Yes, but I received word recently that I’m going to be reassigned to a different manager, so I have high hopes right now.
I decided to not ask my supervisor anything ever again
My boss started our company in his garage and over the past 25 years he built it into a 10 million per year business with 40 employees. He is there every single day and always ready to help with any problem or question no matter how large or small.
Well, he announced today that he’s selling the company, he’ll be gone the 15th and new people will be there. It was an emotional announcement, his wife came in and was by his side and both their voices started to break a couple times. I had to go outside afterward and take a break, and darn if I didn’t get something in my eye. I’m happy for him, he’s in his 60s and I know it had to be a hard decision. I hope he spends some time enjoying himself, although I know he has other irons in the fire and will probably work as much after the 15th as he did before.
But damn. I’ve been there nearly 12 years and enjoyed the stability and atmosphere. Technically, my job is to do X, which is sort of drudgery, but my boss really likes me and I became a “fixer” and got a lot of other special tasks because I’m the only one he trusted to do them. Sometimes I wouldn’t do my actual job for days, even weeks, as I was performing special duties. Lately, I’ve been working on a new aspect of the business which currently only takes me a few hours per week. It could go on forever on that small scale and benefit us a little and make a little money for the company (not me), but I was hoping to expand it into something larger and quit my normal work and concentrate on that full time.
But, he sold it to a corporation that buys and runs companies like ours. I’m betting that my job there will now become X and nothing more.
The few people familiar with the corporation have little hope for the future. A couple even said that today may have been their last day. I’m not entirely sure why, some of the things I heard can’t possibly be true. One thing I do know is that the feeling of being a part of a family is already shaken and seems likely to fade away soon…
Ugh. I’m sorry to hear that, Fubaya. Change…it certainly sucks! I hope things turn out better than you think.
Thanks. It’s not just change. I spent last night googling the new company and don’t like what I found. High pressure, low reward, high turnover, quantity over quality. We talked to people we know in the industry who work for the new company and they said the same. We are a highly trained family that takes pride in our work, someone said were turning into a Wal-Mart.
I really like my job, so I don’t have much to complain about. However, I seem to have caught a cold or something over the weekend, and my throat is irritated. Meaning I have to cough sometimes. In the past, my boss has commented on my coughing, asking why I do it, or making other comments. So today, I stuffed a bunch of cough drops in my pocket, and used them throughout the day, but still had to cough sometimes. Since the last time my boss had commented on my coughing, I’d gotten a little annoyed, I hoped this would be the end of my boss’s comments.
Towards the end of the day, I dashed out of the office to cough, hoping that since I was outside of the office, my boss wouldn’t hear me. So I was outside of the office and starting to cough, being glad I could finally do it, when my boss called me back into the office. I thought she was going to give me some important work to do or something, but NO. She had called me back in to COMMENT on my fucking coughing! Though she did stop when she saw how enraged it made me, and when I said how annoyed it made me. UGH!
…maybe “enraged” is too strong a word.
…I’m over-reacting, aren’t I.
I’m in this work group - we’re stationed in a satellite office daily. We’re tasked with creating our own scheduling. Now, OTHER satellite offices have someone draw up a schedule, and the workers just trade days if something comes up. Not my office, no way no how. We have to meet face to face (so NO Scopia/GoTo stuff) to draw up the calendar.
Today was such a meeting, to complete scheduling through November. Yes, November. As if I know where I’m going to be every damn day three months from now. We have two worker who are, shall we say, boisterous? How about Loud As Friggin Hell? They immediately called out when they want to be scheduled, leaving the crap days to myself and another worker who doesn’t speak up much.
Bullshit.
Y’all are trading Fridays. I refuse to be forced into every damn Friday because YOU don’t like them. I don’t like them either; in fact, I’m usually done by 11am on Fridays. But my daughter / son / goldfish has school / church / swimming lessons every Friday and I can’t! Well, when you said you’d work here, you KNEW we are required to be available Monday through Friday, 8am - 430pm. Too damn bad.
I guess I’ve made an enemy. For the rest of the meeting, any time I opened my mouth, she started talking LOUDLY over me. Her idea of all of us on our laptops, but only one with a working calendar open, randomly shouting out dates sucked, so I went to the whiteboard and drew a calendar so we all could see what we’re doing. She grabbed the marker away from me so she could do it. Really? Fine, I don’t care who does it. Seriously.
I also asked why they feel the need to email everyone every morning stating they’re in office. Being there is the expectation. If you’re not there, management should have already contacted back up to get there. I think it’s silly to send the email. According to the marker stealing loudmouth, I am obviously not a team player. Nope. I’m not. Because we’re not playing a team sport. Gah.
Maybe, a little, 
but I know how utterly fucking annoying it gets to have someone comment on the same. damn. thing. all the time.
My turn: I get very few phone calls. 99.99% of what I do is handled via email or the service desk ticket software our team now uses. Frankly, the way our team is structured, nobody – not even The Pope Himself – should be calling me directly. They should go through our team’s central contact and then, if the agent handling the request runs into problems, it gets escalated up to me.
So the few times I get a call, I sorta have to mentally gear up, because I’m more than likely dealing with someone who a) doesn’t know the proper procedure, or b) is an entitled little snowflake who doesn’t mind jumping to the head of the queue. (Or, for fun, both.)
My phone is ringing constantly today. Why, you ask? Because somewhere, someone posted a Craig’s List ad and typo-d my fucking work phone into their ad. It’s gotten to the point where I’m just not picking up anymore – if it’s truly a work call, they can damn well leave a voice message like everyone else in corporate America.
Now I’m both annoyed AND look like a slacker to my supervisors. Lovely.
Jeez, EmilyG, are you coughing again?!? What’s wrong with your throat? Can I get you a cough drop?
( d&r )
We had about 6 files that didn’t deliver to the client as expected last night. Why?
Because the files were where they were supposed to be, they could not be found.
I did not mistype any of that.
That sounds very Dilbert.
Haha, thanks. I think I already overdosed today. But maybe tomorrow if I still have a cough, I’ll bring my inhaler too. It might help.
Ask about getting a letter or recommendation from him before he leaves, especially if you’ve been going above and beyond your job description.
We got to meet our new district manager/corporate overlord today for a Q&A session. He had all the reassuring words down pat, but it rang hollow. I’ve tried to keep an open mind and was skeptical of the horror stories, but everything points to them being true. From everything I can tell, this company comes into an area and buys all the good companies in our line of work, then starts cranking out shitty work. Quantity over quality, resistance is futile.
Our company is unique, it is the only one in the area qualified to do certain things, at times it has been the only one in the country for certain things, but others eventually catch up. We were usually the tip of the spear though. We did that by attracting people with unique qualifications from all over. People moved from out of state to work there.
Now it’s just a franchise of a corporation with a reputation for turning good companies into shitty franchises. People are already jumping ship. I never imagined it would end like this. Boss man didn’t just sell, he sold us all out.
That sucks. Finding a job you like is an accomplishment. I had a job I liked before (too bad it was hard on my joints and the pay/benefits were crap). Now I have a job I generally don’t like but it is easier on my body and pays enough to live on.
But it sucks that you had a job you liked for 12 years, and now it is likely being replaced by a miserable corporate existence.
I am not too thrilled that the boss encouraged us to give money to someone who is leaving the company next week
I’m an ERP consultant; some of my projects (such as the current one) involve setting up a company’s ERP in a foreign subsidiary.
This is the third time that the subsidiary decided to hire a consultant of their own “because our people don’t speak English too good” and/or to assist with master data preparation. The guy who’d never seen this particular ERP system before was a lovely fellow, one of the nicest and most effective coworkers I’ve ever had, and I wish him all kinds of joy and happiness.
The other two… one was a JAQ type, the one I have this time talks very fast but very confusingly (his English is actually worse than that of the people who “don’t speak it too good”, because he keeps misusing words and mixing it with other languages). He keeps repeating “I am five years an ERP consultant!!!” - uh, I’m my team’s newbie at 13, am I supposed to be impressed? Both this and the JAQ come with their own designs, try to impose them over the one already working company-wide and come up with gems such as claiming that we are not allowed to do this or that because of “European Union requirements!!!”. My boss heard this last jewel and sweetly asked for the regulatory reference.
He also likes scaring the customers by saying that we can do this and that and that will need [enormous list of weird words], and once they’re at the edge of a nervous breakdown, he exclaims “oh, but you don’t have to do all that!!!” I have a similar reaction to people who are cruel to superusers as to those who are cruel to children… dude’s been here less than a week and I already dream of the many ways in which I could cook him if I were an ogre.
I would really like to know why someone at corporate thinks that my location in eastern North Carolina needs constant updates about Hurricane Iselle. Twenty-five emails since Monday is a bit excessive!
Sigh. Yesterday was not a horrible day at work, but it wasn’t great.
And I lost a LOT of respect for one of my co-workers.
Reasons:
- Talked for at least a half hour to a girlfriend
- Took more breaks than entitled
- Left early for frivolous reasons (including a claim he’d not understood how late he was supposed to work, and a claim he had to work in only a few hours at his other job)
- Told me to tell other co-worker he’d “forgotten” to make announcements
- Made me do heavy lifting late in the evening (by virtue of being the only person available from the department, because he’d already left).
Any one of these sounds petty, in fact, the whole list reads kinda petty to me. But still, I don’t know the guy, and now I don’t respect him at all. Sad.
Dear Mr. Annoyingly-Upbeat Young Coworker:
When we’re in meetings and people are giving updates on whatever difficult issue they are working on or researching solutions to, when they say they’ve been working on something for several days, it’s OK to assume that they’ve found all the easy solutions and they won’t work for whatever reason. You do not need to Google the issue while we’re in the meeting, and post the first several solutions you find; you are not the Google Guru, and it’s condescending and annoying to broadcast stuff that took you 15 seconds to find as if your coworkers never even thought to (gasp!) GOOGLE the ISSUE. They’ve been working on it for DAYS. You are not smarter than everyone else, you are not going to magically find something in 15 seconds flat that fits the bill.
I know it’s minor, but man, I’ve wanted to backhand this punk about 5 times in the last week because of this behavior, towards me and others. I actually pushed back once when he sent me a private message with an obvious solution that was the first thing anyone with half a brain would have tried, and he seemed to get that he was stepping out of line a little bit because after I took ten minutes and explained the entire issue to him and why his off-the-cuff 10 second Google solution was the first thing I looked into and exactly why it didn’t work, he acted appropriately sheepish. However, it didn’t keep him from doing the EXACT same thing the next day to someone else.
Seriously, this guy is an OK coworker, is bright and seems to be doing good work, but I just want to hit him sometimes and tell him to stop being such a condescending prick.
Nava, what does ERP mean?