Not so much a gripe as a “WTF!!!” --In over 30 years with the company, I have never seen a technician, in any department, take it upon themselves to hand clean the bollards surrounding a power box in the back of a parking lot. Methinks somebody’s OCD was in high gear this morning.
The road in front of my workplace is covered in ice and slush, the county has shut down schools for the day (since most of the back roads are as crappy as the one out front), and yet we’re operating on a normal schedule for some reason. Employees are free to stay home of course…provided that they’re willing to give up a vacation day. :rolleyes:
(Yep, I almost spun out turning into work this morning.)
That’s the way it is here. We never close, so if you think it’s too bad to come in bye bye vacation day.
No. Sadly, they usually have grad students running the ether stills. Actual teachers are expected to stay flame and explosion free. Unless you’re talking about high school. If you’re talking about high school, I have no data.
I got the call.
They’re paying moving expenses.
And when I made a salary offer my new supervisor said “I think we can go higher.”
Now it’s just down the background check and the reference checks, should be no problem. My last day here could be February 17.
And today they’re announcing that they’re hiring that incompetent, sexist clown as my new supervisor. But, oops, his first day here is going to be February 24. I will recommend to the VP that, since clown has supervised a department similar to mine, he should have no trouble at all running software pulls, doing monthly reports to the board, and putting together mailing lists in my absence. In the interview Clown didn’t even know what basic aspects of our database software were. It will be a beautiful mess!
**Cognoscant **- do the dance of joy! 
Vengeance is best served with a look of total innocence, uh? 
We received new computers today - whee!
It was very strongly stressed that we treat them nicely, as if we hurt our new computers, there will not be a tradeout. You will have to go without until it’s fixed.
As 99.99% of my job is done on the computer, going without is not an optimal situation.
One coworker left the set up session, went back to her desk, and her new laptop crashed immediately. Good thing she has vacation time saved up.
And dear coworker - when the IT guy is telling you to click here, do that, etc, don’t just giggle and say you have no idea what’s going on. PAY ATTENTION. It’s not brain surgery. And saying “It’s okay, your coworkers will help” is a quick way to get said coworkers NOT to help.
Cognoscant, congratulations! Good wage, paid moving, and leaving the former supervisor to flounder on his own? Every working person’s dream.
Oh, that’s a link. Apparently you can’t see it over the smiles.
Conga-rats,Cognoscant! 
Cognograts! I’m really glad you won’t have to work for Bozo. Could the timing be any more perfect?? I think not.
Cognoscant : Sweet!
yeahbut, if cog’s not there how will we get to taste vicariously the sweet sweet tears of his replacement supe?
Just be sure to give your fellow workers your new email/phone – so they can call you to tell the horror stories of his managerialism/ Be very supportive to them; they’ll keep telling you the inside dope.
And keeping in touch lets you find an opening in your new company, and poach the hardest-working, most-talented of them away from him!
Cognoscant, there’s not much that makes me cry - but I’m just so goddamned happy for you right now, I am. Crying, that is. 
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
I do backups (among other things) for a living. Computer backups. Yeah, not very sexy. However, it’s a pretty complex task to do daily backups of nearly 5000 servers, some of them 10+ TB in size across wide swaths of geography. I’ve got millions of dollars of software and hardware invested into the backup systems I help to design & run.
It’s “What I Do” ™ and I’m pretty good at it.
Outside vendor shows up to sell us a new server. We own two already, this is a third. It’s a complicated hardware/software package and they frequently sell their labor services to manage it. We have them manage our current pair.
I back them up according to the specs laid out by the application team when we got involved. It’s one of my best performing ones, even, moving a Terabyte every 15 minutes or so. (We could go faster but this was a compromise between speed and cost we all bought into at design time).
For this third server, the vendor once again sold us management services. However, this time they also sold our application team the complete 12-month backup service. This includes the software (the same as mine), the hardware (which we already own) and the expertise of running it for a year (me!). I don’t know the price tag on this service but I’d be surprised if it was a penny less than half a million dollars.
I don’t know what possessed this internal team to foolishly spend hundreds of thousands on this service but the jerks did… Actually. I know a bit about how it came about. They want to change what they’re doing and they bumped into confiict with the other 4998 servers I back up. Nothing big and nothing unmanageable. They no longer want to do, though, what they specified when we designed it.
Could we accommodate what they want? Sure, buy me two tape drives and we’re golden. Did you return to me and ask what could be done? No. You just grumbled to yourselves and spent half a million with the vendor to fix what about $20k and two days of reconfiguring could have fixed.
Jerks. When I don’t get a bonus this year (and there will be none), decisions like this are why.
Secondly…
VMS Team that has to migrate 14 servers from one platform to another? Yeah, you? I know I gave you the list of them. I did it because you said you didn’t have the time to do it. Rather than arguing that this inventory is, in fact, the very definition of your job, I did it for you. Because I’m a nice guy, because I have the ability, and because I wanted to rub your nose in the fact that I could do the inventory while you were on the phone conference explaining you didn’t have the time.
However… I don’t own these systems, I don’t have any access to them, they’ve never been managed by me, so “Please detail what is needed to do my job” is not going to be answered by me. No, not even when you ask twice Mr. Project Manager and Mr. Group Manager. Finding the system owners? Not my job.
Duck and weave because that buck won’t be passed to me.
Sounds like a pretty dysfunctional group. Maybe you should take your 100 vacation days in one block and tell the company that you’re going on an extended out-of-town vacation (or actually take an out-of-town vacation). You could have a talk with her a week before you go, and let her know that she’s on her own, and she’d better have a long talk with her family about taking care of themselves and one another.
Since she posted about that over 3 years ago, I’d certainly hope she’s taken a vacation since then!
Last Activity: 12-02-2010 11:03 AM
Must still be on vacation.