I think Shredder Guy (q.v.) has emigrated to Canada and works in my office. I was asked to do a coffee/tea setup (not my job, but that’s another gripe) for a meeting this afternoon. I went into the staff kitchen, started collecting mugs, making coffee and generally getting things ready. Coffee? Check. Teabags? Check. Milk/cream/sugar? Check. Spoons? Spoons? Wherearethegoddamned spoons? After scouring the kitchen drawers, dishwasher and sundry other possible hiding places, I came up with two teaspoons from the office cutlery set and three plastic spoons from a couple of fast food outlets. What about stir stix instead? None. So I asked the office manager (who is in charge of sundries for the kitchen) about getting some spoons, stir stix, whatever so our guests would not have to stir their coffee with their thumbs. His answer? “I have replaced three entire sets of cutlery, two sets of dishes and two sets of glasses in the year that we have been in this office. I am tired of outfitting someone’s apartment. If it’s not there, I am not getting more.”
Shredder Guy II must be making a fortune in scrap metal or else he’s opening up his own restaurant.
that they throw away empty boxes (and if the box is only half empty, put the contents on the shelf and throw away the empty box)
and work the hours they are scheduled–preferably without complaint.
I get neither.
This week, they are showing up early or staying late because “X quit” so they think there are extra hours floating around.
Which there aren’t.
But if there were-- it’s the manager’s prerogative to distribute extra hours.
Note to self: If your job feels hateful and crappy, even though you think that this too shall pass, it is OK, even Encouraged to go look for another job, even if you aren’t sure it will be an improvement. You don’t have to wait until there’s a good solid team working in the department that you are soon to leave.
I hate it when people don’t trust my expertise. I’ve been a designer for years. I’ve been a sign designer for several years. Every day, I design signs. You see all those business signs out there? If you can believe it, probably 50% of them in the surrounding towns are mine. I designed all of them. Of course I may have had to deal with subpar logos from the client but many are totally me.
So when someone comes in and says their designer will be doing the design, I want to roll my eyes. Because you know what happens? I spend 40 cumulative minutes on the phone detailing to the designer the possibilities of our substrates, because they’ve never made a sign before and have no idea. Can the aluminum get a frame? Can it have an arched top? How deep are the letters cut in carved signs? What colors can you use? So on and so forth. And after all that, after everything I’ve told them, you know what I get? I get a file that is literally the logo plopped in the middle of a rectangle. (If I’m lucky and the designer isn’t actually a hack that sends me some pixelated raster piece of shit.)
Wow. Wow, guys. You could have just sent me the logo as-is and that’s the same amount of work towards the final product you managed to do. Now I have to pick a nice sign shape, size up the posts, pick out finials, pick out colors, resize sub headers that you put way too small, put all the sizing information on, and lay out all the information the town boards need to approve this. You know, actually get it ready past “hur durr here’s the logo sort of at the size we want with a tagline kind of below it”.
My only consolation to this idiocy is that the customer will essentially be paying for the design twice. Once to their designer who did zero work but still gets paid for their three hours of time, and again to me when I had to do all the work the designer claimed they could do and didn’t.
Still though, why would you trust a person who has never touched a sign in their life over the person who designs signs every day that people rave about?! Really?! Like, just screw you customer. I’m glad you’re paying twice for that stupid-ass choice.
Older gentleman, comes in at 7am. Spends 5+ minutes standing at the one lunch room sink for over 300 people, slowly and laboriously washing his mug. Every goddamned day.
Very Large Woman, comes in at 8am. Spends 10 minutes every fucking morning standing between the sink and the microwaves, obstructing both, slowly organizing her food and cutting a fuck ton of fruit. Something she should be doing at the table.
Middle aged woman. Spent over 5 minutes slowly washing a single piece of cheap tupperware over lunch time yesterday, with other people waiting to use the sink. I come back 4 hours later and she’s in there doing the same damned thing with the same container.
It’s not your fucking sink. We all get to use it. Don’t block it, don’t dawdle at peak hours. If you need to wash something that thoroughly, fucking take it home.
Why do they always wait to have plantwide evacuation drills until it is 90F out under the blazing sun? Every year, they wait until the balmy 70F weather is gone and then we get to go stand getting sunburned while they go through the drill.
Also, bonus fail for not mentioning on the plant radio this was a drill until after they’d announced the scenario. Several times. Long enough for all of us to wonder who it was trapped in the toppled crane in the middle of the flammable, toxic chemicals… oh, hey, just a drill. Now that everyone’s all freaked out, go stand in the sun until you wilt.
The paper towel dispensers here are really easy to use. See the directions on the front with a picture indicating you are to pull down using two hands? If you do that then you end up with a nicely cut piece of paper towel, and the dispenser is left with about four inches of paper towel left sticking out for the next person. Yet every damned time I wash my hands and go to get a piece of paper towel someone has ripped the last piece off and there’s nothing left sticking out. So, I have to fiddle with the knob on the side in order to produce more paper towel: the knob that everyone else in the building probably also fiddles with because there’s never any paper towel left sticking out the bottom!
Oh, and whistling guy who walks past my office 20 times a day randomly whistling notes that aren’t even a real song, just shut up. I’m not happy. I’m stressed. I’m trying to concentrate and you’re pretending to be at Disneyland following the fucking parade around whistling.
Sounds like my experience so far as a female in engineering…guys in production assuming that I’m unfamiliar with work in the field, or that I’m incapable of walking out into the warehouse to look at a motor, or that I don’t know how to read a motor nameplate, or calculate winding resistance…I could go on. And there’s always the fun of listening to someone run to my supervisor to ask a question that I just answered.
I came in here to rant about the sonofabitch who performed the calculations I’ve spent the past week deciphering, and the motherfuckers who did such a poor job of maintaining the documents. The aforementioned sonofabitch performed these calculations for our Dear Customer way back in the 1970’s. Along the way, various motherfuckers made copies of the calculations; there may have been some faxing, and copying of these faxes, as well. The end result of all of this is that the only copy available to me now is barely legible. Combine that with the fact that the sonofabitch failed to show his steps, I’ve basically had to redo six pages of someone else’s calculations to make sure they’re still valid for what we’re working on now. I would have started from scratch, but I barely have any actual dimensions for this assembly…and judging by the amount of rounding, I don’t think the sonofabitch did either.
Speaking of the Dear Customer…if you want a thing to arrive at your facility completely assembled, PUT IT IN YOUR FUCKING PURCHASE ORDER. Don’t drop it on us at 3:30 on the afternoon before the thing ships from the manufacturer.
Aaaand, speaking of that manufacturer: when I give multiple copies of a purchase specification to various people within your organization, I expect someone to read the damn thing before starting the manufacturing process. Don’t get pissy with our inspectors (or with me, for that matter) just because your inability to read a document caused you to skip some important steps.
Recently started a new project. Nice folks, love my boss(es), the processes are so standard it’s silly; we’re going to have more work getting rid of some unnecessary patches that were made 15 years ago and nobody knows how they work any more than doing any new programming.
But.
The end users want us to program every task they will have to do for the project from now to the end of it - first, they’re grownups, second, a lot of tasks will need to be done or not depending on other tasks. For example, if they decide they’re not going to use green winged widgets, there will be no need for a “design green winged widgets” task nor for “prototype green winged widgets”, nor for “test green winged widgets”. D’uh.
And, I’ve been asked to do some programming for another project. It’s non-programmer programming, there’s this task which needs to be done in every project and a script you can follow that makes it very easy. If you have the correct information, that is. First they gave me wrong information, now they pout that “it doesn’t work”. And not a thank you. Given they’re in the South, will it look real bad if I tell 'em “Bless your heart”?
I work for someone with narcissistic personality disorder.
Like me, he has a degree in engineering. But he knows absolutely nothing about engineering. I’ve never seen him make a single calculation or perform any analysis. Over the seven years I’ve worked for him, he has never set foot in our lab. He doesn’t even know how to use any of the instruments.
So when a project comes in, I do all the measurements and all the analysis – all the “hardcore” engineering stuff. And I write most of the report. He does most of the email communication and reviews my report. When it comes time to publish the report, his name is front-and-center on the report. Mine is always second.
He does this with others, too. He’s 54 years old, and his entire career is based on taking credit of others.
She asked me to stick some labels to some envelopes. She spent ages creating pages of labels with the staff addresses on. The only problem is that some plumbers get two newsletters a month, some get three, and some get none. And because each label page has the complete list of plumbers on every page, some of the labels that haven’t been used have been put back in the folder with the rest of the labels.
So I went about my happy task, posting about a dozen newsletters. I took Wednesday off, then on Thursday Mabel presented herself at my desk. I was told that one of the newletters had came back undelivered because I used the wrong address. One of the plumbers had moved house, so she corrected the address on a database (a miraculously rare use of a computer on her part) then printed off more label sheets and stuck them in the back of the label folder- WITHOUT DESTROYING THE OLD LABELS!!! So I didn’t think to look at the back of a pile of labels when I was supposed to be using them up from the front of the pile.
She was particularly dismissal of me when I told her that if I was staying I would print the envelopes directly from the database rather than use labels. She must have spent ages typing labels, and it didn’t look like she had used the MS Word label template, just a lot of carriage returns and spaces.:smack:
Then today she complained to me just as I was leaving that the plumber identity and scheduling spreadsheet (PISS) was wrong because we (with a tone that expressed which “we” she implied) had allowed errors to creep in. All the errors related to a period where she was controlling PISS for an entire week. Obviously she couldn’t be to blame.
This should have been the last week of my temp contract. Unfortunately they appear to have a data entry task for me to do. Fortunately this will probably involve me moving away from Mabel.
Oh, I forgot: I needed to borrow a co-worker’s station on Friday. (Long story. Short version: I hate our company’s outsourced service desk with burning suns etc.) She has a mousepad with a built-in wrist rest. A couple seconds into sitting there, I thought “something feels weird.”
Looked down. Turned mousepad 180 so the wrist rest is, yanno, under one’s wrist. Facepalmed, muttered under breath about relative intelligence of people who share space with me. Signed out. Went home.
For what it’s worth, that’s how my mousepad is arranged, too. The one that the company gave us a year ago has a wrist rest that is too fat for my wrist and is uncomfortable to use. But the mousepad part is fine. So I just use it “upside down.” It is conceivable that your co-worker is not stupid (although it is certainly also within the realm of possibility that she is!).
Another one from my always-awesome supervisor: We have several products that use the same content, and they’re all my responsibility to update. We recently got the official final version of the content, which I used in two of the products. At some point in the past two weeks, my supervisor made a change to one of these products. Did she let me know about this so I could change it in all of the other products? No, of course she did not. I found out about this change from someone else. Otherwise I’m not sure when I would have found this out. Probably after I printed a bunch of stuff that turned out to be wrong because my supervisor can’t take a few seconds to give me some very important information. :mad:
I’ve “worked” with her enough to know that a bag of particularly dumb hammers has a higher intelligence level.
So, guess who found a massive billing problem this morning? One that started out being caused by people who no longer work at this company? That involves a product that (is supposed to) bring in over a million bucks for the company?
I started out going to the product owner with a quiet “Um, I think this might be a problem. Dafuq?” and he promptly went outside for a cigarette and held his forehead, muttering, “Oh, God. Oh, shit.”
I didn’t cause the problem. But I sure got to be the messenger.
