plastic with a number on it with the equipment, and preferably both items on your person. If you lose the equipment, you could be fired! Horror!
Note: I’m overeducated and underemployed. I’m pretty sure I could find a new job if I lose this one, especially this time of year. I don’t want to lose this one, but there are several aspects of it I wouldn’t miss.
And we tried this keep the piece of plastic with you six months ago, and worked really hard at it for a month, and then went back to business as usual. I hadn’t realized that they’d restocked the supply of pieces of plastic and started nagging about them again.
Heh - if you ever need a new username…
I’d get those in writing before you go - those sound like exactly the type of assholes who would either give bad recommendations or no recommendation at all, depending on the mood they’re in. They don’t give a shit about anyone else, so screwing you over for a future job would just be a bit of fun for them.
I worked at one place that stopped having staff Christmas parties after all the divorces that came out of one memorable one. 
Not a gripe so much as a whinge – I’m that grateful to even HAVE a job at this point, and I can’t really complain about the job itself, it’s brilliant. Challenging but not too difficult, so much more worthwhile than being a retail or service drone, and I feel like I’m making a real difference in people’s lives. I’ve had one notably dissatisfied client who thought it was fun to call me up and berate me after telling me he never wanted to hear from me or my organization again, but my boss gave him an earful about abusing his staff, and we haven’t heard from him since. My workplace is pretty decent, coworkers are friendly and supportive, boss and line manager are friendly and supportive, the open-plan office can be quite noisy at times but I’ve more or less gotten used to it, and I’m often out of the office anyway visiting clients. There’s enough variety in the work to stop me getting bored, and enough work to keep me busy so the days don’t drag very often, unless I’m feeling too ill to concentrate very well.
Oh, right, the gripe. I have an assistant. Wait, you say, that’s a gripe? Well, not really, it is nice to have someone to delegate some tasks to so I can focus on other things that can’t be delegated. The problem is that I’m not good at delegating, and I’ve never really been in a position to train someone, and he’s very young so not experienced in quite a lot of areas of life, much less work. This is his first job. Nice enough fellow, just inexperienced, and I am inexperienced at providing experience. So I feel a bit awkward, he feels a bit awkward, it’s just a bit awkward all around.
It’s getting better with time, and I think he is learning a few things from me, so that’s good. But my normal modus operandi is that I prefer to work alone whenever possible, so it’s sometimes irritating to have to give up my alone time, say, in the car between clients or whatnot. But it is valuable experience in managing employees, so I’ll just suck it up and learn as much as I can in the process.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled gripe thread, already in progress.
WOW. Scotland knows how to party!
Our company picnic: cornhole, fishing, a pool for the kids, door prizes, and barbeque. I have heard that there was an epic, non-company-sponsored event that took place at an employee’s house that involved a guy deciding to take a nap in the driveway (he didn’t get hurt, since no one was in good enough shape to drive).
My job has a party in-office each December that has a catered-in appetizer/dessert buffet, an open bar, music, plus random entertainment like karaoke, “white elephant” gift exchanges, or something similar. Plus a couple of the bosses walk through and pass out the bonus envelopes.
Pity a couple of people who don’t know how to hold their liquor managed to make a spectacle of them being drunk last year (including one guy managing to at least get to his own office to puke into a wastebasket) and might well have ruined the open bar aspect. With any luck, I’ll be at a new job before I find out.
This would probably be a good time to explain that cornhole is a bean-bag-tossing game.
And not a salad-tossing game. 'Cos, you know how we Dopers can be.
God, PLEASE let it be a bean-bag-tossing game…
I like this story better without the explanation.
ETA: “Hey new guy, it’s your turn in the barrel!”
The coworker I ranted about here finally got fired this week. Work is much better without him.