It sounds like you’re having a bad day. I hope tomorrow is better.
Word.
That’s kind of brilliant - get you to provide the rope for the noose that they hang you with.
Unless I was specifically told by my supervisor “Employees may get free drinks from the soda machine” I would assume I needed to pay. It’s kind of a no-brainer.
Oh, lord, I had another one today.
Me: “This procedure is out of date.”
ID: “I submitted a revision over a year ago.”
Long pause …
M: “And?”
I: " ‘And?’?"
M: “What is the status of the submitted revision?”
I: “I don’t know. They never responded.”
Very, very long pause.
M: “Did you ever ask them why not?”
I: “No. It is their responsibility to contact me about any problem.”
A) Actually, it’s not. Doesn’t say that anywhere? How do I know? … block your ears …
I read the christless procedures!
Nowhere, in any procedure, does it state a person is relieved of all responsibility by sending an email. Check it out.
B) If it were, I still do not care! This is your process, your responsibility. If someone isn’t doing what you need them to do, you kick their ass. Don’t wait for some lowly inspector at half your salary to do it.
Look, I know it is impossible to get anything done here. But I know why. It is because people with authority (that would be you) accepted and encourage the practice of using personal connections to get something done. If you don’t have a personal connection with an SVP, your rely on your admin’s connection with a specialist who knows the analyst who can get it done (that would be me).
Just … stop it. Go to a Director, or a VP to get things done. Stop relying on admins to do your job.
Uh-oh. He’s got his feelings invested in this.
On the one hand, that beats two hour meetings. On the other, it’s trying to prod non-managers into doing managerial analysis. And there’s a reason that suggestion boxes are anonymous. No one with any sense is going to be honest about anything of substance.
No. The only reason anyone wants job type growth is to get more responsibility, more control, or more money. If you’re not likely to get those things, then he’s pretty much lying about “growth” being something you should want. How much growth would you have to show to get permission to open emails before shift, for example? Do not feel guilty about not wanting what he wants you to want.
You very much have my sympathy. The whole thing sounds stressful.
I wish I could offer something more than sympathy. Is anyone on your team successfully blowing smoke up his skirt? If someone is, maybe you could get tips. Is there a higher paying job that your position could lead to? If so, you could go through the motions of working toward applying for it. If not, I’ve got nothing.
Yeah, that’s how I treat all the problems that I try to fix in my life, at home and at work - send one email and forget about it forever, expecting other people (and fucking Yahoo mail*) to fix it without any more follow-up.
*Did the email go through or not? It’s really a coin flip at this point. Why have I not switched to a better email program? I think I have a task for tomorrow.
Fucking Sears call center bullshit. Fuck our vendors, fuck our AMAZINGLY!!! Byzantine refund process people are waiting 5-10 business days for refunds on appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers and we wonder why HH Gregg is kicking our ass and Amazon is slapping us around.
I was trying to help a guy with his parts return and had to be transferred four times before someone could help me help this guy.
You have to call us at SEARS if you buy something from one of our vendors and need to return it, i have specific steps to take and some megadouche gave me shit becaues I cannot wave a wand and magicallly make his tungsten ring available at a store for an instant exchange.
It’s npt that i think sears is such a horrible place to shop but nobody listens to a goddamn thing i have to say sometimes. Fucking Genevieve always fucking nagging me when i put my tissues on my desk because i have a cold. My office is so damned hot, i wore a polo shirt and jeans and was absolutely broiling hot. Ugh.
I don’t actually disagree with you, I’m just kind of depressed/appalled at how many of my co-workers may not actually have brains.
These are the same people who can’t figure out that if you make a mess in the work kitchen, you clean it up, or that if you kill the joe, you make some mo’, so yeah. Brains optional.
Getting a little annoyed at the folks in the onion capital of the world. I’m still waiting for two travel expense reimbursements from receipts that I submitted on February 9 and March 8.
On my side of the ledger, I was given advance per diem for a third trip that got cancelled. God help them if they ask me to write a check to pay them back for that before they come through with my reimbursements.
Dear boss who chose an office on the other side of the building:
When you want me to open a file, take ten seconds to type the specifics into an email and send it to me. Do not send me an email that says “Please swing by to discuss opening a new file.” I know you love to put the ball in my court and make it my responsibility to make you tell me what I need to know to open the file, but fer chrissake! I waste a lot of time hiking back and forth to stand at attention at his desk while he steeples his fingers and ponders a discussion with me that conveys two or three simple facts.
All I need is client name, new matter title, the names of any adverse parties to check for conflicts, and we’re off. Like I said, it would take only a few seconds to email this all to me. But my boss who’s younger than me is stuck in the age of Mad Men.
So. Yeah. It is my new job. I mean, it’s not going to be me working there full-time or even half-time, but I have to help fix them. I am going to try my best to convince a couple of the doctors that they absolutely must hire another employee to fill the position that my former coworker just vacated, so that there’s someone else doing the same kind of work.
And my replacement asked me the exact. same. question. (where to look up a particular study’s patient schedule) three times in the last three weeks. By E-mail, so I have records of each time she did it. And she could have figured it out by just using the goddamned search function in Outlook and finding my previous response. I did not hesitate to point out that I’d answered it before, either, but she showed absolutely no sense of shame - at least give me a “whoops, airhead!” excuse and I’d be happy.
So I may have mentioned that my boss of the past 4 years or so is leaving; Friday is her last day.
Tonight the email went out from the SVP announcing the resulting organizational changes, the new manager will be someone I never heard of from another division (trying very hard to keep an open mind on that, but that other division is very weird), and who all the supervisors are and who is going to report to the supervisors and so on. Everyone is mentioned except for one person.
Three guesses who that was.
So I happened to be working from home when this came out, so I emailed the SVP “And to whom do I report now?”
His reply: “Good question, and one we hadn’t considered.”
Gee, now I know why I feel fucking invisible. The next 73-1/2 weeks can’t go by fast enough, and that’s not something I would ordinarily say.
I welcome suggestions on mental strategies to avoid going off the deep end at the next insult.
p.s. the departing boss’s going away party is tomorrow after work. I wasn’t going anyway but I was going to make an excuse. Now I’m not going to bother with even that much.
We have people like that.
We also have cleaners who get rid of our cleaning supplies, we bought handled brushes to clean the dishes we use (my boss and I) but they always disappear, then dishes stack up again. What’s worse is to save money the cleaners only come twice a week so even if they do do dishes they get stacked up for 3-4 days.
Here is Page One of Understanding my Team Lead:
Thank you for your patients = patience
the Pacific = the specific
alliteration review = iteration review
cachE = cache (pronounced “CASH” like dollah dollah bill yo, according to SDMB and the Google)
Good God, I could have so much fun with that.
Alliteration reviews would ALWAYS be fun.
I have to tell you, you really missed an opportunity there. A few years back, my boss at the time left for another job, and I was his only direct report. His boss assumed I would go back to reporting to my prior boss. My prior boss assumed I would report to gone-boss’s boss.
For six months, I reported to no one. You could go on the online org chart, and I had a page all to myself – no lines to or from my little box. No one noticed I had no boss. I kept doing my job, and my paychecks continued to be issued. They even gave me a pretty good raise (!) without having a boss. They only noticed when it was time to fill out the annual performance review paperwork to justify the raise they’d already given me. Then I got assigned a boss. (We all had a bit of a chuckle at HR’s expense.)
Since you’re on the short-time countdown, you coulda made the rest of your time, flying under the radar.
Co-worker asks manager if he can work from home tomorrow since we’re expecting a couple of buckets of snow.
Manager says;
1> Not unless the Sr. VP on our floor makes an announcement saying you can.
2> But ‘as always’, be safe, and decide for yourself.
2a> But if you do work from home, you’ll have to answer to our Director for it.
:rolleyes:
One fallout from the manager leaving is a re-org in our area. My co-reports person is being promoted (good for him, he’s a young guy and he deserves it) and leaving the reporting area completely. So they are apparently looking for a new person to head up our little reports area of 2 people (i.e him and me).
I’m reasonably certain (s)he won’t know anything about our business, so I will have to teach him all about what our data looks like. I just hope they hire someone who has some knowledge of, or can learn how to, get data out of databases and organize it into information, otherwise this dept. is in deep trouble when I leave.
Lightray, nice idea but it wouldn’t work here. I said I feel invisible, but that’s except for when they need something. At those times I feel like a robot into which they pour their information demands and out of which comes useful information. I am an analytical (shameless admission) and I have no feelings. Apparently.
Anyway I find I don’t function well without some interaction with (and information from) someone higher up. I need feedback beyond “thanks for the report.”
I’ve spent the last two days performing a pre-shipment review on an order. This order is considered “critical” by the customer; apparently, this resulted in shipping deciding to pack the three items up prior to the completion of the paperwork. These items are extremely sensitive; they’re packed individually in multiple layers of protective material, with extra boxes for protection. This afternoon, I found a gap in our documentation – serial numbers were missing from some documents, so the paperwork documenting the assembly process couldn’t be matched up to the final paperwork. After consulting with two managers and the QA inspector, it was decided that we would reopen one box – the inspector had found credible documentation for one set of serial numbers, so it wasn’t necessary to open all the boxes to determine all the serial number matches.
I went out to shipping with the QA inspector; we found the guy who had packed the assemblies, and asked for his assistance. He didn’t seem to mind too much. As he was unwrapping the item, another shipping employee (who considers himself to be “in charge” of the shipping guys) showed up, and started yelling at us while pacing back and forth. “I hope you ain’t expecting that thing to go out tomorrow, 'cause it’s gonna take me all day to repack it!” I pointed out that he hadn’t packed it in the first place, and that he should calm down and let the guy who packed it handle the situation. “Well, y’all need to learn to do your jobs! Y’all are lucky I ain’t your supervisor, I’d write y’all up! I’m gonna talk to your supervisors, and I’m gonna talk to [manager] and [vice president] and whoever else I can! I’m tired of stuff being packed up before it’s ready to ship! This wouldn’t happen if y’all would do your jobs!” I informed this guy that I had spoken to [manager] prior to requesting the opening of the box, and that he had been the one to OK it. The guy finally stormed off elsewhere, though we could still hear him talking to himself.
The QA inspector told me that this sort of blowup happens any time things don’t go this guy’s way. When I saw [manager] at the end of the day, I asked if he had received a complaint from shipping yet. He had not; however, he did point out that this guy’s rant was baseless – by company policy, an item is not considered ready for shipment unless its paperwork is complete.