Let's bitch about our stupid, annoying co-workers

I learned when I was a manager that when designing systems to be used by other workers, what made them good systems, was having input from the workers that they would actually use them and the new systems would be an improvement

or as the writers of process would call it, user-centered design

Otm

Every branch is going to have idiosyncratic methods and store-specific actions etc. I can see why they might think it helps to standardise processes. The problem is that the standard they've used is not a standard that anyone can or would work with. As you say, no user-centred design!

Soo...IT is tired of getting tickets regarding VoIP phone config. They gave us a troubleshooting guide and told us to use it and stop sending people to them.

The thing is tiny and addresses precisely ONE problem, one that isn't any of the three most frequently reported issues.

and the solution is literally "make sure they typed their login right, have them reinstall the program" for that one issue.

Turns out the most common issue can't be solved by anybody BUT IT - and they've been blaming us for not doing our jobs as the reason for the uptick. Sent them 10 tickets today after i found that out.

if IT is tired of tickets they should make it so the problems stop happening

Also, there are always going to be instances and workers that don't mesh well with whatever system you have to do any given thing ... and any good system has to have a plan in place for dealing with those, what I call "The Mikey Problem" so named because of a former co-worker who would never turn in his timesheet on time and things would always be slightly inaccurate

here watch my talk

hahahah your slides are cool! ... I had no idea you could get a ".fyi"

they've been rolling out new TLDs as a moneymaking scheme for ICANN for some years now.

https://haha.business

basically enterprise software is good when it centralizes drudgery for the drudgery experts to deal with and bad when it piles on new drudgery for edge workers to cope with

I know so little about this stuff -- like, I isolated the world of Capitalist tech and all its jargon from my brain, in the way you suggest a programmer isolates the annoying parts of code that would be a pain to edit or delete -- now, I'm like -- this is fascinating, but probably because I have blocked it out for like, decades.

like the systems I have "designed" are like ... how to operate an arts space effectively and efficiently and on a shoestring budget, or, how to accurately account for money in a chaotic small business or non-profit

how to organize a large number of small objects so that nothing gets lost or damaged ... dumb stuff basically

Programming is the same cognitive task as those examples really, programming is only harder because everything is completely imaginary and capable of taking on an infinite variety of forms in service of the same end

The small objects are Data and the organization system is Business Rules.

In my current line of work, (one of them at least), I can see how this logic (that of your presentation) plays out in code regulating buildings and physical space ... some of it is actually contradictory, and the more that gets written and put in different places, the more time consuming and annoying it is to revise / analyze with the goal of revision

my current "annoying co-worker" was previously a systems engineer/programmer and the way you explain stuff here, helps me understand the way he thinks a lot

hah

he looks at me funny when I print out things and make notes on actual pieces of paper and compare the data/notes on paper to the data on the screen

this is a guy that OCR's all the PDF's

I’m writing some thoughts down on paper as we speak so we’re not all like that

I don't doubt it. This guy is just "difficult" ... like, a half dozen people who at one point have worked with him will either apologize on his behalf that he is so annoying, or express surprise that I have not quit out of frustration yet.

I don't doubt it. This guy is just "difficult" ... like, a half dozen people who at one point have worked with him will either apologize on his behalf that he is so annoying, or express surprise that I have not quit out of frustration yet.

I had to get two people to download something that IT forgot to install on her machine. Pulled first aside, used MS Teams to call her, had her share screen, took control - like, 2 minutes tops. I've done this throughout the last two weeks - every time, it goes off without a hitch.

Other person, who is never paying attention and seems like computers are alien to her, she shares her screen, I click to Request Control, and I can see on her screen that the option to Allow me control has popped up. she keeps letting it expire, insisting she can't see it, even as I tell her exactly where it is on her screen. aafter TEN MINUTES, I gave up, fairly angry, as it was clear she was not going to get it.

I could never do IT support. hats off to those who do.

11 days into training, after showing them multiple times how to email and how to check calendar in Outlook, and after actually sending them invites to MS Teams meetings for almost two weeks and having them accept and join these meetings, once again 10% of the class freaked out when their manager sent them invites to a touchbase today, because they couldn't 'find' the invite. they accept the invite in email and then complain it 'disappeared from their email', or it's not on their calendar because they never accepted it via email.

I know Outlook isn't the easiest but you were using it just fine two days ago!

one just emailed us to let us know Teams and Outlook wasn't working for them, two minutes after msging my partner on Teams, and the email went through which means Outlook was obv working

I can’t figure out who the people you training are. Are these people employed somewhere getting upgraded skills? Seniors with their first computer? Ho-ly cow I consider myself a patient computer trainer (I’m a dev) but this stuff seems like such a trial...

they're people ranging from early 20s - 60s, who are going to be using computers all day every day to take calls for benefits-related customers (health, pension, 401k). technical skills is supposed to be a pre-requisite for hire, and the last class I taught, they were very sharp, but this one....I'm kind of afraid for some of them.

I actually had to pass a WINDOWS 95 test when I got hired (and it was 2004, so it made little sense).

Hah, awesome! Fair. Some of my senior coworkers who are devs also go through moments where I’m describing something I can see on the screen they’re sharing and it’s clear they can’t see it in the slightest. So frustrating.

we will be seniors some day (presumably) ... so ....

my co-workers are all older than me -- two by only a couple years (both used to work in tech), the other two are in their 60s (at least) and they occasionally have old people computer problems like "I can't see the button ... maybe I have it zoomed in too far?"

ffm, I hear that. I feel like I have done that to peers and it comes down to whether you have had to design user interfaces, because you spot things quicker

my developer coworkers had problems with Microsoft Teams because the UI genuinely is bad, there is one part in the sharing bit where you can pick a document to share, but the text is the same as the descriptive text in the same area and it doesn’t seem like an action button or link? like, you should not have “Files” as a description and “Pick file” look identical

so my branch is confirmed as closing down. This means all of us and not just myself are getting made redundant. We do not have a timescale or action plan yet - which is fair enough, given the unpredictability of how the UK Gov't are rolling out lockdowns.

But I didn't find out through a phone call with my boss or even an email. I found out because Head Office posted an announcement on Yammer and I got a notification on my phone about a large comment thread underneath it. I had to phone my own manager to ask if she had seen the news. She had only been told ten mins before the announcement was made on Yammer and had been explicitly asked not to tell us just yet as without a timeline etc it would have caused more questions than answers. Apparently the post went up before every affected branch manager had even been told, not to mention the staff working in the stores who it also affects. A logistical nightmare - imagine if your pal who works in another branch heard you were losing your job before you did and texted to ask if you were ok and that's how you found out?

jesus that is shorty and a super weird thing to post on yammer in a hurry or otherwise!
I’m sorry boxedjoy

Shitty* 🙃

people that ask you for a status update on a deliverable when said deliverable is actually being held up by them not finishing a task.

this happens to me regularly and I spend quality time inventing dialog for what I could say to them, and what the fictional version of me in the tv show / movie / play would say to them.

😳

my issue is every response I come up with sounds sarcastic.

"it looks like in the thread below, you're being asked to do X. Do you see that?"

the other thing is we're training people on that aforementioned "new tool" next week, and nobody thought about access requests. and it turns out users aren't being granted automatic access to it since it's new and not widely available yet, so we have to grant each trainee individually. not a huge time suck, but would have been a big disaster for next week.

also I'm one of two people who knows how to do this so I'll probably have to do it for all classes next week :/

i swear we try to make everything as difficult as possible

I consider myself very lucky to not really have co-workers. That said, I do have clients who do things like send me a 200-page manuscript to be line edited that's formatted as a single 200-page, 75,000-word sentence (and before you ask, no, it's not avant-garde experimental fiction, just some barely literate maniac who doesn't know how written English works).

Armond White?

my issue is every response I come up with sounds sarcastic.

oh yes! That is the joy of it. You can both be sarcastic and have righteousness on your side.

Man, this is more of a recent, COVID era development, but my workplace has become absolutely obsessed with lunch time meetings. 95% of the meetings on my calendar for the next month are scheduled between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., with over half of them straight up for the 12-1 hour. It's obnoxious for me, personally, because this means I'm almost always overlapping with my son's break from remote learning. So either I'm scrambling to make his lunch or having to completely ignore him during the one break for him where I'm sure he'd appreciate some non screen human interaction.

I've had like no meetings scheduled on the noon hour this whole time, tho there is one tomorrow at noon (with regrets from the person who set the schedule). 11am I figure has to be fair game, considering nobody really wants to meet before 10 anyway.

the early-start people start even earlier under wfh conditions it seems like, I have one colleague who I think is on 5a-2p

I mean, my inbox starts filling between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. with the early rising contractor types and doesn't really taper off until 10 or 11 p.m., which is usually when the IT types check in.

I mean, I don't mind the occasional lunch hour meeting, but I've had one every day this week. Was looking forward to Friday since I had a break from it but, nope, meeting request for 12-1 Friday just came in. smh

so yesterday one of the learners missed a few hours due to a technical issue and I gave them what they missed to make up later. they were willing to stay late, but naturally, that's overtime. so they ask their manager if they can make up the material off hours (meaning "can I work overtime to do it?") - I had asked her to do so because it's not my call.

Manager literally tells her she can either make it up during regular work hours (how? she's in training all day) or that she can make it up outside of work hours "off the clock".

report this to my dept lead, who....doesn't respond or care. so I'm going to HR now to report this.