Consider this stolen. 
So apparently today is the National Day of Prayer. I have no problem with people praying or living their faith as long as doing so doesn’t interfere with my right to do the same. What I do have a problem with is it interfering with people performing their jobs. If you feel you must pray at work, do it before or after, not during. Because when I’ve got a line of people in front of me and I ask you a question that will expedite my dealing with the needs of these people and you “can’t” answer me because you’re praying, we’ve got a problem.
Every time my coworker remembers the facebook page that we have and realizes that I must have updated it recently, we go through these steps:
-He forgets how to get to Facebook. I remind him that we put a link directly to the shop page right on his favorites bar in his web browser.
-He can’t find it. I point out where it is in his browser.
-He asks if he can’t just have a shortcut on his desktop. Out of stubborness I say no, it will clutter his desktop (and knowing he will forget it is there anyway, like everything else he has on his desktop).
-He reads the whole page from top to bottom. We started using it only a few months ago and post once a week so this is not difficult to do.
-He stops at the one that mentions poutine. “What is poutine?” he asks. I ask him why he did not use Google instead of interrupting me again with the same question he has asked every time he looks at the Facebook page.
-I tell him what poutine is anyway when he stares dumbly back at his computer without doing anything.
-He notices the four reviews that were put up within two days of us starting a Facebook page.
-He whines that he can’t see the full reviews, probably forgetting that these are the same four reviews we have always had and there are no new ones. Besides, they are just one-sentence reviews that say nothing of particular interest, just “They do a great job!”
-I tell him that if he wants to see the full reviews he will have to create a personal Facebook account, and that the reviews are the same reviews we read to him before anyway so there’s no point.
-He asks if he can just use my account. I tell him absolutely not. He pouts. He does not want to create his own Facebook account, so he closes the window.
Every time. EVERY TIME, it’s the same steps.
I hope this other place I’m interviewing at will take me away from the continual Groundhog Day that is working with this guy, who is continually shocked at every mundane thing that happens in his life.
You did respond by offering blessings in the name of the pagan deity of your choice, right? I mean, it is the National Day of Prayer.
I’m Buddhist, so no. I chose to meditate *after *work.
You’re a better person than I am!
Being the religious type myself, I think prayer is a good thing, but I have to agree with SpazCat that there are appropriate and inappropriate times for it, and using that as an excuse for not performing one’s job duties falls firmly on the “inappropriate” side of the scale.
As for my own work worries, so far it seems that my known anxiety problems presented a much grimmer picture than reality. D was his normal reasonably pleasant self today, my hours got straightened out, and while he’s not thrilled that I can’t make it at 7am, I have the distinct impression he’ll cope. OK, so he kind of has to :D, but nice that it’s not going to be some ongoing irritation on his part that makes me nervous about dealing with a boss who’s annoyed with me.
Try flicking his ear every time, like the dog whisperer.
It’s a simple rule, really. When you e-mail someone and ask them to call you, you leave your goddamned number in the e-mail!!!
Seems like basic common sense to me, unless the sender is absolutely 100% certain that the recipient has sender’s number (I’d only consider that to be 100% with someone like a spouse).
One of the two name partners in the law firm I work for has recently started referring to me as “the head secretary.” Um…no. We don’t have a head secretary, and if we do, I am so not volunteering to be it. Yes, I’ve been here 12 years, but that doesn’t even put me even close to first in seniority. And I do not want to lead, I just want to sit at my desk and do my work for the attorney that I really like.
I’m pretty sure that all this means is, I’m the secretary who sits closest to him, with the most experience, that he hasn’t alienated yet or gotten really, really mad at yet. But if he tries to make this official, I’m going to have to have a talk with our HR person and the other name partner.
Been there, done that, my sympathies. I don’t depend on public transit, but I do work a job that shifted staffing hours for no good reason, and that caused plenty of angst.
Also, as a person who isn’t technically full time, but who has been working full time hours more often than not for a while now and was working hours that varied almost randomly between 25 and 40 for years before that . . . I totally get what you mean about the stress and frustration when they cut your hours one or more weeks. I’ve had the weeks where I thought I should look for something additional or just something else, and the weeks where I was exhausted.
I switched departments in January-- before that, I could usually peek over my boss’s schedule and see what my next week’s hours were Tuesday or Wednesday. In the new department-- I only find out Friday. The week starts Sunday.
On the other hand-- new boss is not as “good” at scheduling me for times I wanted off but not quite badly enough to actually ask for them off as old boss was.
I’ve had the same two days off since I started working here sixteen months ago -Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I came to work on Thursday this week to be told they want to change my days off to Thursdays and Fridays. Ultimately this will be for the best. I’m especially pleased I will only see my micromanaging supervisor once a week instead of twice. But the schedule change means I have to work seven days straight this week with no overtime pay. I also already bought tickets to see the Mountain Goats next month. They’re playing on a Wednesday, which means I’ll now have to use my PTO in order to go to the concert because there’s no way I’m not seeing the Mountain Goats.
I do agency work, most of the time I work in a large university and I’ve been “here” for a very long time. I’ve been in my current role since the middle of March and have just had my request for annual leave refused (despite the fact I booked the holiday last October).
Whilst I understand that this is a very busy time for the uni, my holiday will come right at the end of the exams period and that is not a time when annual leave is normally sanctioned. However, I am a temp. I have no guarantee that I’ll be working at that point or where I’ll be working…so realistically you should have anticipated that I might have holidays booked.
So my line manager has been off sick for about a month, my replacemene line manager has refused my holiday request and that of another temp in the same office, and now I’ve had my agency on the phone to ask if I can change my plans at all.
Do they honestly think I’m going to cancel my long-awaited trip to Mexico just because it’s the wrong time of year for them? I am on holiday when the last two exams in our dept take place and I am back a week before the exam boards happen. The academics will be busy marking stuff during my absence so management’s biggest grizzle is likely to be because I won’t back down. Trouble is, it’s likely to cost me this job as they are talking to the agency about replacing both of us simply because we dared to take time off.
Well, I want to begin by saying that I have spent October to April (now May I guess) reading this thread in it’s entirety. Not an easy task given that I only read it while at work and while I had downtime (sometimes self-imposed). I decided not to register until I completed this task.
I have to say that one of the most difficult aspects of reading it, was that at points I would feel the urge to jump in and comment…but then realized that while it seems like current events to me (as I am reading it), it was actually say, 2011 when it happened.
You all painted very colorful images of the various ‘unique’ people that you work(ed) with/for. Some long boring afternoons in the office were only made bearable by reading this thread.
I work for a bank in Buffalo, NY and have for almost 10 years. I can relate to many of the nightmarish events that have been posted. I plan to share a few here and there on days when I feel the cubicle closing in…
In any case, well met.
hyden
Welcome** hyden** from someone else who read posts for a long time before contributing. Enjoy the boards!
My rant:
Here’s a couple of rules for giving power point presentations.
- Face the audience, not the screen.
- Don’t mumble.
- Have some idea of what you are trying to communicate.
- Don’t just read the wall of text you put up on the screen.
All that in the first 5 minutes of a 3 day series of meetings…
I feel your pain. If you don’t mind, I’d like to alter your rant and deliver it to my former colleagues.
Here’s a couple of rules for giving power point presentations.
- Don’t
- See rule 1
Because after spending a decade in the place, I think your four rules might be too hard for them to grasp.
I had a week full a minor & blindingly infuriating events that are all just a tad too specific to share. (I strongly suspect my boss is here somewhere).
In revenge, I spent every spare second playing with a new application - it has less functionality than the alternative, at which I excel, and it would take me months to transfer my data and set up my reports.
It does not say anything good about my company that I can get away with this.
Thursday night I set up a bunch of our webinars to convert from the stupid proprietary format they’re record in into MP4s. I figured out Friday morning that I accidentally converted one twice, so I went to log onto our account to grab the one I still needed and got page not found. That’s weird. My boss got page not found too. And so did the events coordinator.
After she was on the phone with the idiots who host our webinars for 2 hours, they admitted a clerical error caused them to cancel all of our accounts organization-wide (more than a dozen) instead of just the one they were told we wouldn’t be keeping.
We were able to turn our webinar into a conference call, but other people weren’t so lucky. And I guess it was lucky that I’d already converted the videos people need to watch for their courses Tuesday.
They swear the accounts will all be restored on Monday, and that our recordings will be back, but I don’t know. These are the same idiots who didn’t tell us on 3/1 that they’d changed all our recording links, so I got to spend 7 hours fixing them across four online courses. If the recordings don’t come back, we’ll lose about 15% of them due to not having gotten to back them all up. Grrr.
I am furious and feel extremely disrespected.
No one bothered to make up a schedule for next week for my department, so we are using last week’s schedule again.
I found this out at 6:45 PM. Saturday. New schedule starts in less than six hours. (Although persons in my department aren’t usually scheduled until 7 am).
(And really, this is my fault for not calling sooner-- pr pestering a member of management yesterday-- I had interactions with at least three).
Still, the timing of my finding out is minor.
The bigger deal is that I requested time off last week (for a dentist appointment) and this week (so I didn’t have to play handbells at three church services and then hustle off the work for eight hours), and both requests were not so much denied as ignored. I worked last week’s shift (around the dentist appointment), and I’ll work this week’s shifts, but I am NOT happy.
I want the Saturday after Next off-- I’ve made plans and spent money. And I’ve got a week’s vacation scheduled in less than a month-- I want that time off very badly. And I don’t feel secure in getting either.