Bullshit they don’t have to do that in North Carolina. I sent out at least six credit card authorizations yesterday.
Speaking of I-95, I had someone yesterday tell me that they spent two hours trying to find I-85 East yesterday. Once a week someone asks me how to find I-26 South. :smack:
For those of you not familiar with the U.S. interstate system, odd numbered interstates *always *run N-S and even numbered ones *always *run E-W. Certain Americans who’ve lived here all their lives and hold valid drivers licenses haven’t figured that out yet.
Spaz, that is the general idea on how the roads run, but local conditions can introduce strange things into the mix–for example, route 128 out of Boston ‘North’ departs the city to the south. For about a third of it’s run, I 495 North runs due west.
Of course, they are ring roads, and we won’t even start on the fact that you can be standing on MA 128, US1 and I 95 at the same time.
Normally I’d agree with you BUT (and you knew there was a BUT, didn’t you?) for those of us who rarely stay in hotels, let’s face it, sometimes hotels buy items that are made for hotel use, not home use, and the way to operate the hotel-use items is often not intuitive.
On my last stay, I have to say that I thought that the way the “do not disturb” signs worked was pretty clever…seems that the sign slides into the card slot, so if you want to get into the room, you have to remove the sign first. I don’t know if this is common, or just the way it worked in that particular hotel.
Or it could be their GPS. I was traveling in the south recently and had to buy a replacement GPS just to get home, so I bought the cheapest one. It keeps telling me to go south on freeways that I know only go E-W or east on the N-S ones. I will be very glad when I get the replacement power cable for my old one…
I knew that perfectly well, but I just wasn’t willing to have that argument - it’s too much like teaching a pig to sing. Just firmly and politely insisted that our policy required a legitimate authorization, and that her other option included the Western Union service down the street… (I kept the I95 North option to myself, but I thought it very, very loudly.)
Oh, I completely understand that an unfamiliar alarm clock can be challenging, especially when it’s late and you’re tired. That’s why I ask all guests whether they need a wake-up call, or, if they call the desk for instructions on how to set the alarm, ask again whether they’d like for me to program a wake-up call. The usual reply is “Oh no! I don’t want to be any trouble!” Hmmm… two seconds of my time to punch 6 buttons into the phone console, versus 3-10 minutes of trying to walk someone through the process of setting the clock? :dubious:
And the coffee pots? During breakfast service, it’s absolutely common (daily, at least) for guests to come to the desk and tell one of us that we’re out of coffee - because someone can’t figure out a pot like this. Or they ignore the lovely little sign that I had to make for the coffee brewing station, and press the “on” button, dispensing 2 liters of scalding hot water all over the entrance to the breakfast room (weekly, at least.)
Or they choose the sidewalk as a parking space for check-in. Or run over 4 curbs before making it into the parking lot. Or back over a curb and into a nice deep ditch trying to get out of the parking lot.
(Yes, all of these things happened this weekend, on my shifts alone. In addition to the usual confuzzlement over how to use room keys.)
You’re right, though: The newer style do not disturb tags are very clever. The ones we use can be hung over the door knob or placed in the key slot, though, because the key-slot-only version confused people far too much - Generally, when we used those, I’d have about three guests per night call me for a new dnd sign, because theirs was “broken.”
Then there are these crazy things called “maps.” We’ve travelled over a good chunk of the US with our maps (free from CAA!) with virtually no problems.
That’s definitely a possibility! On some GPS systems, the town where I live is mapped completely backwards - West Main Street is labeled as East, and the east end is labeled west, for all east-west roads. Lots of lost people come to my house looking for the church on the opposite end of the street.
But, there’s also the possibility that Spazcat’s guests are idiots… It happens! (Honestly, from my hotel’s lobby, you can see Interstate 95. No exaggeration - I have spent 5 minutes explaining to people how to get back to the interstate. The directions are “See that stop light? Turn left.” I have walked people out of the front door, pointed to the on-ramp, and spent another several minutes explaining how to get there. In broad daylight. You can’t make this shit up!)
I can understand the confusion on I-26 since it does run N-S through My Fair City. I just want to go :smack: every time I hear someone look for 26 South.
There’s no excuse for looking for I-85 East out of Charlotte, though.
You could always do like Big Boss does where I work. He makes a Very Big Deal out of how the authorization is for your (the card holder’s) protection and we’re just making sure that everyone knows *exactly *what the card is to cover and we have a legitimate signature on file Just In Case. Because, you know, you can’t be too careful these days and we just want to make sure that you, the card holder, are protected.
Still haven’t heard from my boss. I sent my resignation letter to him at 10:00 am Friday morning and it’s now 9:30 am on Monday. How long do I wait before I just go to HR?
Eek! Who vomited in a coffee cup and then left it to dry over the weekend in the executive kitchen sink?
…or maybe it was oatmeal? Whatever it is = disgusting.
Also, I’m pretty sure someone at work is messing with me. She orders a certain product. She’s supposed to give me the receipt/confirmation/authorization form. And yet we have a mysterious charge with no authorization. I sent an email asking for confirmation. No response to my first email. No response to my second email.
I then sought her out in person; she said that she’d look into it.
She sent me an email a day later asking me to resend the information. Apparently, she couldn’t find it. In a stroke of genius she asked me if I was sure I sent it.
I forwarded on my email to her…again.
She replied this time! Immediately, almost as if she hadn’t spent more than a second to glance over the email I sent. “I ordered: different product, date off by a week. Does this help? kthxbai!” A completely different order. This does not help me at all. I now hate her and her ‘have a blessed day’ work voicemail.
My work rant of the day: people who give me a billing number that doesn’t specify if it should be charged to us or to the client. Sometimes it’s obvious, but other times it’s not. Most of those times, it will go to the client, but I don’t want the person in charge of that invoice screaming after me at the end of the month because that work should have been soaked by us.
Seriously, it’s not that fucking hard. Just include the simple, one-letter code at the end of the string of numbers. Ugh.
Ugh, don’t get me started on travel. I get the same thing–“Did you check blah blah blah?” Yes, of course I did–I know you don’t like the options I’ve given you, but those are your options. Making me look again through our terrible system isn’t going to make new flights magically appear.
Also, there’s the fact that even though I ask for the same details every single fucking time, nobody ever things to give them to me. It’s just “I need to be in X city on Y date.” I *always *have to chase down the details (when do you want to arrive, when do you want to depart, do you need a hotel, do you need a car). Always. You think after the first few dozen trips they’d figure this shit out.
Not everybody uses them, but I’ve seen them frequently enough over the past few years to know exactly what you’re talking about.
At this point, what I find gets the best results is to reply again (including the entire timestamped chain, of course)… but CC the person’s manager. “Hi Coworker, I emailed you on X date and Y date and am still waiting to hear back from you. In case you’re out of the office, I’m looping in your manager so that s/he can direct me to the right person in your absense.” Alternatively, simply a threat of including the manager (ostensibly because you’re worried the person isn’t there) also works great. I have never failed to get *immediate *results with this method.
This should be engraved and put on every employee’s desk. It’s amazing how poorly people attend to their emails, even when they’re at their desk most of the day.
One of my favorite answers about not responding to emails was a few years ago after I turned on receipts so I could remind people they’d already read the email. One person explained that they marked all the new email as read and then went back to actually read the important stuff. The person’s supervisor was there and I gave them a “wft?” look and they give back a “whaddya do?” look.
I also loved the folks that checked email once a day some time in the morning, which meant that issues may get 24 hour turnaround. They’d just cloned their personal voicemail response policy.
There’s a reason I ask for the script output to contain the column headers. It’s because many of these tables have dozens of columns and I need to know which columns each of these values corresponds with. Yes, I can compare it to my own install, but if you would give me the column headers like I asked for, then you would get your problems resolved more quickly. I’m just sayin’…
This has been an ongoing theme in just about every position I’ve had - there’s something I do regularly every day or so, and there’s somebody that I have to get some information from, the same every time, or they have to do something so that I can get on with my job, and instead of learning how it goes (I do X, you do Y, I can then do Z and we can all get on with it), they make me ask or wait or hunt them down every. Fucking. Time.
I made a mistake and double-booked my boss into a Holiday Inn Express and their policy is absolutely positively no way to get out of being charged one night’s stay. Fine. I agreed to that, and you absolutely positively suck that you have no flexibility when I realized my error five seconds after I did it.
What makes you total dicks is the attitude of your supposed Guest Relations Manager. Who then would not pass me on to nor give me the name of her supervisor when she was a bitch. Called back and this department would not give me the name of a manager to the poor CSR who got my call a second time. (“Ok, truly nice CSR, I know this isn’t your problem and you didn’t cause this, but I just want to confirm that your Guest Relations department outright refuses to give YOU the name of a manager in that department.”) Then I got passed on to a “senior case manager” who wouldn’t give me that information either.
I might write a (pointless) letter to their regional office, but for sure they’re not getting another dime from us.
Dear Boss, you dithering fool. Since you have ignored all my mails that were questions about the upcoming catalog, I have not been able to schedule press time. This has been going on since 3/8. Today you feel that if you have a firm press time, you can work to that deadline. Apparently my telling you repeatedly that we need a deadline AND providing you with a timeline to do so, didn’t work. Well, guess what, FOOL, now the web presses are booked solid for 3 weeks, no press time to be had. The catalog is now late, very very late. And I have multiple sent emails stored proving my case.
MAKE A DECISION FOR ONCE IN YOUR SELF-ENTITLES BOSS’S DAUGHTER MARRYING LIFE.
My shredder guy outdid himself today. All he had for lunch was 1 bread and margarine sandwich, so he was digging in the fridge for leftover food. (which he had cleaned out on Friday)
I’m a kind person. I really am. But the begging for food came after he told me about spending most of the weekend at the casino and then gas station shock when he had to fill his full sized pick up with gas. No food for him.
The HR department is going to change the rules about PTO. We are no longer allowed to roll over more than 80 hours per year. We are not allowed to sell it back. Its now changed to a use it or lose it situation. I’d love to use it, but we are so shortstaffed that its a major deal for me to take a whole day off. In October, I’m going to lose about 5 weeks of PTO.
Does anyone know a way to fake a fever and get sent home because I’ve got swine flu? I could use a week off to lay around and catch up with my reading.
Jeeze, just take time off! They’ve set up the rules, and should not be permitted to guilt you into donating your vacation time to the company. My sister was in a similar situation a few years back. She told them that she would would be taking the weeks of X to X off AND she would be taking off each Thursday (generally the slowest day for her particular job) from them through the end of the year.
Major shock, but she stuck to her guns, and the company survived. Yeah, they ended up hiring another person, but everyone else in the department was in similar ‘gotta take time off’ status, so it worked out.
Yeah, the stockholders got a penny less in their dividends, so what? If they need XXXX hours of labor a year to run the company, they need to hire enough people to handle it without depriving everyone of vacations, holidays, sick days, etc.
We’ve travelled over a good chunk of the US with our maps (free from CAA!) with virtually no problems.
kthxbai!” A completely different order. This does not help me at all. I now hate her and her ‘have a blessed day’ work voicemail.