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

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.

I suspect this is happening a lot as we had a classmate work 10+ hours off the clock one week without billing it and I was horrified - I always tell learners in class bill EVERY hour you work because we do not work for free. even one of my (dumb) colleagues was telling learners they could do this.

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.

Could you let your co-workers know this and request more variety in the meeting times? Or, what happens if you miss one of these meetings? Could you send your stuff in advance and then not be there?

I like to propose other meeting times

you should troll and propose the meeting be moved to another month

Unfortunately, due to my role I’m usually last to get added to meetings after they’ve already been scheduled with faculty. Trying to convince six professors to change the time of a meeting after they’ve already agreed to it is usually an exercise in futility.

then it should be understandable to them if you can't make some of these meetings, as you weren't consulted and you have family obligations.

when a manager gets pinged asking for a link to provide backdoor access to a tool, instead of perusing the materials to find it (which would have taken 5 minutes), you send them to....me, when I'm in the process of screensharing and leading a course, so I don't see it until 90 minutes later.

brilliant.

which I said in nicer, yet passive aggressive words

jon – i would probably just mark off 30 minutes in your calendar everyday for taking care of your kid over lunch (hopefully your system is set to notify people you can't make it when a meeting is scheduled over that). it sounds like these people have all decided through indifference that you don't deserve a lunch break anymore (which is bullshit on it's own) - and if they can't understand that parents are all having a hard time right now and you need to see to your child, then you're going to have to make it their responsibility to make some extra time later to tell you what you need to know from the meeting.

for one of our processes, there are two separate 7-day timings. reissuing pension checks requires a 7 business day wait, but if reissuing to a new address, that address has to be on file 7 calendar days first (fraud reasons, etc).

confusing, yes, but....it's been the process a while. so anyway, we're redesigning our training materials, and the third party helping us do it gets this timing correct on the first attempt. inexplicably, one of the subject matter experts, who actually wrote the Best Practice for each 7-day wait period, incorrectly tells them to change the 7 calendar day timing to "7 business days". I piped in that this was wrong, citing the actual Best Practice she wrote, but was ignored, and the wrong info made it into Production.

I got the information fixed, and a day later, someone else submitted a request to change it back to the wrong info. which I just caught before it was done.

OMFG

you don't have to ask a question in every meeting

esp 1 minutes before meeting end

oh this guy is the type that's the first to ask a question the moment "any questions?" is said

my pet hate is when a presenter will take questions during a presentation instead of at the end. especially HR open enrollment meetsing. omg derail CITY.
and when questions get too specific they dont push to handle offline - they’ll just go right on down the rabbit hole

drives me insane

lol yeah, especially when the presentation is about something new rolling out and people are already asking about "what does 10 months from now look like", or you're teaching a basic concept and they don't even understand that yet and are asking advanced questions about unlikely scenarios which create a 20 minute tangent while other people had legit questions to ask.

I used to say "I'd answer that but you don't even understand the basics yet, so how is my answer going to make any sense?" or "so let me parking lot that for you" and....move on

nothing like one hour meetings that get derailed to where the presenter doesn't get to finish and then the dreaded question

"do y'all have hard stops or can you 'stay longer'"

on a conf call with someone who I found out is a Trump donor thanks to that site caek shared.

tempted to ask my first question - "who here supports coups?"

do it.

do it

a couper says what

Hangin' With Mr. Couper

Had a meeting about returning to work in the office today, they'd already gone over how people with health concerns can apply for exceptions to stay home.

Coworker pipes up during the q'time "I have elderly parents and am worried about public transport can I stay home" THAT WAS ALREADY ADDRESSED TAKE IT OFFLINE GEEZ.

so the 'new tool' I referenced we are building, since it's on a third party vendor and no longer proprietary tech of ours, it requires licenses for all users. previously, no 'licenses' were needed, access to the previous tool was automatic.

they had a deal with the vendor for a specific # of licenses. the number of licenses is insufficient for the # of people who need it. entire project put on hold.

after we already moved our training materials in QA and QC to the new format.

lol. this place is hilarious.

Whoopsie doodle

My boss has been out of the country for the last 5 weeks so I had to take sole responsibility for hiring and training 2 new staff for the stores, which I hate bc 1. I don’t want to talk to anybody let alone strangers and 2. I don’t fucking work in the stores so I don’t know shit about the front end of our POS

But fine whatever, I do it and it’s been 2 weeks. One of the new staff, who seemed promising, is already giving off major red flags:
We’re all in a group chat bitching about a customer who tried to throw a one coworker under the bus to another. New staff member - let’s call her G - privately tells another coworker that she thinks it’s “catty” which is just like... wtf you claimed you’ve worked years in CS, bitching is what everyone ever who works in CS does - it’s fucking bonding!!
Again, we’re in a group chat bc there’s some customer issue, we’re trying to figure out who she originally dealt with, coworker E says that from what she can gather from the customer, the original staff member was G. G goes OFF and accuses E of being a liar - in the group chat!!! She eventually sort of apologizes and blanes it on stress caused by unspecified family issues.
Later on I tell that I’m happy she apologized but that she needs to know it’s inappropriate and unacceptable to speak to a coworker that way and WOW she didn’t like my attitude. She claimed she was raised to “defend” herself (except she attacked instead of defending), blamed her personal problems again, and when I told her that personal problems are no excuse for disrespecting coworkers she gave me a lecture about disappointing it is her employer doesn’t care about her.

I can’t wait till my boss gets back bc these two will absolutely not vibe and shit is gonna hit the fan.

ugh ... yeah ... one of my clients does custom products and has a store as well ... and complaining/joking about customers was definite bonding time. ... like the guy who walked in and wanted the front end staffperson to help him make a cactus hoodie, like how to design a cactus hoodie ...it was actually hilarious (because the guy was a jerk and also probably high) and awesome because it then became a brainstorming session about how one would actually go about making a cactus hoodie and why someone would want a cactus hoodie.

really hate when managers want a meeting with me but it's beneath them to set up the conference line so they email me to set it up instead

Lol yes that is bullllshit

oh it wasn't even asked either, it was just like "we would like to have a call tomorrow morning," just implied that they wouldn't be setting it up. i wish i could have replied "OKAY, AND?"

"that's cool. i would like a salad right now myself"

how one would actually go about making a cactus hoodie and why someone would want a cactus hoodie

so how would one make a cactus hoodie though?

asking for a friend

LOL speaking of bitching about customers in group chats, I wrote "ugh i am going to kill harry" (a customer) in what I thought was our direct team-only chat but it was the somewhat wider our team + all the devs and managers craaaap

Thankfully someone just joked "make sure you Jira that" lol. I deleted it p fast.

I did that once years ago where our most toxic member of our team had just loudly boasted "I WORK TWICE AS HARD AS EVERYONE ELSE ON THIS TEAM". I wrote "K@thleen just said she works 'twice as hard as everyone else on the team'", and then accidentally sent it TO HER. I tried to backpedal and say "and I agree with you", only I realized by looking at her desk that she hadn't read it yet, and then a manager pulled her into a meeting and she didn't lock her desk like she was supposed to.

I got up and closed the window. this was Sametime 15 years ago so it didn't save Conversation History and it wasn't setup to send email transcripts to her email, so she didn't see it.

Now if I'm trash talking, I double check!

i wrote a css overlay for slack to make 'safe' chats have a different background colour to shared chats, just as a reminder.

anyway, i'm off for a week so i wrote instructions on how to make a time sensitive change to the worst config file in history and on the jira ticket noted that there was a known problem which is unimportant and pre-existing and to be careful because the config is fragile.

change was applied as requested, and then the team-lead noticed the non-problem and 'fixed' that too, breaking the config and causing other jobs not to process.

Going by my past experiences, your coworkers will then subtly infer that this would not have happened had you not taken time off.

we're redesigning our training and one of the SMEs disagreed with feedback that my colleagues and I had left. She posted her concerns directly below our feedback, which was sure to confuse the developer with conflicting instructions, so I took the discussion offline. We discussed and the head of our dept decided to go with our approach rather than the SMEs.

In retaliation, the SME is now making passive aggressive comments ("you'll need to ask Neanderthal/etc, I disagreed, but they decided not to go with my suggestion, and then she deleted all of her feedback, including feedback not related at all to the content in dispute. so now the developer is asking where that feedback went as they need it for today's deadline.

like, are you 12 years old? jfc.

My immediate team is 4 staff. With the way our work's structured, we've basically divided the work into 4 parts, each about as busy as the other but all diff skillsets. Me and the other gal in the team we can, and do, manage all 4 tasks when we have to ie when someone's away we'll do their bit.

Whenever I or her are away, the other 2 useless men in the team stick to their own part and whinge theyre busy.

2 ppl were away the last 2 days leaving me and Useless Guy to divide the work up. 50 50 right? Makes sense?

So I say "I am doing my usual task A and T*ryns task B, You can do your usual, and Task D". He has the gall to say "I'll see what I can do to help out."

...help out? How are you HEPLING me by NOT DOING YOUR SHARE.

He kept making it sound like he was doing me a favour doing his extra quarter of the work, whinged he was busy, and inevitagbly I had to do the bulk of it because it couldnt just not get done.

So I did 3/4 of the work last 2 days and I am PISS MAD.

there seems to be one of those at every business and yet if you ever call them out for not being productive, they have every excuse in the book, none of which has anything to do with why they couldn't do the work to help.

is there another assignment you can have someone drop into his lap by proxy?

i'm tired of idiot team managers being allowed to add their stupid fucking representatives to training roster up until the Friday afternoon before it begins. rather than instituting a firm cutoff date, which should optimally be a week before.

We base the number of trainers on the size of the class a week before, which proves faulty because between during the Monday - Friday of the week before, the requests that come in Thursday/Friday wind up increasing the roster 150 - 200%. More than half the time, that means we have too few trainers (as the ratio is supposed to be 12:1) and have to go scrambling to find someone last minute, or leave the class short handed. (and in virtual training it's important to have a good ratio due to the increase in the number of tech issues, where there's often multiple that need to be addressed simultaneously).

then a quarter of the time, they wind up msging us the Monday or Tuesday to disenroll these same people, saying "nevermind, they have a conflict this week that I didn't know about". real easy to keep together who's in the class when the 'official roster' is out of date by the time it gets to us (and the dude responsible for keeping it fucks it up half the time).

verbatim exchange I just had. including timestamps, which were visible to the other person while making these statements:

[12:26 PM] GOOBER
how much time do we have I want to take it over but if not enough time to start it I will do it again later.

​[12:26 PM] NEANDERTHAL
about 9 minutes

​[12:27 PM] GOOBER
Ok, I reviewed, I know my mistakes but want to make sure I have time to redo so I will later even if it doesn't count for you guys, for myself.

​[12:36 PM] GOOBER
that was the longest 9 min I could've retested by now.