Phoenix, you definitely need to carry a notebook and start transcribing when this kind of thing happens.
You also might want to make friends with the corporate auditors … I hear they can be right terrors about documentation issues.
Heh, heh.
On the opposite end of the spectrum … my friend works for a home health aid company as a case manager. One of their patients died because their family member called and left a message for a nurse instead of taking them to the hospital or calling 911 when she went into respiratory distress - you know, like not breathing??
That makes me want to break out in hives just reading it. :eek:
I’ve been on vacation this week, and I’m starting to worry about what kind of a mess I’m going to come back to. I haven’t taken more than two days off in a row since I started this job. I had a nightmare last night that someone didn’t realize that I was out this week and assigned me stuff that has a 10-day deadline so I came back to a bunch of overdue work. We’ll see what my inbox looks like on Monday.
Saturday afternoon/evening working in a thrift store is bad enough. Some of the customers add to the anti-joy. Some of the co-irkers really make life miserable.
Customers: please do not whine to the salesperson that 10% of retail is robbery. I’d like to know how you think we’re going to pay our operating expenses (wages that are NOT letting anyone live large, utilities, insurance, etc.) if we were charging the pittance you seem to think the goods are worth. Also, is it really THAT hard to browse without trashing the place? Straightening the same aisle five times in as many hours does get really old, not to mention discouraging and demoralizing.
Irkers:
E, you are wonderful, please keep being the same great colleague and human being you are now.
A, you might not think the rest of us who are having to scramble to deal with your absences on Saturdays are smart enough to notice this “coincidence”, but we are, and we don’t appreciate being left short-handed on the busiest day of the week.
F, if I were not deterred by the consequences of doing so, such as firing and legal problems, I’d be choking you. You are NOT a lead, you do NOT have authority to come over and bark at me about what task I might be performing (when simply LOOKING would answer your question). Nor do you have authority to scold me (especially with customers in earshot) about how I need to spend less time providing service to a steady stream of customers essentially single-handed and more time on housekeeping. Yes, I KNOW the shelves need straightening and I am doing what I can when I have a moment around the customers needing attention. If you think there’s a problem (and TBH, that’s not your call), how about getting your butt in gear and HELPING me with the customer service instead of being impossible to find and casually strolling off for extra breaks when someone else is at lunch, which tends to leave all of ONE person still on the floor in our department? Today, I felt horrible about taking the full thirty minutes I am legally required to take for lunch after you ambled into the breakroom and spent several minutes on a leisurely beverage when I knew very well that E was the ONLY person in our department, one of the busiest in the store if not the busiest, still on the sales floor. Better yet, how about losing the “self-promoted to supervisory role” BS and actually pitching in instead of being hard to find and pretty much refusing to deal with major parts of the job such as customers, and how about you stop taking it on yourself to critique a co-worker in front of customers when she’s working a lot harder than you are?
Wow. F sounds like a piece of work (excuse me – a piece of irk :D). Have you considered approaching the real boss with an offer to re-bury whatever bodies F apparently knows about, so F can have his/her leverage taken away?
:). He doesn’t really HAVE any leverage in this situation.
I don’t enjoy playing schoolyard tattletale, but I do think I’ll be chatting with our REAL lead or our supervisor about the situation.
I think you should. It has to be handled somewhat delicately so you don’t sound like you’re just a bitchy tattletale, but a co-worker not doing their job, making it more difficult for other workers to do theirs, and negatively affecting the whole business needs to be discussed.
Today our new boss announced that we had been using a wrong pay code…for for the last 8 years. Funny how nobody caught it until now…must have been some kind of management screw-up, I guess. The correct pay coding results in a $300/yr ***cut ***for everyone. The new boss is saving the company $1200 a year now…hooray!
Did talk to our lead today, who was apparently already aware of difficulties that had occurred when she wasn’t even there (dunno how she worked that magic), and she responded by rather promptly grabbing F (who was due to leave half an hour before I was) and hauling him into the back for a chat. Judging by the amount of arm-waving I noticed through a window (glanced that way while continuing to perform actual work), he was rather displeased at being called on his various annoying behavior. Let’s hope he grows up a bit before I have to move up one step on the supervisory ladder to get to someone capable of handing him a much-needed attitude adjustment.
I have a little anti-rant. I finally finished a project that’s been going on for a while. It was on the back burner, but it really needed to be done, and I’ve been squeezing it in between other high-priority projects. I wrapped it up this morning, and then later today my supervisor emailed me asking where these things were, and I was so happy it was all done before she emailed me! 
Wheeeeeee!!
I’m not very happy with the person who dug up big chunks of my peace lily that’s in my office. There aren’t very many people who could have done it, because my office is locked when I’m not there, and I don’t think it’s very likely that anyone else in my department did it. That leaves security, the cleaners, and a few random people who might have master keys. I need to get a webcam so I can see what the hell is going on in my office when I’m not there. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Attn: customer: It’s not all about you
Yes, we try to prioritize the needs of our customer(s), but it isn’t all about *you * singular.
Attn: member of management (and whoever else had this information): if you want me to do something, tell me about it–especially if there’s a time limit on doing the thing.
Once again my boss is off the hook due to daddy’s money.
Daddy’s money turned his son’s DUI felonies into misdemeanors. Boss gets to drive around under the influence with almost no consequences yet again. “Fuck da po-leece” and all that shit.
Fucking scumbags.
There was an election yesterday. People at work talked about politics all day today! Annoying. I don’t like political conversations at work. Especially considering most people at work seem to have different political opinions and leanings than me. I just keep my mouth shut.
SO glad I have tomorrow off. F barely spoke to me today, and that part was fine by me. Customers and other co-workers, also fine with me, since everyone was civil to pleasant. F did decide to mouth off to assistant lead who was in charge of our shift, but she seems well able to either handle the problem herself or send it upstream. Found out from breakroom conversation that F does have some history of being a problem, which I’m quite sure our current supervisor WILL be dealing with. D is a nice enough guy, but so far as I can tell has a rather low BS tolerance. I suspect about the only reason problems are occurring is recent shuffling of supervisors, with D not yet being well acquainted with new-to-him subordinates.
Yep, same here…especially since political conversations in this part of the country tend to degenerate into discussions about how certain groups of people ought to “know their place,” or else just be rounded up for not being Christian enough. :rolleyes: I’m confident that knowledge of my political/social leanings would spark a small riot among some of the employees where I work.
Sadly enough, the person who essentially acts as lead auditor for our facility is fully aware of this guy’s outbursts…he wasn’t at all surprised as to what had happened, but seemed a bit disturbed that I had witnessed it. As part of his role as auditor, he gave a brief presentation last Friday that had clearly been reworked at the last minute to reference the events I described…specifically, he reiterated that nothing should be packaged until the paperwork is complete. As far as the issues that caused me to hold up the paperwork…they’re normal to the point of being expected (at my workplace – I’m guessing it’s not acceptable elsewhere).
BTW, turns out that A really was sick on his most recent Saturday call-in-sick. His sister works there too, and I had a chance to chat with her today.
It’s probably a good thing that lecture feedback is anonymous. The final question is do you have any comments about the lecture.
My favorite comments from this month, paraphrased, and how I’d probably get fired responding to them if they were signed:
[ul]
[li]It bothered me that people in the conference room were talking during the lecture[/li]so…why didn’t you ask them not to? You’re several states away, I can’t really shhh them from NH
[li]The screen to my computer is too small to view lectures well[/li]how is: a. anyone’s problem but your office’s given they supply you with the computer not us b. how is this in anyway a comment about the lecture??
[li]We’re using slave clients that aren’t equipped with sound. Can we call in to hear the video’s audio? [/li]are you high? what video anywhere lets you do this?
[/ul]
Then there are the people who complained the lecturer, who is from North Carolina, speaks too quickly. If they call the national office, I expect they won’t understand a word we say because we speak much faster than he does.
There’s a risk of blowing a gasket, because you’ll probably get exactly the same responses, but you could try “Do you have any comments about the content of the lecture.”
Dear coworkers:
Stop emailing things for me “to put on the webpage.” Please liberate your documents from your hard drive, put them on the server, and tell me where they are so I can link to them.
Many of the webinars that Caltrans (CA DOT) gives can be listened to through an internet hookup or through a conference call. Our internet hookup is usually through a laptop in a conference room, and the laptop has a tiny speaker. The conference room’s phone, however, has three fair-sized speakers that can be spread out along the table. That’s usually the audio choice we go with.
Caltrans webinars are usually power point based, but there are occassional video clips included. So some systems do have a parallel phone connection.