Fingers crossed for you and your co-workers’ lives, purplehorseshoe!
ETA: That didn’t come out right - I mean, not that you’re fearing for your lives at work, but that you can actually have a bit of a life on your lunchbreak.
WOWZA.
Grandboss went from singing along with her annoyingass electronic little kid toys, to slamming things around and crying.
Also, this showed up in my inbox:
[QUOTE=My Boss’s Boss]
The event today is cancelled. We will no longer be having anything like this. Feel free to have the pizza. Please remember [company] purchased it for you.
You have your own lunch hour to take today but please do not stop and eat pizza then take lunch. You can work and eat and then take a lunch. I really don’t care.
[/QUOTE]
Then she stormed off. Her office is dark - usually means she’s gone for the day.
Huh.
Turns out I’ll see Mr. Horseshoe today after all. 
Not sure if it’ll be worth it, in the long run. (I didn’t do anything but there’s, idunno, a cumulative effect. Yanno?)
And another manager finds out that team-building exercises aren’t. World-view shatters.
I hadn’t seen this when I posted the above - silly page breaks! - but you know what? You are one luck-infused Doper today. Go buy a coupla lotto tickets, wouldja?
Funny you should make that ETA, by the way. The last time this all happened (the stand-in-a-circle-and-untangle BS) the thing was scheduled (also last-minute!) for Friday the 13th. We really DID joke that we were all going to be murdered. Joke! Joke!
Ummm… I need to find a moment to polish up my resume, don’t I? :dubious:
Yeah, probably. Body armor couldn’t hurt, either, as it sounds like she just snapped and took it very, very personally…
I’m a terrible person for being happy that someone is crying as her dreams shattered. But really, just how clueless IS grandboss to not see that most of the workers have lives, and would rather spend their time off doing something they enjoy, and preferably WITH someone they enjoy?
If team building exercises are so important, then the company can damn well pay for the employees’ time. And no, donuts and/or pizza isn’t enough to make me want to spend time with some of my co-workers, especially not if I’m going to have to do those stupid exercises with them.
You know what would help? Identifying and counseling toxic team members (and possibly leaders). If the toxic people can’t or won’t change, then get rid of them. THAT will improve morale.
True dat, except that grandboss has some sort of immunity. Part of it is that her superior (a VP) has never met Teh Crazy. She is a model of professionalism when he’s around (which isn’t often, unf’ly) and he would probably not even believe anyone who told him that she acts like this. There have been HR investigations before … they’ve all ended with the other person getting the shaft, not her. Somehow.
Anyway, the meltdown itself is actually fairly easy for me to understand. It’s similar to the Scentsy thing I was bitching about earlier in this thread: she takes it as a personal rejection. SHE was all excited about this game we were all going to play together, so the fact that we’re not must mean we’re rejecting her personally. SHE loves the blueberry-cheesecake-of-doom smell, so the fact that some of us don’t must mean we’re rejecting her personally.
She’ll either blow this up so out of proportion that she cancels her own birthday lunch this Friday, or she’ll come in tomorrow singing and happy as if nothing had ever happened. The latter has happened, plenty of times - damn bipolar bitch. No way to anticipate what to expect next.
My stomach is a knotted mess from anxiety and coming down off adrenaline. I should not have to hang around the office hallway waiting until the bathroom is empty so I can throw up in peace, but that’s what I’m reduced to. I just have to hold out long enough to go home on my newly-minted lunch break and hug my husband, scritch the kitties, and then hug him again, hard. Ha! I just realized - then I’ll feel awkward for flaunting my reasonably happy marriage in front of my friend.
Lynn, if you’re “a terrible person” then we’re all going straight to hell together.
Wow. That is one crazy grandboss. Oh yeah, I’d be polishing up my resume.
Now I gotta go buy some lottery tickets. 
This is why we can’t have nice things. 
NOW WE’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT B-2 MEANT DAMMIT CALL HER BACK IN TO EXPLAIN
Actually, the company *is *legally required to pay for the employees’ time, assuming they’re nonexempt.
One person can be easily dismissed as overreacting. A *group *of people (preferably with any crazies in the department excluded) all going to HR together, with a *documented *series of incidents, have (a) a much better chance of being believed and (b) much greater protection from reprisal. If I were you, I’d start keeping a log of every single time she pulls crazy shit like this: date, time, and a description of the incident. And then start feeling around for who else would be interested in approaching HR with the list together.
Oy! I was gonna come in to bitch about my (great-grand?) boss, but Madame Violet Equine Footwear has me beat by a large margin! (Fortunately for me, our director of operations is actually the son of ggboss. His explicit instructions? “If my mom tells you something really stupid, call me for clarification. Usually, it’s safe to smile, nod, and ignore her.”)
Bless her heart, though, she’s a combination of clueless and meddling. And she has a high opinion of her abilities. Which usually means that a request for the office machine repair number is met with “Give me a minute, I’ll come look at the fax machine.” Two hours later, she punches some buttons, can’t get faxes to print, and tells me to call the repairman. Okie dokie, but I still need the gd number, which isn’t posted! And two hours later, I’m dealing with a 1.5" stack of urgent faxes!
And let’s not even start on how Monday morning went! She (ggboss) was asking ME where to find a specific circuit breaker - bwuh? I’ve worked here for six days! I have no clue! (Meanwhile, ggboss is co-owner of this joint. Doesn’t it behoove her to know shit like locations of breakers and water valves and stuff?! Long story, but I at least caught the major problem before the whole joint caught fire!)
I guess that the silver lining is that ggboss likes to feed all of us nice homemade Indian food…
Thanks for the best laugh I’ve had today. 
The words I bolded are made out of solid gold. Possibly encrusted with diamonds and slung over the horn of a unicorn who shits winning lotto tickets and rainbows while simulatenously making peace in the Middle East.
snip… *coupla really funny stories *…snip
That better be some DAMN fine Indian food!
[QUOTE=Shot from Guns]
NOW WE’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT B-2 MEANT DAMMIT CALL HER BACK IN TO EXPLAIN
[/QUOTE]
The mysterious colored strips of paper are still hanging on the whiteboard in the conference room, next to two columns labelled “A” and “B.”
I used to has a sad. Now, instead, I has a mystery. 
Does this sound like a familiar setup to anyone else out there? Think cheezy grade-school summer camp type of games…
I’m sure A and B are teams, and you’ll be matched up with your corresponding number on the other team for some sort of activity.
ETA: Lacunae, I originally read that as Italian food and went, “Meh.” Now that I figured out it’s Indian, I’m much more excited.
Wowza indeed. I haven’t seen a foot-stomping temper tantrum of that caliber on this side of kindergarten. Are you sure she’s a grown woman? She has to be a stack of five-year-olds in an adult suit.
Considering grandboss’s penchant for incredibly inappropriate stuff (I do not need to hear the phrase “gay anal sex” this often in a corporate environment, ferchrissakes) that’s a scary proposition indeed.
That’s an awesome mental image, SpazCat. Warning: pettiness ahead. She’s putting on a lot of weight since weaning her kid, so she may have added another kid to her stack. HA!
Some people try to get around this by having employees “voluntarily” showing up for “fun activities”, while broadly hinting that anyone who isn’t a team player can kiss promotions or even continued employment bye-bye. And quite often it works.
To my dear coworker that supports that other application that is trying to be rolled you into production: you are a fucking moron. A lazy one, at that.
First, you decided to do no work to build your half of the interface for 2 solid months despite repeated requests from me and my boss for updates, until 3 weeks before production implementation I had to bite the bullet and do all the coding myself. Of course that first pilot crashed and burned, because you are a lazy moron.
Now we go for try number2 at a pilot and everything goes to hell as soon as the system comes up. You didn’t think the system sending 50 alerts for each machine would be a problem? You actually dare to say on the bridge line that you expected it? How about telling somebody else about it you fucking idiot? And don’t think I didn’t catch that you were lying through your teeth when you gave that bullshit explanation why it was happening.
Of course I could step in and manually stop the alerts during roll-out, so it wasn’t a big deal. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it jackass? No, you also somehow neglected to tell anybody that every single machine will send an alert each time it beeps, and that alert is designed, as you well know, to send an email to everybody and their fucking dog. Not only do you pipe up with “oh we saw that during testing,” but then you come up with the brilliant excuse of “Oh I thought we were only going to test the email process once and then shut it down, or did I get confused with another pilot?” Well I know that is a lie as well because just yesterday we spent hours on the phone because that’s when you decided to spring it to our business partners that the thing you said you had fixed last week was actually not fixed. I was explained to you that the problem was the emails going out to everybody, so despite you being terminally lazy and stupid, you knew the emails would go out. We had daily calls for OVER A FUCKING MONTH that clearly explained this. This project has been hell since it started, all because you are a fucking lazy moron.
I’m deeply disturbed by how clear that post was to me, Porcupine. Before I took this most recent job I wouldn’t have been able to parse three words of that.
Well, grandboss showed up this morning, in case anyone’s interested. I had bad timing: was just walking back to my desk from the water dispenser with my glass, and crossed paths with her as she walked in. (That may not sound like any big deal, but when I told my suitemate, she went :eek: so…) Anyway, [del]she glared at me[/del] we made eye contact and I opened my mouth to choke out a quiet “Good morning!” when she walked into her office and shut the door.
Fine. No “good morning” for you.
At least she didn’t slam the door in my face.
In other news, if anyone knows a job opening in east Dallas that pays decently and doesn’t suck as bad as this one …
Today it’s supposed to be about 97 here with maybe about 80% humidity–probably the most uncomfortably hot day since I moved here eight years ago.
And today’s the day TPTB picked to ask us to turn off our AC units for our energy abatement program.
AW, HELL NO!!!
I would go home for the day. I have, when our AC was broken. But then, I live in Houston.
Clearly, you haven’t spent nearly enough time in the corporate world. A depressing percentage of people in management positions are obscenely immature.
Pretty sure that’s still illegal. Of course, good luck reporting it without getting fired.
Welcome to the thread. You’re gonna fit riiiiiiight in here.
I believe the correct response to that request is best expressed with a single raised finger directed at said PTB. I will leave the determination of which finger as an exercise for the reader.