Ah, gotcha.
There’s a new policy at my workplace that new employees can’t operate certain machinery until they’ve passed their initial evaluation three months in. In reality this means these newbies can use most of the machines, only they aren’t allowed to push the on-off buttons. It’s fucking absurd.
Chimp, what is wrong with you management? Is there no OSHA where you work?
Just a WAG: there is, but people calling them are labeled as “whistleblowers” and become work-finding pariahs, the new employees don’t even see the risk, and the policy would actually be good if implemented correctly (such as, “train people as soon as they walk in the door, not three weeks later”).
The bad news: a resource from The Cult who was not available two months before is available now, so he’s taking over from me.
The good news: that means I’m off from a project which, while far from the worst I’ve been in, was disorganized to ridiculous amounts. The next job has relatively-high probabilities of being better, we’ll see.
The whole team was surprised because I was doing great, until we explained that my replacement is internal and therefore cheaper on one hand, and expensive to keep around doing nothing on the other.
The manager has agreed to act as a reference.
I already have an in-person interview for next week, and I don’t have it for sooner because I wasn’t available sooner. Also two more leads and the agent I was working for has gotten totally mad over this and is pushing my CV to everybody he knows, their moms and the cleaning lady (never underestimate the networking power of cleaning ladies).
Oh, remembered another item that I hadn’t wanted to tell you about from work but that doesn’t matter now.
In one of our areas we have two key users; one is off for surgery. The other one is one of those people who panic when they don’t know exactly what to do, you guys ever heard of “hysteric blindness”? He suffers from it, anxiety makes him unable to read.
We’d had an in-person training session on a relatively complex task; later he wasn’t sure what to do (“opening the manual” might be a start, if you weren’t hyperventilating so hard that images on the screen wobble) so he complained to his boss instead of contacting me, of course. So, telecon for teletraining. “Click on the second tab of the excel file, ‘MyLittleTab’” (mouse on teleshared screen starts waving around the top right corner) “it’s on the bottom left… bottom… lower… low… below… under… further down… yeah that direction, move more in that direction…” Two hours along those lines. My coworkers ranged from “hands tightly held over mouth” to “grinning from ear to ear and making ‘oh how I wish I could record this’ signs”, but the task got done.
Okay, I finally have to ask: What, exactly, is a “CV”? I get from context that it’s something like a resume, but I have seriously only ever seen the abbreviation; I’ve never, to the best of my knowledge, seen it spelled out.
Curriculum Vitae. That link explains the difference between a CV and a resume.
My monster comes up to seven pages and that’s without listing papers and with very abbreviated information for my previous career; so, definitely not a resume. Lengths like those or even bigger are perfectly normal in my field, I get more requests to tweak it with more detail (so, more length) than less.
Thanks 
Okay, after 30+ years in the foodservice business, I’ve grown accustomed to uneducated, near-illiterate servers. I long ago gave up on trying to explain that there is no “Q” in the word “biscuit”.
But now, at my current job, I have discovered that the word “raisin” is apparently a very difficult word to spell (I’m currently cooking in a retirement home, where we have raisin toast as an option). I swear that I have seen “raisin” misspelled six different ways. Rasin. Raison. Raisen. Raizin. Rasin. Raizan. GAAAAAAAAAAH!
And what am I supposed to do when I’m asked to cook Frensh Toast?
Our servers are supposed to also write the residents’ names on the tickets, so that if another server needs to deliver the food, they know who to deliver it to. And every day, I thank God that the residents never see these tickets. The spellings on the residents’ names are an abomination.
Dorthy?
Louis? For two months I thought we had a male resident name Louis, until one day one of the servers asked me if I had a ticket for Louise, and I looked at the tickets and said, “No.”. Half of these servers don’t realize that “Louise” had a fucking “E” on the end.
Wain?
Jain?
Marj?
Yes, half of these servers aren’t actually servers, they’re caregivers and med-aides who have been shanghai’d into serving food because this company is too cheap to hire more competent servers. And most of them are Mexicans who may be confusing “Louise” with “Luis”, but dammit, almost every one of them was born, raised, and educated here in the USA, so English as a second language is not an excuse for most of them.
Not to mention that most of these pseudo-servers have no concept of “abbreviations”, and insist on writing everything out longhand, to the point that I feel like I’m reading a book instead of a meal ticket. Morons, you don’t need to fully write out “Buttermilk Pancakes”. We only serve one kind of pancake. Just write fucking “Pancakes”! Don’t write, “Over Easy Eggs”, write “OE”. The “specials” are numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. So just fucking write #1, #2, #3, or #4. Don’t write out the full name of the special!
And then there’s the other problem with using caregivers and med-aides as servers: THEY HAVE THEIR CAREGIVING AND MEDICATION DUTIES TO ATTEND TO. So more often than not, they’ll turn in a meal ticket, I’ll make the food, and then it will sit in the window for 30+ minutes because they got tied up doing their actual job, which is attending to other needs of the residents. So what happened the other day? A caregiver turned in a ticket, I made the food, and then it sat there for a long time. One of my actual servers went into the dining room, and some resident hollered at her that she hadn’t gotten fed yet. She saw the food in the window and assumed it was for the hollering resident, and she took the plate to her. 15 minutes later, the caregiver who turned in the order came back and yelled at me because my server delivered the food to the wrong person. So I said, “Well, you turn in the order and then don’t come back …” “Blah blah blah I have my caregiving work to do!” “Yeah, and that’s why you’re supposed to write the resident’s name on the ticket so that somebody else can deliver it correctly!”
Goddam, I’m so sick of this.
Sounds like the manager of Food Service and the manager of Resident Care need to have a conference with the big boss to get some rules established.
Indeed. I think I already posted earlier in this thread about how they fired my manager, and cook #3 was his daughter, so she left with him, leaving me as the only cook in this place, so I worked 27 consecutive days, including 17 consecutive 13-hour shifts, preparing three meals a day, every day, all by myself, before they finally got a new foodservice manager and another cook hired. During that stretch (in which everybody in this place was in awe of me) I had several conversations with the Resident Care Coordinator (with whom I get along well) about the fact that I AM FUCKING IN CHARGE OF THE KITCHEN WHEN I’M THE ONLY COOK ON DUTY, AND HER PEOPLE NEED TO DO WHAT THE FUCK I TELL THEM TO DO. And the RCC assures me that she has communicated my message to her people. Yet some of them continue with the “you’re not the boss of me!” crap. Yes, I’m not “management”. But I’m still in charge of the fucking kitchen when my manager isn’t here (this is the Holy Word from the “big boss”, which he told me when I was hired and reaffirmed when I was the only cook here). And the instructions I’m giving are for the benefit of the residents, and, in fact, will make the caregivers’ jobs easier.
I ran into a similar problem when I started working at the local convention center, eight+ years ago. I had applied for a cook position, but they didn’t need a cook, they needed a dishwasher. I didn’t want to be a dishwasher, but I needed a damn job, so I took it (I was swayed by the "union job, health insurance plan, 401k, and paid vacations, things you don’t typically get in my line of work). And I was a damned awesome dishwasher. I earned two “Employee of the Month” awards for my dishwashing excellence (you try washing the dishes for parties of 800+ people, all by yourself). And there I was, 40+ years old, washing the damn dishes, and trying to give instructions to teenaged and 20-something servers about how they should bring the dirty dishes to me. Everything I was telling them not only made my job easier, it also made their jobs easier. But they all looked at me with the idea that anybody who would wash dishes for a living must be an uneducated dumbass, and just ignored everything I told them. Never mind the fact that I started working in foodservice before most of them were born, and I knew what the fuck I was talking about. When I finally got promoted back into a cook position and they had to deal with my dishwashing replacements, most of them finally realized how good they had it when I was washing the dishes.
But my current job … I hate it, and I despise my greedy bastard corporate overlords, and I’m looking for something else. When they fired my previous manager for bullshit reasons, I was so angry that I was prepared to follow him out the door. But my conscience wouldn’t let me do that. I had around 150 elderly clients who needed to eat, and it wasn’t their fault that I was the only one there to cook for them. So I stuck it out. My convention center job prepared me for working long stretches of long shifts, so I was able to handle the load. I just made the decision that I was going to stick it out, and hang around long enough to make sure the new manager and new cook were going to be able to handle the job. New manager is wonderfully competent, and the new cook is good, so I feel comfortable leaving now as soon as something better shows itself.
Well, I called dibs on the current Powerball jackpot, so I’ll probably be needing to hire a chef soon…
This is the weirdest work complaint I’ve ever had but I just had to share.
I was assigned a new project a couple weeks ago and have had several teleconferences with them getting details and scope. There is one woman on the team who thankfully is not directly communicating with me. She has a very quiet whispery voice and I automatically picture a 100 yr old woman in a rocking chair every time I hear her. I was SO curious that I drove downtown to a meeting yesterday and she was OFF.
Now I need to go in for another meeting to find out just how dramatically she differs from my mind picture.
Mister Rik, I do hope they did not put up a fight about those weeks with 51 hours of OT.
At what point does time-and-a-half become double time?
Speakerphone. Hate it. Hate it with a fiery passion.
I understand that there are times when a person might need to have their hands free, but when I am asking you to repeat every. Single. Sentence. Three times over because I can’t understand what you are saying due to background noise, the echo, and the fact that it sounds like you are producing the decible equivalent of a churchmouse, maybe it’s time to pick up the receiver.
This goes doubly so for incoming calls. I understand that, if I called you, I might have caught you at a bad time, but if you are going to initiate contact with me, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to do so at a time when you can hold the phone to your ear.
My manager calls me on speakerphone all the damn time for no reason other than she doesn’t feel like actually picking the phone up. And when she can’t hear me and I can’t hear her? No, she still doesn’t pick up, she has me come in to her office. Lame.
In other news my calendar must be broken because it says it’s april but I definitely brushed 2+ inches of snow off my car this morning. Never should have gotten up.
OMG, little Miss “Thank you for your patients” just topped herself. Prepare to fall out of your respective chairs:
Sorry for the incontinence.
I’m not kidding. I’ll take a screen shot if someone doesn’t believe me. At this point, I have to wonder just how much of this is stupidity/ignorance, and how much is flat-out malice. Yeah, yeah, "Never ascribe … " and all that, but jeeeeeeeeeeeeez.
That sentence has a **very **different meaningwhere I come from.
I was about to offer condolences 