Oooo, good one!
Punctuality is a fucking meme for me. SHOW THE FUCK UP ON TIME! I don’t care if you can show up late and still get your work done. It’s not about that. It’s about your coworkers expecting you, and wondering if you’re showing up, and panicking because you’re not there.
As of two days ago, I’m officially the manager of my department, and I am going to deliver this message to my underlings: Show up on time, ready to work, or get the fuck out.
About bloody time!
Just realized that the next time I write a procedure that requires the technician to verify an observed value is less than a specific number – for example, verifying that a leakage rate is less than 2 gallons over the course of 5 minutes – I need to write it like this: “Verify leakage is less than two gallons (<2 gallons) over a period of five (5) minutes.” Otherwise, the technician may record that the leakage rate was “>2” and cause certain people to think that the part failed testing.
Naturally, this slipped right by the two people who reviewed and signed off on the results before me.
:smack:
“Your computer needs an update. Installing in (countdown)…”
I tell it to go ahead and do it. Twenty minutes later, still no sign of it doing anything, nothing showing up in the task manager. Then suddenly all my programs start shutting down on their own with zero warning.
“Are you sure you want to continue shutting down?”
“NO!”
(does it anyway)
Comes back up, does two rounds of windows updates with reboots in between, then back up and says still installing things.
Twenty minutes later I’m petrified of getting in the middle of a critical task and having it decide to shut down with no warning again.
That’s not a bug, that’s a ‘feature’.
Just realised I haven’t actually told anyone this yet, but if anyone remembers my struggles with securing funding to continue my project (and incidentally my job), well, I did it, and then some. I have actually obtained (in my virtual grubby little paws) most of the proposed budget amount for this year, with some more almost certainly to come, and two of those grants include promises of the same for the next two years as well, covering more than half of those years’ budgets. Now I can get started on getting the rest of next year’s funding…
So that’s one less thing to worry about, but I do worry that I won’t be able to keep on doing this job indefinitely. Fortunately, my current (interim) senior manager is very accommodating of my disability, even allowing me to work from home when it’s not safe for me to drive in to the office. I hope whoever gets hired permanently in that position is as understanding. I’m still having nightmares about the former boss guy. As in, literal nightmares. At least now I’m able to stand up to him even though I can’t quite get away from him in the dreams, whereas before he would be physically hurting me and I couldn’t make him stop. Probably says something about my relative levels of feeling helpless, heh.
With any luck, Him Indoors will land a decent job and I can look for something with less responsibility and stress, as finding something with less of those but still enough money to support both of us, well, that ain’t happening.
I keep a shortcut to “shutdown /a” on my desktop.
Sometimes I can get to it in time.
Well by then half my programs were closed without warning and I’m going “Damn, I hope it saved my changes to that document…”
I know it’s on your website. If I didn’t have to work under totally-inappropriate (for my job) rules that forbade internet use I wouldn’t have bothered you in the first place. I’d have my contact’s name and all her data before I called, but that’s another rant.
I know it’s in the phone book, the tax rolls, the Rolodices (physical or virtual) of all you clients and vendors. For that matter, it’s in the date book of your regular rep from here. It’s on your letterhead, your checks, your invoices, your receipts, your filings with the SEC, and your ads. It’s on every piece of junkmail you send out, because we both know you are not the innocent you pretend to be and play this game, too. It’s known by that wino who is looking at your building from across the street. I even have your email address because you just gave me it.
By Odin’s bad eye, why are you suddenly unwilling to tell me your company’s mailing address?
Work partner, you have got to get your act together or you are going to get canned. You were supposed to at least check my email while I was on vacation. I don’t think you even opened my inbox all week. I came back to almost 300 unread messages, some of which were urgent. I had some time-sensitive projects in my queue that I told you and the boss about. They were still sitting in my queue when I got back. And the projects you did do you did wrong. I can’t correct your mistakes anymore, I just don’t have the time.
You’ve been in this department almost a year now and you still don’t grasp even simple tasks. You keep asking me the same questions about how to do the same damn things over and over again. I can’t say I always get how to do something the first or even second time, but by the fifth or sixth time in one week I get real tired of showing you what to do.
I try to not let my annoyance show so much but I’ve reached my limit. Especially when you interrupt my lunch again for the same damn questions. I usually eat my lunch at my desk because the other options are the tiny table jammed in the corner by the microwaves or the picnic table in the middle of the parking lot. I tried putting earbuds in while I was eating but you just walk over to my desk and start asking questions.
The boss knows you’re not keeping up and I really don’t want to see you get canned mainly because I don’t want to be flying solo until they find someone else foolish enough to join this department. A crappy partner is better than no partner… I think.
Not necessarily. A *competent *partner is better than no partner. No partner is better than a crappy partner. At least in my experience.
And a manual is better than showing, because you can say “page 13”. Some people just won’t read them (sadly, that’s the case with an absurd amount of my current coworkers), but proving the existence of a manual and that its existence was notified is easier than proving you showed someone…
again…
and again…
and again.
I’m a patent writer for a law firm. The inventors that I am currently in the process of writing patents for seem all to be trying to drive me crazy in different ways.
Inventor #1 thinks he is a patent writer so he likes to nitpick the applications and rewrite all the claims. So then I have spend hours revising the application and claims to incorporate his changes and re-revising his changes so that the application still follows all the specific patent rules.
Inventor #2 thinks that patent applications materialize out of thin air, so that even though he has not given me certain pieces of essential information (even after me asking several times), he is still upset that the patent application process is taking so long. Well give me the frickin’ info that I ask for and it will be a lot quicker! Oh, and he is also aggravated that I am asking for information at all, “Can’t you just work with what you have?” No, you have revised the invention considerably since I started working on it (and of course didn’t tell me, I had to figure it out on my own) and I need to have the current information!
Inventor #3 also owes me some information, but seems incapable of following a simple email chain and every reply is some form of “Huh??? What???”.:smack:
Oh, dear. I hope the second inventor’s patent application isn’t for some kind of perpetual motion machine…
My 80+ hours a week boss finally broke from the stress and the hours he was putting in. Out several weeks so far and we’re being told he’ll be out at least another month.
I broke in 2001 from stress and too many hours. Swore never to do it again and had a discussion with this man last year where I refused his “suggestions” that it would be great if I worked a lot of hours again. I straight up warned him where he was headed and he became very angry with me about it.
He’s in his early 60’s, so we’ll see if he comes back at all.
I have been put on another program. I’ve basically been fired by our client.
My boss said, “We don’t understand it, either. You had me, my boss, a vice president, and our rep who brought the client in–people with real skin in the game–pushing for you. You are by far our top rep on the program, but they don’t like you. They say that you are awkward on the phone and that you push too hard for sales, but we listened to the same calls and you sounded great: flexible while following the strategy, bringing out the features, and not being pushy when you schedule a sales call. We don’t get it, but they don’t like you.”
So I’m off Friday and start on a puke consumer program on Monday until another B2B opens up. No room for originality, just read the script and sign 'em up. And hand-dialing a flesh-colored POT. I told her how the last time I used one at another job after four days I lost full use of two fingers on my left hand, which hasn’t returned, and she blanched, I assume at the thought of a workman’s comp case. Maybe that’ll light a fire under them and they’ll get us all headsets. The other sits a lot closer to the bathroom and the coffee pot, so that will help offset the reduced pay and no commissions.
My boss announced a team lunch, and asked us for ideas of what we’d eat.
Someone via email voted for Thai food.
Because I have a serious, anaphylaxis-level allergy to coconut and tree nuts, I emailed the team and requested that we opt for something else, since 15 people in a closed room all eating food containing stuff I’m extremely allergic to is a bit iffy. (My allergist said, “…you *should *be ok, but keep your epi-pen near you and some antihistamines nearby.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.)
After I made that request that we not eat food that could make me very sick or kill me, the team decided to have Thai food.
Fuck you, too, team.
Not paid work, but I found out today that someone I do volunteer work with complained about me to the volunteer coordinator, and apparently demanded that I be shit-canned. There are already several other volunteers who have refused to work with this person, so the coordinator did not give in to her request. As a result, she is taking her volunteer hours elsewhere. Too bad, because (other than her interpersonal difficulties) she was good at the work.
Without details, she complained that something I said offended her deeply. This happened more than 2 months ago, but she just complained last week. During the same conversation she said offensive things to me too, but I assumed it was just a heated discussion which we then dropped and forgot. Apparently I was wrong, and only I was in the wrong.
The coordinator was very nice about it, but did feel obliged to tell me to be sure I know my audience before mentioning certain topics. Lesson learned. I often don’t say much, so I guess I’m out of practice on what’s out of bounds when I do open up.
…and now we have someone complaining that I sat on a client inquiry for three months.
No, we provided an answer to one of the questions right away.
We also said that we don’t know what’s going on with the second questions right away, because we couldn’t recreate the problem. We ran it by several people who also couldn’t see it. Then we ran it by someone else, who said they don’t own that issue, and got smacked by that person’s director. Then we asked three other people who the hell owned that piece of the software, and got the runaround.
Essentially, I asked several directors and VPs who owns an item (because I found out that it is not my team) and got a runaround for three months.
But my name is the one being thrown around. Yeah, thanks.