It’s the St.'s and Saints that screw me up. (Does St. Clair come before or after Saint Clair?)
Our department administrator (let’s say Pat) tends to come in late, leave early, etc., and has for years. Still, Pat and a number of us (including me) have ‘salaried’ positions where you’re expected to put in at least 40 hours a week, and we have a generous time-off allowance.
The assistant (Kelly) to the department head (John - the head is over the administrator) had some stuff going on lately and had to leave early/come in late a number of days during the last pay period. Pat charged about 20 of Kelly’s hours (the time missed) as paid time-off hours. That’s fine.
Except Kelly found out that Pat hasn’t (perhaps ever, but certainly in the last pay period) taken any come-in-late/leave-early times out of Pat’s time-off hours pool, leaving Pat a giant pool of remaining time-off hours.
Kelly is, needless to say, pissed. Since Kelly has John’s “ear” I’m thinking that shit may or may not hit the fan.
I’m feeling less and less guilty about applying for an in-house transfer to another department, which will deeply fuck over the people involved with my position, but hey, if Pat refuses to hire a backup person, that’s what happens. It’d be the same situation were I to get run over someday.
Long story short, I had to interview with my own company/department so that they will hopefully let me keep doing certain parts of my job that I’ve been doing for years. They gave everyone help with our resumes and put us through mock interviews, but I still feel like I did a crappy job in the interview. It also turns out that they are doing two rounds of interviews for one of the two positions I applied for, so if I passed this one, I get to go through this again in a few weeks!
Since the last name is the same (St. is an abbreviation for Saint), the order would be determined by the first name.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing (treating St. as Saint.)
Filing fun:
Many medical charts have stickers on the filed-outwards edge showing typically something like the first three letters of the family/last name and the first letter of the personal/first name. This obviously helps a lot in finding a chart quickly.
One clinic that I work in files their charts by those stickers. And by, I mean they file using the first initial as the 4th item to alphabetize by, and let me explain that.
Let’s take John Wilton and Karen Williams. Their charts’ spines would read “J WIL” and “K WIL” respectively. Most people would expect that a chart under the name of Williams would come before one by the name of Wilton.
Not in this system! They file “J WIL” prior to “K WIL”. And typically it seems like to find a chart, you have to just find the appropriate “block” of initials and sift through them until you get the right patient as it’s a toss-up as to whether anyone alphabetizes within that little group of charts or not.
:smack:
Fortunately it’s a specialty clinic and not some massive general departmental clinic that handles tons of people, or I couldn’t see how they could wade through so many charts.
(The big general clinic for the department uses stickers but alphabetizes in the usual way.)
First, let me say that I do appreciate finally being able to legitimately post a work rant, rather than an unemployment rant, but it’s already pissing me off at this job that I get basically no notice about shifts.
It’s security work, including at quite a few entertainment venues, so I get that often there’s not much notice that, say, a gig has sold out, and they want a few more people on. That’s fine. But there’s also two ongoing contracts- one for two people for 4 hours every day, and one for a single person for 12 hours (split into 2 shifts of 6). I really cannot think of any good reason why those shifts can’t be planned more than a day in advance- hell, the guy I was on with today got asked to do it only 2 hours before the shift started, and that’s pretty common.
The boss, apparently, doesn’t see the issue in this- you get a text asking if you can work, and he says ‘just say no if you can’t do it’. Except, of course, then you go way down the waiting list for being offered extra shifts. If he gave me some damn notice, I could do the shopping, or whatever, some other day, but if I don’t know I need to work around a shift… I can’t.
You might have guessed from some of my earlier complaints that at my particular workplace (as, I would imagine, in many others) there is a very fine line between “passive-aggressive” and “openly hostile.” In my department, the line is becoming perforated, but because there is, AND I AM QUOTING HERE, “no sex stuff involved,” I can’t get HR to take my hostile workplace complaints seriously.
I don’t take the term “hostile work environment” lightly, either. I want to keep my mouth shut and stick it out until January, when I will be taking a leave of absence to do my student teaching for 14 weeks, but I am honestly starting to think that there are efforts underway to get me to quit before then so that they won’t have to pay me for any part of my leave.
Now, look: I know I can be a snarky bitch, but that is mostly on the internet. OF COURSE I am not as cranky and nasty in person as I am here. I might be wearing superhero underpants right now, but I am otherwise dressed in a professional fashion. I say “please” and “thank you” and try as much as possible to save the really filthy curse words for when I am outside having a smoke break, and even then they’re spoken under my breath.
But, to paraphrase a cliché, I am MAD AS HELL and I don’t know how much longer I can take any more. Management does not want to rock by the boat by actually dealing with personnel issues, and HR seems to be too busy playing Candy Crush to deal with employee relations matters. I am ready to get all Norma Rae in the lunchroom and stand on a table with a giant “UNION” sign just to get some attention.
I’ve been here 10 years. I wish that someone would listen to me.
We’ll listen to you, rockle; we’ve been doing that for one another going on three years now, over more than 6300 posts.
Can you be more specific than “my workplace is becoming unendurable,” though?
In his 16 months as a contractor, CG was late maybe twice, tops. I think he also called in sick once or twice. Pretty impressive work attendance overall.
In the slightly less than 3 months we’ve been employees, of which we’ve had PTO available for what, 7.5 weeks now? He’s been late roughly six times and called in sick three times. He showed up nearly two hours late yesterday, not having called in or emailed saying as much. When I called hm out on it and said he needed to do so, he claimed that he had done so every time but this one (false, he’s done so maybe half the time) and was just in a big hurry to get in. :rolleyes: Last time he emailed our boss saying he’d be late as he was walking in the door. Yeah, that doesn’t count.
Hey dude, if you want to be casual about your work hours now that you’re an employee, it’s on your head. Eventually management will notice. But when you’re not here (and you’re supposed to be), I’m the one people call because I a> work with you, and b> sit next to you. So they kind of expect that I will know where you are and when you’ll be in.
But that would require you to actually tell us these things.
Sorry – I was wallowing and whinging there, for a minute.
My biggest gripes have to do largely with personality conflicts and favoritism and how these things get addressed (or not, as the case may be). There are people in this department I don’t like, and it’s getting super old. Now, of course I’m not so deluded as to expect to work in Happy Rainbow Unicorn Land, where everybody is best friends and whatever – hell, I don’t even like my husband 100% of the time, and I’m still totally madly in love with that crazy, sainted man – but it would be nice if more than half the department could be in a room together without riots breaking out.
All of this is pretty typical, I suppose. But the people with whom I am least likely to get along are also the Manager’s favorites. And to be honest, I don’t know why. I will be the first person to admit to petty jealousy – why can’t I be the “teacher’s pet?” I’ve been here for more than 10 years, I’ve never gotten less than an excellent performance review, I am trusted with important projects, I am the person that Directors and VP’s come to when they need something done quickly and correctly. As Josh Lyman put it once, on The West Wing, I am the guy The Guy counts on.
But I have never once, in all this time, been invited out for lunch. I’ve never been invited to a bridal or baby shower. I know I’m not the only one, and part of me doesn’t care. But the part of me that is a parent who tries to be a decent person finds something about it fundamentally unfair. The ladies who lunch (which includes the Manager)? They take two-plus hour lunches at least two days a week. They come in late and leave early on the same days. They go out for mani-pedis together. They take vacation days together to go Christmas shopping. They actually go on vacation together.
In other words: they’re FRIENDS. And our HR policies say that friends can’t report to each other. I’ve mentioned casually AND formally to the Manager’s Boss, and nothing got done. I filed a complaint with HR about a potential relationship conflict, and it got bounced back down to the Manager’s Boss, who continued (and still continues) to do nothing about it. (People from other departments notice, and I am hearing through the grapevine that this bad behavior is starting to manifest in other departments as well.)
And meanwhile, one of the ladies who lunch makes a habit of “dropping off” paperwork with me – specifically with me – that she can’t get finished because she is leaving early and coming in late and taking two-hour lunches. I always get these projects when they’re already crazy overdue and borked beyond recognition. Once things get reassigned to me, THEN Manager gets a bug up her ass about things needing to be done or fixed immediately. I don’t get information I need to complete spreadsheets, I can’t get contact information for people I need to contact, and I sure as hell don’t get overtime.
All I get is to watch as my Manager and her friends saunter out of the building together at ten after three because they have appointments with the new colorist at a salon whose name they can’t even pronounce.
Most of the time I try to stay in my cube and do what I need to and avoid everyone else as much as possible. But it’s getting harder and harder for me to continue to give a shit. I’ve been going to grad school for the last two years, and now I’m almost done. My capstone project is student teaching, which starts in January, and I’ll be out for 14 weeks. And as we get closer to “go time,” I think my Manager is starting to panic, and she’s being even worse than usual. I was 15 minutes late one day last week because I had an issue with my daughter, and Manager threatened to write me up. She’s been hollering because I am “abusing her consideration” by actually sticking to a special schedule that she approved (where “special” = I take a half-hour unpaid lunch, instead of a full hour).
Oh, and I am ALMOST FORTY FUCKING YEARS OLD, with almost 20 years of professional experience (well, 20 years of work experience; not sure how many of them have been “professional”). Nobody in this department is younger than 30. And yet the kids in Lord of the Flies are more mature and civilized than the majority of these bozos.
tl;dr: I AM TIRED. And if SOMEONE WOULD ONLY MAKE AN EFFORT TO TRY TO KEEP ME HAPPY HERE, I might even be willing to stay. (Doubt it, though.)
Oh, dear, Rockle, I’m getting mad on your behalf. That is one hundred per cent, pure unadulterated bullshit.
I can help you out with one thing, though - your age and competence is more than likely what is keeping you out of the “We only work when we feel like it” Club. There are always insecure souls who are threatened by secure, competent people. I suspect you work with an assload of them.
Does this bff of the manager sneak the work onto your desk, or is there any way you can tell her you won’t be doing it for her?
Failing, that, do you have some documentation for this behavior that you can take to your boss (even if not to get it to stop, to negotiate for some OT)?
Also, what kind of a worthless HR department has a policy that “hostile work environment” is defined as “a work environment where sexual harassment is occurring?”
(1) She usually makes a big production of dropping it off when my Manager is at my desk to discuss something else – usually at 3:55pm on a Thursday, right before I need to leave for class, when I’m trying to finish up testing that hasn’t gotten completed yet because I just got that an hour and a half earlier. There is always a dramatic flourish: some absolute tragedy has occurred, you see, with the accompanying waving of hands and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, etc. Then BFF hands the paperwork to the Manager who then turns around and passes it right off to me. No one ever asks me to help; it’s just given to me, and then I start getting requests for status around 6:30 the next morning, before either the Manager or I are even in the office. (And incidentally, isn’t it awfully bad luck for someone to have a car / pet / phone / relative die EVERY SINGLE MONTH on the DAY AFTER this URGENTLY IMPORTANT report is due to Senior Management? You’d think Senior Management would start harassing my Manager earlier, since the report is ALWAYS late, but apparently since I’m the person who actually completes it, I’m the one who gets shit when it isn’t done on time.)
(2) I’ve asked for OT and/or comp time for the extra hours, but I’m always told no – sometimes before I even ask. Because I’m hourly, you see. I’ve tried repeatedly to make the argument that if they want me to do 60 hours of work a week but they don’t want to pay me for them, they should just make me salaried, but that’s a no-go, too. I honestly don’t get it.
(3) Our HR department is basically an NLRB nightmare / wet dream scenario. NOTHING gets handled. NOTHING. We had a Director who was sleeping with a direct report for SEVEN YEARS, and nothing was ever done about it until the underling’s husband caught wind of the affair and started threatening people. More than half the “Employee Relations” team telecommutes, and when you try to contact them you get voice mail or an out-of-office autoreply. I got locked out of the time card system in August 2011 and I STILL can’t get in (I have to log in through an old backdoor link that I got from a friend in IT). Frankly, these assholes wouldn’t recognize a hostile work environment if one gave them a swirlie and then jammed them in a locker for three weeks.
Wait, WHAT???
If you are hourly and are being forced to work uncompensated hours, then you have a MAJOR FUCKING LAWSUIT just waiting in the wings for you to fry their motherfucking asses. Start documenting every fucking minute you work, every day. Document when you’re told that you have to work, when you request pay for it, when and how you are turned down. Start forwarding any emails where they say this shit to your personal email address. Then, after a couple of months of this, take all of your documentation and get a free consultation with an attorney. I guarantee that if this is true, they’ll start drooling in anticipation the moment they start looking at your documentation and they’ll likely agree to take it on contingency.
On your side, carry on as normal. Make no threats of legal action, don’t mention the legality of it. Do everything you currently do, just make sure you’re keeping track of every goddamned second and everything ever said to you about it.
I misspoke (or mis-explained). They want me to DO 60 hours’ worth of work in a 40 hour week, but they won’t pay me for more than 40 hours, so they only GET 40 hours’ worth of work. Which is why I keep getting screamed at, you see: because I literally CANNOT – and more importantly WILL NOT – do any more work than I will be paid for. If shit does not get done because my Manager expects me to be all Hermione-Granger-with-a-time-turner, well too damned bad. I can only do so much in a day. My suggestion to management is always the same: “Hey, here’s an idea, how about if you make EVERYONE ELSE do what they’re getting paid for, instead of expecting me to pick up the slack for, like, 18 people?”
Fuck that noise. Right now, though, it’s frustrating because it feels like they’re trying to build a case to either get me fired or try to force me to resign before my leave of absence starts. And I ain’t a quitter.
Rockle, I am not an employment lawyer, and you should not consider this to be legal advice, just practical.
Nothing that you describe sounds like a “hostile work environment” to me. There’s no question that it sounds awful and nasty and soul-crushing and horrible. But a “hostile work environment” is a legal term of art that means that people are treated differently from one another on the basis of a protected class (usually sex, but it could be age, race, handicap status, or a few other things). HR is probably right to tell you that there is not much they can do for you.
If you are not willing to quit, you probably need to keep your head down and make the best of it until your leave starts. (Why are you going on leave? If it’s pregnancy, can you tie the bad treatment to that, or has it been going on since before you announced it? That actually would be a protected condition and you might have some chance of legal recourse.) But your best move is probably to be looking for another job, one with people who do not lack basic decency.
You’re right – I am sure that by definition this is not a “hostile work environment” so much as it is a work environment filled with hostility. I do realize these are not the same thing. At the same time, I wish that HR would at least pretend to look into whether certain people (Manager and her BFF’s) are being given “preferential” – or at least markedly different – treatment than the rest of us. If I need to take more than my 30 minutes for lunch (like on the rare day when I have an appointment), I need to clear it in writing, let them know exactly when I am leaving and when I am coming back, etc. Meanwhile, over the last month, my Manager has been out more than once when NOBODY knew she wasn’t going to be in the office, but in the same period, I was threatened with disciplinary action when I had to use a vacation day for a family emergency and didn’t give 24 hours notice. (I honestly am not sure how she defines “emergency,” or how she expects that I know I will have one more than 24 seconds in advance, let alone 24 hours, but whatever.)
My leave of absence – if it is even approved, which looks questionable at best right now – is because I have to student teach to finish my M.Ed. I started letting the “chain of command” know about this back in January of this year, when I knew for sure that I would be on schedule to student teach next year. I have been honest and transparent the entire time – yes, I expect to be looking for a teaching job at some point, but I don’t know how long it will take to find a job as a high school English teacher in this area, and so I’d like to stay here as long as I can because I have a kid and a mortgage and stuff, and I realize that I will need to train one or more people on the special tasks that I do. I don’t want to leave anyone in the lurch.
I have never once let my grad school work interfere with my regular work. I actually think that being in grad school has improved my regular work, because I have to be hyper-aware of deadlines and due dates for things, so I have been making an active effort to work on everything more efficiently. I’ve been trying to parse why it is that I’ve been getting so much extra “pushback” on things lately, and I honestly feel that it is because of jealousy or something. I am getting an advanced degree, when my Manager has only an associate degree. She does like to throw in my face that she is my boss even though she doesn’t have “as much education” as I do. It certainly feels like things have gotten worse over the last semester or so. But that could also be hypersensitivity on my part, because I do view my continuing education as an “exit strategy” as much as a career change.
Well, the fact that they’re trying to dick you over is probably beyond your control, but you can at least start to document the ways in which they’re dicking you over in the most pleasant way possible. Identify things like the URGENTLY IMPORTANT report that frequently get passed off onto you. Send your manager an email (something in writing!):
“In the past XX months, I have been responsible for this report XX times. This responsibility has been passed to me XX-XX days after the deadline has already passed, creating sub-optimal results. If I am going to be responsible for this report in an ongoing fashion, can we please ensure that I receive all of the necessary information a minimum of XX days prior to the deadline?”
It looks like you’re trying to get the job done properly, but really you’re documenting that the manger’s friends are falling down in their duties.
I think you need to consider this job as already having an expiration date. I probably don’t need to tell you, but don’t let them screw up your finishing your Master’s, when they’ll probably fire you seconds after that (or maybe even before). They know you plan to get another job; I think the only real question is will they fire you before you get a chance to quit.
But documenting all the shit in the meantime is a good idea - you might have a case for getting unemployment benefits.