My work group is trying EXTRA HARD to make my last two weeks before maternity leave EXTRA SPECIAL. This morning they started assigning bugs to me that are all about decisions they made behind my back, and for which there is no documentation of the thought processes.
Also, I looked, and I am the only resource person who bugs are being assigned to.
ETA: Sorry, to whom bugs are being assigned. Because we’re all about fucking stuffy non-native-speaker obsessive grammar mindfucks in my group.
Lord, Sattua, you’re going to set fire to this place on your way out, right? Leave fire ants in the breakroom?
I mean, sure, you could be classy about it. But fire ants sound pretty tempting, am I right?
I’m in tears right now. I don’t know how I’m going to get through two more weeks.
The team lead just cited email conversations that happened between 12 and 18 months ago, as the reason why all these issues are being assigned to me.
So I’m the only person bugs are being assigned to.
I’m not allowed to assign them to people who understand them better.
I’m not being allowed to close them out–when I submit them for approval, they’re kicking them back saying “oh but there must be stuff like this all over, keep looking”
Or, even more aggravating, “please re-write your notes in the ‘notes’ field instead of the ‘explanation’ field”
I AM FUCKING 39 WEEKS PREGNANT. I can’t wear shoes. I can barely walk. I can’t vacuum or mop. My fingers are so swollen, the joints lock up overnight. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. And I can’t start my maternity leave yet for insurance reasons. And they’re fucking PICKING on me on PURPOSE just to be EVIL SHITS. And nobody else in the group is being assigned ANY WORK AT ALL.
See, now I feel bad for being flippant. Internet hug? Seriously though, can you half-arse your way through the next two weeks? You’ll still get the same amount of aggro from them, but you can just type lorem ipsum dolor in the explanation field and then corrrect it with fuck off you dogs when they ask for clarification? Or will that lead to disciplinary issues that will interfere with your maternity cover?
And I can’t imagine I’m suggesting anything you haven’t already thought of, so all I can really offer is an internet hug.
Calm down. They may be trying to get you fired rather than pay insurance.
How long before you can start leave?
Just because they’re paying you is no reason you have to be supercompetent. Make attempts. Follow all instructions. But you don’t have to do it right. Do everything, one thing at a time, very slowly.
Be serene. Smile. Glow. Deadlines no longer matter to you.
I’m being pestered by my work group, not by management, so there’s no particular new reason they’d be trying to get me fired. We’ve always hated each others’ guts (bad personal history with certain members, going back before we all worked here) and I think they like having me around as a scapegoat.
I have to judge for myself when to start leave, but I’m only cleared for six weeks, and the sooner I start before having the baby, the less time I (supposedly) have after she’s born. Since I’m going to quit, that isn’t the real issue, but having time to get her officially and unarguably on my insurance before I quit is, because I may need to COBRA while we apply for private insurance. At 39 weeks, I could be pregnant for three more weeks yet… I’ve told them that 41 weeks is my official absolute last day. So, I have a maximum of two weeks of work left.
I am trying to calm down. They get my goat, for the personal reasons. Having established a big email trail of having tried to work, today, I am treating myself to an afternoon of web surfing. I may not look at my bugs list any more, period. I have other work to do, that I know how to do. I can do that. When I’m gone they’ll have to reassign the bugs to the appropriate people, or admit that they aren’t actually important.
Turn into a model bureaucrat. Agree profusely with every instruction and ask for clarification on everything. Request additional resources to complete jobs.
It doesn’t matter what they answer, just mirror it back with more of the same.
Smile knowing that you’re effing with them more. Because it will land in their plates and they’re far less capable and/or familiar with the problems than you are.
Two weeks isn’t a long time to hand off in preparation for 6 weeks absence (I know you’re not coming back, but they don’t.) Raise that issue.
You may find that you wish you had more than 2 weeks left to properly screw with them.
While fire ants are smaller and sneakier, I think that scorpions would be a better choice here, if they’re available.
There’s also limberger (sp?) cheese or fish, placed in inconspicous places like the bathroom/breakroom, although you might not be really physically capable of moving stuff or unscrewing access plates.
If you really want to screw with them, just mis-file stuff. You put stuff in arbitrary boxes, it will NEVER be found.
When you need an emotional pick-me-up, try meditating on what they’re going to still have on their plates when you give your notice…
Plant an Annoyo-a-tronor two on the way out. I know you’re heavily pregnant, but there has to be *someplace *you can put it where they’ll have trouble finding it.
Morgyn, those look like fun! 
However, today is turning into a bad combination: way too much to do, and every. single. thing. going. wrong. I could deal with the workload if at least a few things went as designed here and there, but I can’t get anything done without some gremlin in the system pushing back at me! Our webmaster must be sick of seeing my emails.
It just never ends around here. Today I actually had to tattle on someone. I sent something to someone to review. That thing was then sent to our call center employees for marketing review. Yes, apparently now our call center employees should review everything we send out.
When I commented, “So you’re [call center employee] now reviewing everything we send?” and said call center employee said, “Yeah, that’s where the communication breakdown really is. I should see anything before it goes out,” for the first time since I’ve started here, I was so mad, I was unable to look at them. I calmly, but not necessarily graciously, accepted the changes, then had to leave my desk to take a walk around the parking lot. Then I came back to find that she had yet more changes to a different document.
So, I got up, asked my boss (again calmly), so do you have additional comments to these? When I handed him the document, he asked, “Um, why is [call center employee name] reviewing this?” I said, “Well, that’s my other concern. She has indicated that she needs to review everything. I’m not sure if that’s necessary and the constant changes are preventing me from completing other work.”
He agreed and I left. I’m still so mad I can’t work. This is the fourth time those documents have been reviewed and I had e-mailed them to marketing for mock up, then had to e-mail them back, retract them and e-mail brand new pieces.
Oh, ple-e-e-ease update us when this all shakes out.
Listen up, asshole: It’s not my fault that both of your Visa cards were declined authorization for your hotel stay. (And no, as you snottily tried to claim, it’s not my computer system either. Everyone else’s card authorizations went through just fine.) As I tried to gently explain to you, many banks will put holds on cards if they are used in unexpected ways and/or places. I see it often, given my job: Someone who lives in, say, Florida, who has travelled to DC and back over the course of a couple of days - like you have, sir - gets a “suspicious use” hold on their credit or debit cards, because the bank’s system automatically flags it when your previous 482 purchases were in West Palm Beach, and suddenly your card(s) have been used in 4 other states and the District of Columbia over the course of 2 days. Just call the 800 number. Don’t bitch at me - I can’t rent you a room without payment.
Monday morning, 8:43 am. A hearty FUCK YOU to my fucking co-workers. This week is gonna be greeeeeeeeaaat. Thanks for spending the weekend selectively deleting items with my timestamp on them, and replacing them with identical items that have your own.
Also, thanks to management for scheduling the sign-up meeting for the new, shitty 401K that you still don’t match contributions to for the day before my due date. I am TOTALLY attending that one.
Clearly it’s time to submit lots of bug reports, cc’d to management or whoever, and screenshot/print everything else you submit. Because seriously, WTF. I think either they’re trying to slack and not get fired, or they are trying to get you fired because they don’t want to shoulder the load themselves or deal with a temp for 6 weeks.
This weekend’s mischief was done by a contractor who I’m pretty sure has severe emotional problems. She has a long history of pretending she knows better than I do and writing snotty things about it directly into our resource files… though I’ve been doing this for ten years and have a PhD in it, and she came on with… six months of low-level experience, ten years ago. She’s also written me some hysterical emails. In any case, there is no one for me to report this to, because she reports to the person who was giving me shit about bug reports and 18-month-old emails last week. He definitely won’t care.
And I don’t care, really. Less than two weeks left to work here and then I’m gone. I hope they enjoy each others’ company.
I have talked to the management about these problems in the past. Unfortunately the company has spent so much money on our project already that they’re unwilling to even anger these people, for fear they’ll move on some place else. Management are pussies. Clueless pussies.
To the executive director of our agency:
Keep track of you own damn Doctor’s appointments.
And explain to me why it is more efficient to call me to tell me to call your doctor to find out when your next appointment is scheduled? Expecially when they won’t tell me anything and you have to call yourself anyhow? And look-up your own doctor’s phone number!
And maintain your own calendar if you don’t like how things are posted on it.
I am getting more and more sick of this fucking consultant I picked up.
1.) I checked around this morning to see if I could take Friday off, because I’m feeling the need for a personal day (in some small part thanks to her). Now, I realized it was pretty short notice, but there was nothing on my calendar for that day. But oops, guess what! She’s going to be sending me a last-second project on Friday, and then calling me on Monday with further changes, so that we can produce it on Monday and send it to the client. 'Cause god forbid you just get the shit done at anything but the last possible second.
2.) Even better: you send me a document to edit and [company]-ize. But wait! Gee, this looks familiar. In fact, this looks just like the original, unedited version of the first document I worked on for you last week. Well, whaddya know! It is! You had some changes, so instead of making them to the FINAL version, the one I spent all that time on and broke our in-house style rules for because you’re a controlling bitch who doesn’t understand branding, you made them on the shitty, ugly original. And, of course, didn’t enable Track Changes like I’d asked you to. So I got to re-do everything I’d done to the original file to this one.
THUMBS UP! You are the BEST COWORKER EVER.
I swear to god, if you keep sending me the message that you respect neither my skills nor my time, I am calling my manager and asking her how the fuck she wants me to deal with a prima donna bitch like you. Because I sure as hell am not going to put up with this treatment long-term.
IME, this happens because to get the temperature right in the offices (which have windows) means that the cube maze (in the middle) must be freezing. The small number of people in the offices “matter” more than the large number of people in the cubicals.
I say this in all seriousness: do you have or could you get access to a lawyer? Because this sounds to my layperson’s ear like it could qualify as a hostile work environment. Especially since you don’t need to worry about burning any bridges, just having a letter from a lawyer on the law firm’s letterhead pointing out how this treatment could be construed as an attempt to force you to quit so they don’t have to provide you with your benefits could make your final weeks there tolerable.