I was happy to see that the small yearly raise we were able to get in the last contract meant that my after raise take home pay went down by $10 a week. Great raise right?
I’m convinced that the small raise I got as a consolation prize for not getting the management job I tried for a couple months ago did nothing but bump me up a tax bracket. I will swear that my paychecks have been smaller.
This has nothing to do with a tax bracket and everything to do with Chris Christie. Even though our contract is local and has nothing to do with the state and we negotiated smaller raises to keep health care costs down for years, he nullified that with a stroke of a pen. Now we are mandated to pay a certain percentage regardless of what our contract was before. So we bit that bullet and took what amounted to a new $10,000 tax on our income. Fast forward to this year, now we get our state mandated shitty raise. But surprise, the cost of our health care goes up without anyone saying anything. It just happens to out pace our raise. So on my level my raise means $10 less per week. Many had their check go down by more than that after their raise.
Why are you answering your phone if you’re in a “VERY important meeting”? I’m returning your call. No, I can’t speed it up, you left a laundry list of questions that I prefer to answer in full so there aren’t follow up queries. Yes, I will request that you call back later when you have time because if I’m assisting you, I want your attention.
Twit.
Not a gripe, just an observation (reposted from my Facebook post):
A somewhat bittersweet day at work today …
I left my previous job at the city convention center to take a lower-paying job in a retirement home. I made the change for several reasons, but one of those reasons was that I missed having a relationship with my customers. In the convention business, the closest thing I had to “regular customers” were people who attended the same convention once a year. And most of the time, I’d never even see them, unless they had a buffet for one of their meals and I happened to be carving prime rib at the end of the buffet line. And even then, I’d see them for the 10 seconds it took me to slice their meat for them.
When I started my current job in August 2013, the guy I was replacing as a cook said something profound to me. He said, “Yeah, some of these folks can get really annoying with their special requests. But then, you have to remember that every meal you cook for them might be their last, and you want to make sure they enjoyed it.”
Friday afternoon, one of residents called out to me after lunch, as I was passing through the main lobby, and made a point of telling me, in front of everybody, that I had done an “outstanding” job with the onion-crusted cod I had served for lunch.
This morning, I learned that he had passed away peacefully in his sleep last night.
RIP, Bruce, and God bless you.
I’d call that a sweet and sour story Rik.
Good on ya.
I was writing a wall of text but don’t wanna bore you. TLDR: there’s this insulting, demeaning, inefficient asshole who was hired by the locals “to help” one of my three groups of key users, but thanks to him that’s the group which is months behind schedule. My other two groups are on schedule or ahead, his group is behind and getting further and further back. Yesterday he was claiming that he “wants to follow the company’s processes” (no you don’t, you fuck, you keep saying we have to change this and change that and make you a special this and that, without providing any actual business reasons - the reason you give is “this is how you do it!”) but “nobody has explained them to me” (other than, let’s see, a demonstration in May, exercises done by the users with ppt and explanations by me in September and October, mo’ manuals, testing users should have been doing following those manuals in the last three months but which your users are doing with you and not with me and of course not with the manual because… because, and those explanations which you refuse to listen to when given verbally added to every single manual and sent by email).
The only thing he’s good at is fanning the insecurity of the guy who hired him. I hope he gets an attack of the runs so big it gets published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Man, oh man. Have been trying very hard not to rant, but…
My boss is mentally ill.
Without spilling too many details or going on too long, we’ve been fighting about a major project for a year. He came up with a new “plan” around Thanksgiving that was not going to work. I explained how it was not going to work for two major reasons. The developers I’m working with were so unhappy with it that they refused to accept his plan coming from me and demanded that he meet with them directly to explain it. He never did, despite telling me clearly in front of his boss that he had planned to do that all along. They sent it up to their VP, who started to plan out their very negative response. Narcissistic manager insisted that we go ahead despite all these objections. I went to his boss with it, explained why it wasn’t going to work. His boss gave a tentative approval to the plan, but gave it to another team under his control to analyze it and see if it would work. They came back a month later and said it was unworkable for exactly the same reasons I gave.
Should have been the end of it, right?
Nope, manager confronts me in a room about how someone was jealous that they didn’t think of it first and sabotaged HIS plan. (Clearly meaning me.)
Sure. Sure thing. I was so jealous that I didn’t think of this unworkable plan first that I deliberately riled up an entire division of developers into a frenzy, somehow got him to not meet with them as they wanted, then got an entire other team of people to reject this plan for my made up reasons.
Because there’s absolutely NO chance that I was right all along.
Nava, you are hereby duly informed that I’m [del]stealing[/del] borrowing the last sentence of your post.
All yours.
And ftr, I’ve realized that particular Mr. Moron is actually a mo-Ron. Which somehow makes the time left until I can lose sight of him a little bit more bearable. Well, that, plus my boss wants me to hold him down while she kicks him… I like this boss 
Oh good, Nava, tell us some Ron stories; it’s been too long.
Another group in my department has A Big Progject that is currently the most critical (all the groups have Big Projects, many of them critical. I love this company.) I’ve been working with them, falling behind in my own projects despite working twelve hour days, and today I told them I was not available for the next stage; one of the four other people with the needed skills would have to do it.
Today, Friday, at quarter to five, I am cc’d on an email stating that none of the alternates are available, so they would need me. I’m scheduled to leave at 4:00.
How does the alternates’ non-availability trump mine?
Did they really think that email wouldn’t get forwarded to my boss and my boss’s boss (oh, yeah, they didn’t cc my boss) well before five?
Or not grasp that my boss and boss’s boss still got that message, even if they were at the big going away party?
Most importantly, are they really completely unaware of how thoroughly I can screw them simply by working to rule (figuratively - I don’t have a union job)?
Not much in the way of stories, but a few screenies.
mo-Ron claims to be an expert in maintenance. His definitions do not include maintenance performed on builldings, landscaping, roads or utility networks. The look in my boss’ face when he informed us that “snort hotels do not do maintenance!”: :eek: (her color is more pink, mind you). Improvement and refurbishment projects are also not maintenance (please look to the floor to view three apoplectic Finance guys). There is no link between maintenance and company assets (one of the Finance guys, who had started to recover, just flopped back down).
He also claims to be an expert user of SAP. In the last week alone:
- he has claimed that he “knows maintenance, not materials, and I should not know anything about materials”. This is akin to a cook claiming he shouldn’t know anything about ingredients.
- he’s complained to one of the managers that I “send (him) mails with too much SAP words, I do not know SAP words!!!” That particular manager is always happy to back the local dude against the foreign chick, but that was a bit much even for him.
- the manager then read the forwarded email and discovered that all the SAP terms were there because I was defining them, and that he had no problems understanding the definitions.
- that email referenced a file the manager didn’t have, and which I forwarded to him at his request. The manager was surprised to see screenshots in Swedish and German. Our system is only available in English. He’s sending screenshots of other people’s databases…
- some of which are from specially-made programs, the only people who have them are whomever posted those screenshots somewhere or gave them to him.
- he complained that “nobody has explained the processes here to me.” OK, so when you rejected two of the three standard processes we have, you did it without anybody explaining them to you? Wow.
- having claimed that he’s not supposed to have anything to do with data preparation, he sent to my boss a link to our shared folders, indicating where the raw data is and that “Nava never gave us any files to fill up with the data or any explanations”.
- in the exact same location there was a file, created the same day the raw data was posted but an hour later, with the first bunch of data that needs to be cleaned (we can work without anything else, but not without that - we can’t do anything in maintenance without that), copied from the raw files into an appropriate structure, with explanations and some check fields. I was soooo happy to be me, at that point, because damnit, that’s my SOP when I get raw data: grab the file that’s got 200 blank fields, reduce it to those fields which actually have something, add some autochecks, and start working on it with the people who actually own the data. In this case, I haven’t been able to do the last step because of mo-Ron’s interference, but everything else was right. There. And hadn’t been touched since I made that file, started explaining it and was told “you are not looking right file! Is not correct field!” (yes they are. Or they is. Or whatever. He’s got the worst English of anybody in the team.)
I’m covering five departments, he’s involved with only one of them. Three are on track, one is way ahead, the one he’s buggering is months behind.
Hey, Inefficient Accounting Office - when I am eligible to get paid for developing a new course, and my supervisor approves my getting paid for developing a new course, and I agree to postpone the getting paid for developing a new course until after said new course is taught, it behooves you to, you know, FUCKING PAY ME FOR DEVELOPING A NEW COURSE.
Quit messing with my paycheck, yo, do your job, yo, and gimme my money, YO, and I swear if I hear you meep about how you can’t cut an extra check and I’ll have to just wait another pay cycle, we’re going to have an unpleasant conversation up to and including the president of the college, if necessary.
Just do. your. job.
Does this guy ever claim to have been Kenny Chesney’s bus driver or a trained Army Sniper or Maintenance Manager of a major trucking company? (When he was actually never any of those things)
If so, I know where a former co-worker of mine went. 
When I was in college there was a guy in our dorm like that. One time someone made a list of all the things he claimed he had done. I don’t remember how long it was, but it was quite extensive for someone in their 20’s.
Although it is work-related, this isn’t a rant. It’s too mundane and pointless for its own thread, but too funny not to share:
Someone apparently sent in their resume with a box of donuts for some of our open positions. So guess who’s getting an interview for sure? Obviously knows the target audience…
In high school, there was a guy who swore that he and his father were part of a select few who were privy to some of the government’s top secrets, and if a war or catastrophe would ever break out, he’d be rushed to an underground bunker in South Dakota.
I don’t think I’ve heard him claim trucking companies (are you sure trucking companies do maintenance?), but the amount of years he claims to have doing contract work in different places does not match the amount of years he has been a contractor; his webpage doesn’t list half the stuff he claims verbally, and he misspells the names of half his clients, although none as badly as that consultant I once met, who mentioned Roroi in many of her documents as “an important customer”. Rolls Royce wasn’t just a customer, it owned 75% of the company.
At one point moRon claimed to have worked at a well-known company in a location nearby. One of my Swedish coworkers worked at that company for fifteen years; his wife still works there, and he is reasonably sure they never had a factory in that town “but you never know, I may be having memory problems already!”
Picture this: A guys office. In the drop down ceiling are 4 flourescent light fixtures. Only 2 of them are working.
I get a call and he asks why only 2 of the 4 are working. I get up into the ceiling and notice the 2 were not hooked up. I wirenut everything together and all 4 come on just fine. 30 minute job tops.
I ask how long the other 2 fixtures have been out and he says maybe 5 years? The guy just never got around to asking about them.
You mean to tell me you’ve been sitting in an office for 5 years with only half the lights working and you never bothered to tell maintenance?
I will say the office has this HUGE window facing the sun so it always had natural light. He only recently switched to working at night and I guess only then he noticed that his office was a little dark.