Yeah, that won’t happen. When things similar to this happened before, we were told we should have planned ahead / made arrangements to make sure our own work was not neglected.
I spend a day a week in a community office. I can see anywhere from 0 - 8 walk in clients that day. No ‘visits’ are scheduled, so you can be in the middle of something massive and have to drop it to see the client. We are timed on how long it takes to get our client and how long we meet with them, so that must be a priority over doing my own work. I asked my supervisor how she would juggle her daily work and the needs of our clients (noting the we’re timed bit). She suggested I do all mandatory daily work the day before. That doesn’t quite work, as the majority of daily work comes in the day it’s due. I’m not Kreskin.
Management is so far removed from our work, it’s pathetic. We used to have managers who could (and WOULD) do casework if needed. Now, they’re bean counters. They don’t waste time evaluating the content of our work, only tic mark that it’s been done timely. Our union is useless in dealing with the issues we’re having. They just suggest we ask management to change. People who HAVE asked for change are no longer working here. I’m in a tenuous position, as management seems to come down harder on people with medical issues. Of 10 people I know with ongoing medical concerns, 7 are on additional review, essentially being babysat by management. I just got OFF of additional review, despite never having a less than 95% review in the almost two decades here.
I’m just frustrated (obviously). I have a choice - halfass it to get it done, or do it right and have problems. The idea of halfassing it bothers me, as my job is to help people.
For reasons having to do with who the fuck knows and who the fuck cares because who the fuck remembers, I have to combine XML files into a proprietary binary file without losing the fucking cross references. I’m not even sure it’s possible. It is, however, nearly 7 and I have an hour’s drive home, so bugger this for a game of soldiers and I am not going to even LOOK at this until sometime tomorrow.
Sometimes I wish I drank. This would be a good night to get blitzed.
Dear young male co-workers:
When asked to find some peg hooks that are nine inches in length, pretending that one can use a certain part of the male anatomy for comparison purposes is annoying.
Failing to stop when Boss says to is even more annoying.
Spending all day doing and redoing the same project is also annoying. Especially when it’s your own darn fault you didn’t pay enough attention the first time.
And I sure hope that the product I spent all day arranging sells.
Coworkers, answer the gorram question asked. I don’t need to know you were on vacation and this person doesn’t do things right and you had to come back and fix it all up and you are still finding things and I’m done, I’ve told everyone I’m done, it’s bull they get away with this shit.
I know all of this. Because I get the same shit on your end every time and I have to get pissy because I don’t want the song and dance I just want an answer to the question I asked. Even worse is when I have to lead you by the nose to find me the answer when I know it would take me less time to get it myself but I either don’t have access to the new systems because it is not my responsibility or my boss wants me to make sure you are giving it to me.
So answer the question!
I guess this is my final post to the Workplace Griping thread because starting tomorrow I am officially Retired™, with no workplace. Or the world is my workplace. Or something.
I do have one tiny rant to go out with: co-workers and managers threw a very nice little party, many nice things were said both by others and by me, and there was a nice card signed by many people (and other stuff that I won’t go into). My little rant is that several of the people who signed the card used their initials or some scrawled thing, neither of which I can read.
Folks, this is a card that will be read by one or more persons, not a credit card checkout where it doesn’t matter what your scrawl looks like. Some of you said very nice things on the card, and I don’t know who said it! Poozis.
And with that I bow gracefully out of the thread, with the expectation that I will spend a lot less time on the Dope now that I don’t have (paid for) time that I have to kill. I only have my own time now, and that’s too valuable for this shit (kidding! kidding!)
TTFN
Happy retirement!
Yes, happy retirement!
If you want me to dress up for Halloween, post the notice that encourages doing so a week or so in advance, please. Not the evening before Halloween.
Although I still probably wouldn’t have bothered, given that I was not expecting to spend much time in a customer facing role.
But I might have picked up a tiara or cat ears . . .
I dunno, Roderick; I’m retired and I still read this thread. So I can say “thank og I don’t have to put up with that, thank og that is over, thank og.”
Very true, but you can’t post those thoughts, can you - it would be too much like gloating.
What’s wrong with a little gloating?
Not only was I not better by Friday, I’m still not better…as in, I had to go for a chest x-ray yesterday.
I had been working on a repair project for a certain customer. It was supposed to have shipped back to them, all shiny and new, on October 9th. Due to material delays (the manufacturer of the parts is European), the project is still sitting in pieces in a warehouse in New Jersey. Lovely Customer called my company’s customer service manager today screaming that they absolutely need it Thursday. (They know what sort of business we’re in, and that we have very, very stringent material, inspection, and quality procedures/requirements for a reason. As in, this thing needs to be perfect or lives will be in danger. Typical engineering stuff.) Our company’s quality rep has been hustled off to New Jersey, and my new supervisor is trying to wrap up my report on this project. There’s just one little issue…
…two of the parts needed to reassemble this thing are still in transit. :smack:
Fuck you, Customer, for not maintaining your shit according to schedule. (This thing had been in place for 20+ years…way too long, even with infrequent use.)
Fuck you, customer service manager, for once again promising something that can’t be delivered. I’m sure you’re screaming at someone in engineering about it right now.
And the worst thing for me is that despite all the work I’ve done on this, my name won’t be on the final approvals, or even the report (I had put together all the backup info for it, but I was still lacking critical information that prevented assembly of the report before I got sick.)
Oh, and I’m obviously still way too sick to travel for an interview. 
Right , that’s it, all software people are on notice , that unless, from this point on, any piece of software , datalogging device or file converter made by you, that does not automatically output dates in ISO8601 format, then you will be right up there with at least the 2nd or 3rd wave of people against the wall when the revolution comes.
And Matlab developers, I know your software is wonderful, but for fucks sake, is reading a date from a CSV or XLS files really that hard, I know Microsoft is evil, but they are there and are not going away, lots of people use those formats, so couldn’t you just make my life a smidgeon easier?
It is all of course Microsoft fault, because as soon as you open a CSV file, excel applies its ‘let’s randomly interpret the date string and change the interpretation half way down the column’ filter. Fuckers.
(fwiw I am have fun taking 5 different data sources all sampled on different time bases with differing decimal accuracy, with different time formats, and trying to sync them up in matlab so I can do some number crunching on the squiggly lines. It has been a little irritating. I gave up on coffee several hours ago and have resorted to vodka)
My workplace wants me to be Wally from Dilbert.
I do QA, which involves me looking at content before it goes to press/web. I write up QA reports and list the errors I find. I’ll sometimes look at the print QA reports later and find that most of the items are labeled “stet” because they went to print that way before. So, because it was printed wrong before means it can never be corrected?
A very glaring example: one of the review questions accidentally got split because of an errant return carriage. So, instead of 4 distractors, there’s 5 because one of them got split. The extra distractor is just the word “event.” I put this in the QA report and checked later and it got marked “stet” because it had printed that way before in a previous version.
It’s even worse for the web versions. Usually, the administrator will pay me a visit and ask me to dial down my comments. Apparently, the authors and editors have easily bruised egos and can’t take criticism. She tells me we have to assume the authors and editors did their job perfectly, despite what we see to the contrary. She tells me to label my comments “error from upstream” so it won’t look like it’s their fault the error got through. The web editors aren’t skilled enough to make any major corrections, and some changes require layers of approval from various department heads.
She also tells me to email her and a couple other admins any “gray area” errors (recommendations for rephrasing awkward sentence structures, for example) and not put them in the QA report. Again, it might make somebody look bad.
I’ve been reporting links to external web pages that don’t work, but she tells me to discontinue that, because it’s not our responsibility to test links. Also, the links are disabled in the web versions. They’re just there for reference.
WTF? I’m not trying to make them look bad. I’m trying to make them look GOOD! I used to work for a company that made testing materials for state departments of education. If any errors got out, we could have been penalized a certain amount of payout and subjected to lawsuits. I’m used to that standard. Now, I’m just supposed to put my initials on a report and look the other way.
I’m supposed to have a meeting with my supervisor this morning. Will she show up for the meeting or come in an hour later (and of course not call or email to let me know)? I’ll be very surprised if she’s here on time. :dubious:
poking her head up from behind her largest coworker You know importing the files and telling the moron that all columns are text solves that, right?
Tried that one, alas something else is screwy, when the date goes from 31-10-14
(31st of October) to 1-11-14 (1st-november) both excel and Matlab decide that it really is now 11-jan, because, well it want’s to fuck me over horribly. Tried multiple import ways and formatting, copying out to ascii and back all to occasional moment of success , followed swiftly by the crushing despair that matlab/excel found a new way to balls it up
Eventually I gave up using the potted matlab csv or excel read commands and have resorted to the somewhat arcane textscan function which despite having to put random %F %a /r/n and other shit that I have no idea what it does, for all I know I am summoning a demon or something, and needing 8 times as many lines of code and formatting to read a file, did actually work.
Oooooh if you do summon a demon we want pics!
I’m starting to get the idea that some people think Dilbert is a how-to guide. My supervisor told me (twice) that she went to see “Horrible Bosses.” It was one of those times when I was speechless, but I really wanted to say that I hoped she realized that it wasn’t a how-to kind of movie.
If she’ll tell you twice, she’ll tell you 3 times. Next time ask her if her ticket was paid for by the training department.