Workplace griping, anyone?

The BBQ Pit
9042

Send an email to the original requester, saying that it is unlikely that this will be finished on time, due to the fact that you have still not received the needed info.

You will probably get a response from her direct to you, attaching that file (and likely a note that she had already sent it long ago). Which will at least let others know that your boss is not passing the needed info on to you.

I once had a boss like that. I got in the habit of ensuring that my emails to him saying that the project was at a standstill until I got the needed info were cc’d to the actual requester of the project, so they would know the status. They usually responded by sending the info directly to me, so the project could get done. Eventually, they began cc’ing me directly on their original requests. (Which irritated my boss no end. But he was soon gone.)

9043

Sigh.

Boss is on vacation this week.

And she made a major scheduling oversight-- well, it’s the kind of thing that’s obvious in hindsight, I’m not sure if I would have predicted it in advance.

We should have had a guy with muscles and a clue (and some history) scheduled until close tonight, not a set of clueless newbies, especially given the clueless managers around.

9044

Correct: PT = Part Time

It’s better than getting their hours cut so much that they’d quit. If he has to cut hours the younger crowd has theirs cut first as they don’t have as many bills, don’t have to rely on their paycheck for grocery money, etc.

I think, though, come July he’ll have no choice but to cut hours as directed by store management because store management will be under the gun re hours via upper management. It happens every summer but I have a feeling it’s going to be a lot dicier this year because of stuff happening behind the scenes.

9045

Dear Og, what a fucked-up day.

Wanna know the best thing that happened to me today? I went to Costco to buy 15 dozen eggs, and as I turned into the first lane I tried in the parking lot, there was a car backing out of a space, opening it up for me. That’s the best thing that happened today.

At the moment, I am up for a promotion at my job. I’ve been here nearly 2 years, my manager (the fourth I’ve had in less than two years) quit last month, and I am basically undergoing a trial by fire to see if I can do the job (and I really fucking want the job). For now, I am the acting manager of my department, running the entire dining service in a retirement home.

Naturally, shortly after I took over, three of my servers decided that they wanted to be caregivers for our assisted-living people (better money there, and they had already decided to do that before the last manager quit), and another one simply quit. Not because of me; she’s a high-school student (well, graduate now) who had other plans for the summer. So this basically meant that I suddenly had half of the serving staff I need. I’ve been forced to stretch my remaining servers to the limit to make sure that shifts are covered, and have had to do that with three of them still being in high school, and one of them being a “special needs” woman. That means I’ve had to work my one remaining, dedicated server way too much, but she’s willing and available, and she truly cares about our residents, but I’m afraid of running her into the ground the same way I’m getting run into the ground.

So. Today.

When I made out this week’s server schedule, I had one of them coming in at 7:30 AM today. Earlier this week, she sent me a series of horrifyingly confusing text messages about a doctor’s appointment out of town. The texts were so confusing that I had to call her and talk to her live to figure out WTF she was talking about. It turned out that she couldn’t work today or tomorrow, because her appointment is in Seattle, and she doesn’t have a car and so had to take the train to Seattle today in order to be able to make it to her appointment tomorrow.

Okay, that sucked, but at least I had another server coming in at 9:30 AM, to work the lunch shift. That server called in at 8:00 AM to tell me that she couldn’t come in, because school blah-blah-blah. Her last day of school was supposed to be yesterday, which is why I scheduled her for a morning shift today. I’m all, “WTF?” See, she’s a 16-year-old, recently-emancipated minor, and she’s trying to graduate from high school right now, and something-something she’ll go to jail if she doesn’t take care of this school business … my head is still spinning. Why did my last manager leave me with this shit?

So for today’s lunch, I should have had three servers working. I ended up with one: The “special needs” woman, whom we do not allow to work alone. There has to be a manager present when she’s working, and we don’t have her work without two other servers working with her, because she’s just not very fast, she’s easily distracted, and needs to have somebody keeping her focused on what she should be doing. But I’m proud of her today. When she realized she was the only server, she stepped right up, and did really well. She wasn’t alone, though; once the people in other departments saw the situation, they jumped in to help, taking orders and delivering meals to tables so that my server didn’t have to do everything. And she even took initiative to perform some tasks that I hadn’t even asked her to do.

That brings me to the dinner shift. I had scheduled three servers to work tonight. One was the aforementioned emancipated minor. When I called her later to make sure she could show up for the dinner shift, it turned out that she didn’t even realize I’d scheduled her for a split shift, and in any case she couldn’t come in for dinner because of some school event that she was required to attend. And … I can accept that; if you’re still in high school, school takes precedence over a job, as far as I’m concerned. The second server I had scheduled for dinner knew she was scheduled and agreed to come in an hour early when I called her. The third server was a girl I hired last week, who worked two shifts and then quit. I called the one remaining server, another high school girl, to beg her to come in (she missed her shift yesterday, but that was entirely my own fault, because I bungled the copy of the schedule that I posted), but, since she was scheduled to have tonight off, she had already committed to babysitting her little brothers, and her mom was at work, and her dad wouldn’t be home from work until too late to let her come in, and she couldn’t find anybody else to watch her brothers. And that one, adult, dedicated server I mentioned above? I couldn’t call her in at all because she had already requested the day off because her mom was having surgery and she was her mom’s ride.

So yeah, dinner, like lunch, had one server.

That one dinner server, though, I’m going to reward her. She just happened to show up yesterday afternoon, because she had to be tested for TB (a requirement for working with the elderly). I had just phoned one of the other servers to make sure she knew she was scheduled to work last night (because I had just discovered my bungle), and no, she thought she was off, and was in fact out of town. Crap. I turned to this girl who was only there for her TB test, and begged her to cover the other girl’s shift. She was willing, but pointed out that she didn’t have her work clothes with her, and didn’t have a car. So I put her in my car, drove her to her house (she lives like a block from my sister, and knows my 17-year-old niece) so that she could collect her work clothes, then drove her back just in time to start the shift.

Yeah, this is what my previous manager left me with. I should mention that my previous manager was 24 years old, and that I am 49 years old, and that I already had 8 years of experience in foodservice before he was born. I have dedicated myself to my profession as a cook for 32 years, and I’m damned good at it. I applied for the manager position late last year, and corporate decided to hire this kid over me because, “he has experience managing people”. Yeah, he had experience managing people on a fishing boat in Alaska. And now he’s left the kitchen manager job to become an apprentice mechanic. I bear the guy no ill will, but he’s a damned kid who hasn’t decided what he wants to do with his life. I decided what I wanted to do with my life long before he was born. And so now I’m stuck with a bunch of mostly-undependable high school girls, working their first jobs, not knowing what they’re doing, and having not yet developed a work ethic or an urgency to want to satisfy their customers. Customers who are some of the most wonderful people you’d ever want to meet, customers who are the only reason I have not just walked off of this job the last ten times I had a damned good reason to walk.

My recently-departed former manager told me why he hired all of these schoolgirls: “They’re just working for spending money. They don’t have bills to pay. So they’re not going to be constantly leaving for better jobs.” Well, except at least one of them did (she’s a caregiver now). That was him basically being lazy, because he didn’t want to deal with the overly-complicated hiring process. See, the thing about working with the elderly is that there is a crapload of government oversight of these facilities. Candidates have to pass a UA to make sure they’re not on drugs. Then they have to pass an FBI background check (complete with fingerprinting) to make sure they’ve never committed a crime that would disqualify them from working with seniors. So by hiring high school girls, as long as they pass the UA, they probably don’t have a criminal record that would disqualify them. But … they mostly suck as workers.

So now I’m tasked with hiring adult, dependable, experienced servers. And that is complicated by something I recognized two years ago: You are not going to find experienced servers who are willing to work for minimum wage with no tips. Yeah, there’s no tipping in a retirement home dining room. These people’s meals are already paid for from the money they’re paying to live here. So my company is advertising “5-Star Dining!”, and not shelling out what is needed to provide it. (Though, for the record, my customers/residents absolutely love the food I’m preparing for them.) I just ran into this problem when I had a phone conversation with a woman who had submitted a resume for a server position. She has 10 years of experience, and, judging by her voice over the phone, and her e-mail address (somethingsomething64@yahoo.com) (yes, I’ve replaced her name with "somethingsomething) she’s my age or older. But … she lives in a small town that is a 45-minute drive away, and it’s just not worth her time to drive all the way here and back for minimum wage and no tips.

So I have sent out a call to some of my Facebook friends, my coworkers at my previous job. Servers who worked alongside of me serving banquets at my city’s convention center. These are people I worked with for 5+ years, who I know can do the job well. And, having worked at the convention center for 7-1/2 years, I know that the Spring convention season has run out, and now they’re going into the summer drought. I’m basically going to beg them to come work for me, even if only on a short-term basis. I need some servers who can show how to do it.

9046

:sympathetically nods:

One of my former employers wouldn’t hire people still in school because although TPTB considered them “cheap”, they were also, in general, too unreliable. They were willing to hire older folk for more money just so they’d already have reliability and a work ethic.

I once worked with a woman who traveled more than 1 hour one-way because she couldn’t find a job which paid as much in her immediate area. Mind you, she wasn’t being paid THAT much but it was above minimum wage.

9047

Mister Rik, you have my sympathy, and this suggestion, for what it’s worth: I recognize that you’d prefer experienced servers, and you deserve them. But if you can’t get as many as you need, maybe you should consider hiring another one or two people with special needs. I think they’d be more willing to work for a lower wage/no tips job, and although they’d need more supervision and training, they’d be less likely to leave, too.

Some people with special needs can be very good, dependable workers, as you found out with the one you have.

And…do any of the seniors have any relatives (grandchildren?) who might need a job?

9048

I so hear you, Mister Rik, on the High School Kids working first jobs vs. adult workers.

I’m in retail, and I worked with two new hires this past week. One of them is 18 or 19, I think, home from her first year of college, wants to work 20-25 hours a week, and is generally sweet and helpless.

The other one last worked at a different retail chain (not really a competitor), and she’s got a clue. She may not always make the same judgement calls I would, but she gets the big picture. She’s a delight to work with.

Especially when co-workers who have been around long enough to know better are engrossed with their cell phones!

9049

My supervisor finally sent me the file so I didn’t have to go nuclear. I made a mistake–the original email was sent to her a month ago, not last week. She wanted to edit it, which is why she didn’t send it to me right away. But seriously, a month later? And then it has to be done now now now.

A bonus story: My supervisor is routinely 15 or 20 minutes late to meetings, which can be very inconvenient if we have a conference room booked for an hour and someone else has it reserved right after us. I was 5 minutes late for a meeting, and I was just walking out of my office, and she called me from the conference room. :rolleyes:[URL=“http://boards.straightdope.com//www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]

9050

So, when you book a conference room, factor in expected wait-for-the-supervisor-to-show-up time.

9051

Hey folks, I need contact information for your agency.

Please send:
Name
Agency/Division
Phone #
Email

Thanks,
Kelevra

First reply: Hey Kelevra. Contact Mike Brown for that.

Seriously people! NAME. AGENCY/DIVISION. PHONE#. EMAIL.

How the holy fuck am I supposed to contact Mike Brown when you don’t send me so much as an email address or phone number! The person that replied is far above my pay grade so I can’t reply the way I want to. Time to suck up to dumb shits.

9052

When you’ve worked in one place for a long time, lots of things just become second nature to you. I noticed this when I was fresh out of school and sometimes I was expected to “just know” some things in my first jobs. Later when I was the “old-timer” in a job I remembered that feeling and made sure to document as much as I could to make it easy on my fellow workers. Now I’m in a new job again, in a company with lots of old-timers. I understand, things just sink in over time, or if you were instrumental in designing/implementing something, you remember all the nitty details. It’s human nature to forget that not everybody knows everything you know.

Fully understood, this is still one of my biggest workplace peeves. Metaphorically it’s like setting landmines around the office and then snickering and saying “you should have known it was there” when new coworkers step on them and blow their legs off.

Encountered this recently with one coworker who is really blatant and completely unashamed about doing this to the point where she makes you feel stupid for not knowing. Lots of our software uses a location field, for example you could enter a city, state, country, zip code. Last year I came across documentation for one product that seemed to overlook one of those location types. The documentation said you could enter city, state, or country. I assumed the original author just forgot to include zip code in the list. The reason I thought that? The product allowed you to enter zip code and did not throw an error. Therefore, I fixed it the document.

Now, months later, she’s asking when that was changed and why and it’s a big problem because one of our products can’t handle zip code in a location field. After I explained how it got changed, she replied that (tone of voice: I should KNOW this) “the way we document things here is to just specify what is allowed, we don’t document every possible thing we don’t allow”.

Well, I’d agree you don’t want the document to say the location field cannot be email addresses, customer names, company names, name of first child, pet’s name, SSN, etc. That’s dumb. HOWEVER, if most of your products have a standard list of supported data elements, and this one product does not support one of those data elements, then you DO need to explicitly state that. She’s an arrogant asshole for thinking that everybody should just know by the fact that it wasn’t mentioned that zip code wasn’t allowed. (Especially when the user interface did in fact allow it!)

9053

Well, I just got off of 8 hours of night shift.

 It went well, no complaints. 

 Except...when my replacement comes in. The woman who works the mornings is easily the most bitchy, grumpy, critical, malcontent control freak I have ever had the displeasure of working with. 

  When I get on shift, her daughter - who is an angelic sweetheart by comparison, but a bit lazy, has usually left things on her shift undone. That means I have to do them. I really don't mind all that much, because the daughter is not rude, or grumpy or bitchy like her mother is. 

 My good mood this morning was ruined by a nearly ceaseless barrage of criticisms of the job I did (unjustified - I did a good job), musings about my character, and dictatorial micro management on what I can and can't do. 

And this person isn't even the boss or the manager. She's just been there for donkey's years and thinks she queen of the roost. 

Among the other males who work there - there is not a single one who doesn't think she is a bitch. 

 Bite my tongue...the place seems to go through a lot of employees. Perhaps if/when I leave sometime in the future she is tasked with training a grossly overweight slob who constantly smells of B.O. , makes crass jokes and bugs the crap out of her.
9054

I fully understand that a large portion of my job is educating clients on how our system works. It’s government, it’s scary, and it will fuck up your life if you don’t pay attention.
But for fuck’s sake.
I seriously wonder how some people tie their shoes, they’re so clueless.
I’ve played phone tag with one person for the past three days. Same question left in every voicemail, I respond with the same answer in every voicemail… AND they called again. What more do you want from me?
Another wants me to guess what a judge will order. No, just no. Asked me if I will testify on their behalf. If you serve me, I will, but I’m impartial. cue squawking about how the other party got to me and I must believe those lies
Calls like those one after another.
I know I’m mentally fatigued with all that’s going on in my life right now. I have always strived NOT to be one of “Those” government workers and I fear I am slowing going that route.
Add to it, we’re still training new people, and the training isn’t going so well. They’re taught the very basics, which is good and all, but critical thinking skills cannot be taught - that can only come with time and experience. I spend half my day IM’ing with newbies who cannot figure out the next logical step on a case because they were never instructed how to process one. I can give my suggestions, that’s it. And if they ask a different worker, they’re going to get a different answer. They all came from an area where everything was black and white. Everything is grey in our realm of the division, and that can be frustrating. Their frustration bleeds on to me, and it frustrates me, too.

9055

Well, normally, I ask that people address me as “Michael,” but I’m not totally inflexible.

'Sup?

9056

So she’s arrogant because she thinks you should “just know” things, an asshole because she never thought that you might actually have tested which information was correct and misinformed because the information she thinks you should have “just known” was in fact incorrect.

I’ve spent the last 15 years running into that kind of thing, generally from people who learned it from The Certification Course (please bow when you say those holy words). Sometimes, after showing to someone that what they say can’t be done can, in fact, be done, their reaction is “cool!” Sometimes, they’re left doing a good imitation of a carp: “but but but but…” butt is what I sit on, dude :rolleyes:

9057

I don’t know, but I asked my sister (who is the head nurse at our location on the other side of town) if I could hire my oldest niece (who just turned 17). She said, “Nah, Katy’s not dependable, because of her migraines, and she wouldn’t pass the drug test.”

And that right there is exactly why I voted to legalize marijuana in Washington, and I hope the rest of the country will follow, right up to the Federal level. My niece smokes because it relieves her migraines, but it disqualifies her from working here, thanks to the “war on drugs” Federal laws.

Last year, when I found myself suddenly working the kitchen by myself for 17 days, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I auditioned three different cooks. The first two worked for one day and said, "I don’t think I can handle this!. The third audition was so good that I was prepared to let him take over the next day so that I could get a damned day, or at least a morning, off. Sadly, he failed his UA because he had smoked three weeks earlier, and that disqualified him. He stormed out the door saying, “Marijuana is legal in Washington!” But he wasn’t considering the Federal laws. Thanks to the War on Drugs, any company that receives Federal funds must be a “drug-free facility”. Given that the majority of retirement home residents are having their bills paid, at least partially, via Social Security, that qualifies retirement homes as “receiving Federal funds”. So we have to be 100% drug-free.

Hey, Feds, why don’t you care how much beer I’m guzzling?

9058

I do have one idea about how to motivate these kids, though:

9059

“But do you want your brain surgeon working on you while high?” :rolleyes:

Right now she can do it drunk off her ass or high as a kite on Oxy. Get real.

9060

I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or criticizing. I think she’s an arrogant asshole because of her tone when talking about these things. It’s like the most natural thing that I know everything she knows. Her tone is like “It goes without saying that <$thing> is true and you shouldn’t even need to ask about it. In fact you’re kind of stupid to have done it wrong when it’s so obvious.”

9061

I hate my present work uniform.

My work uniform is khaki pants and a black t-shirt.

And the present t-shirt has this great big roundish logo on the back, which doesn’t allow moisture to pass through. So if I sweat-- 'cause I’m working or 'cause I’m in the back room which isn’t airconditioned, I end up with this damp, icky feeling between the shoulderblades where I can’t reach . It’s annoying.