This is why snail-mail (postal letters) and phone conversations and in-personal conversations are a no-no.
Email. IM convos. Paper (well, virtual) trail. If you don’t have that, you’re screwed.
The janitors did that at lunchtime to the restroom next to the drivers break room at one place where I worked, and got a whole lot of complaints. When they did it again a month or so later, somebody put a hand-lettered sign up “Restroom closed for cleaning – use the wastepaper basket in the Maintenance Managers Office, room 204 upstairs”.
And they did it! After two burly Teamster drivers had walked into his office, unzipped, and pissed into the wastebasket next to his desk, as he was sitting at it – and then a third driver came in, started unbuckling his pants and asked the manager which of those papers on his desk he should use to wipe, the manager led him to the management restroom, and then went directly down to have a ‘serious discussion’ with the janitors & their supervisor.
It didn’t happen ever again!.
But about a year later, during contract negotiations, it came up again. The union demanded that they tear out some managers’ offices next to that, and install a second restroom, to be available when the one was closed for cleaning. They settled for the company having to remodel the toilet part of the area into individual bathrooms. (Which helped them, since they had just hired the second female driver, and it now met EEO guidelines.) But it cost the company something like $100,000 in remodeling plumbing & electrical costs, and reduced size for the management offices there.
My supervisor does things like this. She’ll ask me to do something, not say when she wants it, and suddenly she wants it right away. One afternoon she sent me an email about 3 asking me to do something. I had a long list of other things I needed to get done that afternoon, so I thought, no problem, I’ll do this tomorrow. Then she emailed me at 4 asking me if it was done yet. :mad: Sometimes I have several high-priority projects going on at the same time, and she’ll keep asking me if another non-high priority project is done yet. Sorry, I can’t work on four things at the same time!
I always ask when they need it, even though I don’t have these kinds of passive-aggressive bosses. It just helps me to prioritize my own work.
I get asked for things by people who aren’t my boss, and if they are working my last nerve and they say they need something right away, I refer them to my boss to ask which of my other projects can be put aside. That usually works pretty well.
Roddy
That’s a really good strategy, and it would work well with any semi-rational supervisor. However, based on past experience, here’s how it would play out:
Option 1: I send her an email asking her when she wants me to do this. She doesn’t respond to the email.
Option 2: I hunt her down (which is not easy sometimes) and ask her in person when she wants this done. She deflects to a totally different topic and never answers the question.
In the unlikely event that she does tell me when she wants something finished, she’ll decide a few days before the deadline she gave me that it needs to be ready for a meeting at 8am the next day.
I’m not just guessing. These have all happened. In spite of this, I do like my job, most days.
"I’d like to be able to meet your deadlines, but you don’t just keep moving the goal posts, you strap them to the backs of wild animals and set them free in the woods!’
I dealt with this frequently, and you’re going at it wrong.
Once you see that certain people do this to you, don’t let them be the ones to decide (or not decide). Instead, you take charge – even of your boss.
Send he an email, but don’t ask – instead tell her: “This appears to be a medium-priority task, so I expect to work on it after I finish the high-priority XYZ project. Thus this should be ready by Noon on Friday. Email me if this is not OK.”
Then you have specified, in writing, what you understand are the requirements. And the burden is on her if she wants them changed.
Also, do NOT hunt her down and discuss it in person. As you said, you won;t get any better answers. And you won’t have a paper trail. If she catches you somewhere in person and changes the priorities, make sure that as soon as you’re back at your desk, you send a confirmation email: “Just to confirm that I understand our conversation in the hallway earlier, you want me to work on this task immediately, to have it ready by 8am tomorrow. Then I will return to working on the high-priority XYZ project, which should only be delayed by a few days.”
[And cc this email to the sponsor of the XYZ Project – after all, it’s proper business to keep your other customers aware of the progress on their projects. If they call your supervisor (or her boss), that’s just a management-level problem. Peons like you just work on the tasks you are assigned, with the priorities you are told.
Got yet another dingbat fake “designer” that doesn’t know raster from vector. I’m sick to death of being handed raster logos from clients (about 75% can suddenly find the proper vector logo after I tell them I need THAT one) but this one was straight from the horse’s mouth which made it worse.
“But nobody ever said they couldn’t use my photoshop logos before!” Yeah, that’s probably because you handed your clients the raster logo you made, got paid, and went on your merry way. Then the client passes it on to the printer and the printer goes, “Where’s the vector copy?”. The client shrugs their shoulders and says this is all I have, and the printer goes through the trouble of tracing the vector logo. You never hear about it because it’s the printer over here fixing up your stupidity. Well this time you’re talking straight to the printer and this time I get to tell you to your face that your logo is no good and we have to charge the client extra to redo it. While Ccing them.
While we’re at it, frankly, your portfolio is crap and the logo you made is awful. I can tell you have no training as a designer at all, so please, get the fuck out of my profession already. I have no idea why my client went from a great designer to your pile of steaming shit - wait, I bet I know. Because you’re cheap.
Every cheap self-taught designer is the biggest headache to deal with because they don’t know anything. They’re just going to fuck the project up from start to finish. Clients, pay up for a proper designer already. You get what you pay for - and in cases like this you have to pay twice because of your cheap-ass ways.
That’s what I do, too. I think (non-asshole) bosses appreciate it - I communicate with them about what I have going on, and it helps them to schedule things and keep everyone busy (but not overloaded).
This is great if your boss is like MagicEyes’ and refuses to take responsibility for doing the scheduling that she should be doing. I heartily endorse this plan!
Once upon a time, maybe 25 years ago, I was a self-taught designer (mostly for fun) and even then the issues were exactly the same. I’m glad to say I did know the difference between raster and vector, and in fact I hated working in Photoshop. I always thought vector was much easier (I didn’t work with photos). I only did work for myself and a couple of friends (one for free, one I took out in trade, so they both got their money’s worth). I studied a lot of other peoples’ work and saw clearly enough that I probably didn’t have what it takes to make a living in design. But even now I look back at my small portfolio with a little pride, that I was able to produce work that I’m not ashamed of even today.
Roddy
Yup, client just confirmed it for me. “But she’s cheaper than you are!” and I told her flat out, “Not if I have to redo all the work that your designer sends over to me”
Didn’t dissuade her. I’ll be getting some more low-res photoshop crap to magically turn into usable print files, I’m sure. Looks like she’s happy to get charged twice - downside is she’ll still get crap work in the end as I won’t spend my time improving bad designs. If she wants bad designs, she can have them.
You want to give me her email address, and I’ll send her an article on false economy?
All I ask is that you morons can READ. Is that too much?
Forgodsake, I sent you an email with 2 whole sentences in it. 2.
One of those 2 sentences says
“Please add ‘newemployee@whereiwork.com’ to your safe senders list.”
The other one says “All replies and inquiries should be sent to the minion copied in this message.” Of 200 messages, 150 either asked some stupid, irelevant question or replied to only me. Not the minion. Not all. Me. Not that it’s that much to forward 100+ messages to the various recipients, but if you would be bothered to fucking read your 2 sentences you could have saved me so much, lazy ass.
Never expect email to be idiot proof.
I sent an email to several people, and bcc’d one who I thought should know what was going on.
He Replied All. Just to say ‘Thanks’.
As God is my witness, I will never bcc instead of forwarding again.
That seems to be the motto around here… it happened again yesterday. We have two small assemblies, each consisting of three parts, that are in use at nearly all of our customer sites. Each customer site has a unique assembly; for example, a site might require two of the parts to be a certain size, and the third to be a different material. Waaaay back in the day, engineering addressed this issue by establishing a part number for each assembly based on its base model number; notes in the part database gave a description of each site’s requirements. When an order was placed, the engineer reviewing the order would simply copy the description for the appropriate site and paste it in the engineering comments for the order.
About a year ago, I was informed by purchasing that our vendor needed the manufacturer’s part number for each component in addition to its description. I spent roughly two days matching each site description to the correct part numbers, and ensured the part database was updated too.
Got a call from purchasing yesterday whining about how the assembly can’t be ordered like this, that it’s too confusing for the vendor (and for purchasing, too). I checked the engineering comments for the order…all parts are neatly listed by both the manufacturer’s part number and the description. sigh Yes, the individual database records for the parts contain huge amounts of information… but the only thing purchasing needs to look at is the engineering comments section on the order.
[ol]
[li]Ok, when I’m disgusted by how dusty it is (here in my office) that’s pretty bad.[/li]
[li]The turn-in to my office is apparently a local cop speed trap.[/li]
[li]My exalted team leader, in a group meeting the other day:[/li][/ol]
"Our first-response time is 5.92, and blah blah … "
agent raises hand “Is that in hours?”
ETL: "Yes. Hours. So, a response time of 5.92 means five hours and ninety-two minutes … "
Me, inner monologue: I outlived Grandboss. I can outlive this one.
Me (loudly): “So 6 hours, 32 minutes then?” 
Edit down to:
Don’t fucking tell me that your syntax error SQL code ran on another computer.
Don’t have someone else from your team send me a copy/paste of your email several hours later asking the same question.
Why* do some co-workers, when they have a problem, start out by saying “This is broken, you made a mistake,” and then when you point out, as gently as you possibly can, that the mistake was in fact theirs, complain that you are being mean to them?
*This is purely rhetorical, of course, although if you have a can of spray presto-changeo that would cause them to purchase a clue from the nearest vending machine, I would gladly pay you for it on Tuesday.
Roddy
One month ago;
User emails DBA, copying us, telling DBA to change something we own.
I step in and say no, we have to approve that since we own it, hold off and let me look it over.
DBA responds and says it looks good to her, she’s doing it anyway.
I respond spelling out that we own it and we have to approve any changes to it, so it is not appropriate to do it after I specifically said not to.
DBA flips out, IMing me screaming that I just called her out in public (since the email exchange went to her team box) and telling me never to do that again.
Today;
(Different) user does something stupid. Email exchange that doesn’t identify the person working out how to address it. Several teams involved.
DBA Sensitive (above) replies all calling out that user by name and telling him, in bold, colors and capital letters, to never do that again.
:rolleyes: