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

Someone’s already written a book on harnessing the secrets of serial killers to improve your productivity and management skills, right?

meanwhile my next few months are about to be hell, because special temporary assignment that I was supposed to work on from 8/2 - 8/17 was supposed to be the only thing I was working on, and then the doofus in charge of assigning work out decided to throw a full load on top of that assignment.

last summer during our busy season, I mostly had 3-4 new hire classes to supervise at a time, which is actually pretty hefty, but I could manage. I hit 10 next week, 13 the week after, before I finally come back down to 7.

10 is my previous record, and these were all seasonal people pre-pandemic who were in office who require less attention, and half of those were close to completion all ready. for new hire classes, I have to book 5 guest speakers on 3 different days.

instead of taking work off my plate, they just said "tell us what you need next week and we'll help". yes, because delegating is so easy when you're in the weeds.

Someone’s already written a book on harnessing the secrets of serial killers to improve your productivity and management skills, right?

― JoeStork

i think it was called _the art of the deal_

lol

xp - good job!

https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/The-Benefits-of-Psychopathy-for-Business-and-Capitalism

"References

Babiak, P. , Hare, R. (2007). Snakes in suits: when psychopaths go to work. Published New York, Regan Books.

Dutton, K.. (2012). The wisdom of psychopaths: lessons in life from Saints, spies and serial killers. Published London, William Heinemann. "

once again, had to remind my leaders today that I have 14 classes I'm overseeing next week and specifically tell them the 5 that I cannot observe and that they need to help me with.

so I looked at all of my other teammates. Nobody else has more than *7*. some have *1*.

it's based on location but come the fuck on. the guy who assigned me all these only has 5 himself.

however, I'm nothing if not created, so I am cheating to get what I need.

I'm supposed to observe every instructor for 30-60 minutes within teh first week of training so I can give feedback. Well, do the math - that's 30+ people, 15-30 hours. no way I can do that and do my other stuff during core business hours.

so I"m having instructors use the Record feature on MS Teams to record sessions so I can review them any time I feel like it. I'm not supposed to do that but I told them it's either that or it doesn't happen at all.

"Leaders have a lot of eyes on this, so we need to be careful".

I don't care what executive has their hemorrhoids in a twist, they're the ones who made the bad decision to hire 750 people at the same fucking time, knowing we'd only have barely-ready, green instructors available due to the sheer size.

that was the one-liner that used to make me laugh in my old role. oh u think I care that an Executive is mad? that's basically foreplay to me.

I'm ashamed that there was a time in my career here where I was just as callous and unfeeling as these fucks despite 1/100000th of their salary

it finally happened, I basically had to quit monitoring 2-3 of my classes due to the sheer insane volume until help was provided to me (but help couldn't start until today), and sure enough, there was a behavior issue amongst two of my trainers, and now I'm having to address it and speak to why it happened.

told my boss's boss "well, this is what happens when we're so overworked that we don't have time to adequately monitor classes" and requested rather frustratedly that she tell leadership taht basically you're killing us right now.

because I truly don't care how well things go. I only feel bad if my inability to do my job due to this shit causes someone to quit because I wasn't there to see someone doing something that made a learner uncomfortable or gives up and quits to how badly the training is going. but that ain't my fault.

our training course servers go down globally today, mostly because we hired too many people at once and it's overloading the servers. yay, this is me trying to tell 13 classes worth of instructors how to somehow wing training because we have no backup for this now.

the third party system we moved to for several processes outright stopped working for a day because someone uploaded a bulk Excel job with one bad piece of data in it that caused the entire thing to stop working until someone manually fixed it.

you're literally going to hinge a system working on every user following directions appropriately? LOL great, I look forward to this breaking daily.

Old software, btw, actually screened the file first before you uploaded it and refused the upload if it was non-compliant. new software basically lets you upload a virus.

kinda lol but mostly sad

i'm tempted to get a half day by like deliberately uploading a gif of Trump and crashing everything

how about an excel file with a pivot table of Trump gifs?

omg that'd be a whole week off

on it

can you include one with sound efx?

one of him honking the truck horn

i was thinking more of fart sounds, but, y'know ...

would you trade it all in for a place with no calls, ever, and a large room of cubes with 3 other people who barely ever speak? Beyond this room I'm lucky to get a "good morning" returned. Everybody just checked out.

this place gives me the willies and i can't believe i've been here 4 years.. well kind of 2 given all the pandemic interruptions. I hope it hasn't turned me into a huge(r) weirdo. Somehow I've put together 3 job interviews over the next week, a couple even relevant to some schooling I did. wish me luck

2 months and 7 or 8 additional interviews later... one offer, for the highest paying gig of the lot. Was I selling myself short? My resume is a real grab bag of stuff... I have to spin a yarn in every interview I do for how this makes me the best candidate for X work. This job should get me back on track in a field I have worked in before and I'll re-write the resume to be more focused.

Should be a whole new raft of madness, and I imagine I'll be posting here at some point again. But I just wanted to stop in and say

NEVER SURRENDER
ೕ(˃̵ᴗ˂̵ ๑)

Congrats! (I would hire you just based on your ascii skills...)

hey don't get me wrong, my DMs are very open

(*´∀｀)ﾉゞ Thanks.｡.･ﾟ

rolls in 20 mins late for shift. "sorry i'm late i broke a nail opening my bag". not sure what ensued during the 20 mins .

the help i was promised last week never materialized, new stuff breaks every day, and I've given up trying to do my job and am just surfing the net for 15 minutes now until my mood improves.

looking for trump gifs?

oh i done found em.

lmao, IT sent a trainee someone else's monitor. one was named Antoinette, the other was named Annette. last names not at all similar.

manager dryly writes "can you see why IT might have been confused" when we report it.

Yes, I will ask both trainees to apologize to having similar first names. no idea what they were thinking having those names.

we have someone in training who told us he needed to go to part-time DURING training (he was hired full-time) as he's going to college. when his manager asked how that would even work, since that would mean missing half a day of class every day for the next few weeks, he expressed surprise, saying he thought he could work his 8 hours whenever he wanted during the day, instead of, y'know, having to be in the class for 8 hours.

o_O

is he a Sagittarius?

always feel good when one of our hiring managers derisively screams "just get rid of her" in response to a report of someone we hired having chronic connection issues to our VPN, which IT and her ISP are both blaming the other party.

yeah, cos it's her fault, and her being fired won't leave her without money to live off of.

this is btw the same person who eyerolled at me for the payroll issue before relenting as I was about to go to HR.

likewise, IT is getting beat up today due to a poor game of telephone.

"Brenda's got a ticket open, ticket #1234"
*one hour later*
"Brenda's ticket was resolved and closed, she said everything is working now".
*one hour later*
"welp, spoke too soon - it's come back"
'ok, i'll create a new ticket for her and we'll call her'

*they try and call twice, nobody answers the phone*

in another chat room

"Brenda is still having issues, ticket #1234 needs to be looked at, nobody has called her"
'that ticket is closed'
"What? she just opened it, why was it closed"
'IT has got to stop closing Tier 1 tickets prematurely'

they not only didn't, but the person they were helping ignored their calls too.

it feels like larger companies / organizations have the "luxury" of throwing other departments under the bus, so it isn't as personal ... as opposed to the various places I work where it's individuals doing this to other individuals ...

Yesterday:
co-worker: complains about Rhonda blaming him for not having something done that he doesn't remember committing to having done this week
me: ugh, I'm sorry
co-worker: you're lucky you're not on these calls, though that's because Rhonda doesn't like you
me: oh? I didn't know that Rhonda didn't like me. I just figured I was excluded because I don't have a central role in this project and she wants to have fewer people in the meetings
co-worker: oh, maybe. It's okay though if she doesn't like you. She doesn't like Tom either. Or Nate.

On Thursday, all of our folders and files started disappearing rapidly from Dropbox, like - everything just *poof*! I immediately start searching "Dropbox ransomware" and feeling relief that I'm not in charge of IT or data security here. Turns out someone who reports to me wanted to free up disk space on their laptop, not realizing what deleting that Dropbox backup would mean since they were synching....

We got everything back in slightly over 24 hours but so many permissions need reapplied and so much panic.

I sort of hate using Dropbox. A place I freelance for (more specifically one designer I work with there) wants me using the desktop version (it’s my machine, not one they’ve provided) vs the browser version. He seems to think it’s superior - but I don’t want to suddenly have a bunch of disc space vanish because some dork throw a pile of 2 gig files in there, or, worse, accidentally save another clients stuff into the wrong folder and then have the entire team in possession of confidential materials.
He never misses an opportunity to be passive aggressive about it - but he’s largely powerless.

so this morning...

*I get told the class that we were told would run 11:30 - 8:00 pm ET, and had confirmed for weeks, should have been 9:00 - 5:30 pm ET all along, and can I change it.

*One of the people I was given as an instructor says he has no idea about the assignment, I must have wrong person, etc etc, and nobody can confirm if they meant someone else with a similar name.

*Another person that is co-teaching a class which ends in 5 days has PTO 8/30 - 9/1, and her manager told the person who communicated the name to us, but that person didn't tell us the PTO days, so we found out just now. and the trainer didn't tell their co-trainer about the PTO and actually agreed to teach topics on those days she won't even be here.

*One person who we were volunteered for training had to withdraw because they had never seen the technology they'd be training people on (???).

the reason I'm relatively chill about it now is because when I do a relatively mediocre job of keeping things together, everybody will feel bad and give me another reward for 'dealing with their mess' that I can exchange for a gift card to some restaurant.

I like free food.

xpost Thermo, I'd have those same concerns w/ using Dropbox. wouldn't that raise red flags with your company's security team?

weirdly, no. i used to work there full time years ago, and their IT department were the most uptight, annoying obstacles to doing my job (in one instance literally dictating what fonts I could and - more importantly – could not use). i guess maybe with covid they had to be sedated so that they could get some workable solution to thousands of people working remotely. i dunno.
i already got them to buy me a bunch of external storage, if they really want to have a folder on my machine that is shared with everyone, I'm going to make them send me a dedicated computer (and i have very expensive needs)! otherwise, my computer, my rules.

xp Thermo, Neando -- what I tend to do (because I've been in this situation with Dropbox and Google Drive) is just have a separate folder that is more or less a backup (and also contains work in progress that isn't at a point where it would be shared with the group or client) that doesn't sync with the shared folder. Last year, one of my clients had a group member who had shared one folder with a third party, didn't check the permissions on it, and the third party deleted the entire Google Drive, thinking they were just deleting their copy.

there are a ton of common names for our partner employees in India, but everybody has their own email address/company ID, so it's not hard to keep them apart.

Nonetheless, they keep screwing it up. so I was supposed to prepare a learner to teach a class this week. His name was given, and he had three names, and he was the only person listed that way in the system. I wasn't given his ID or email. he immediately said he thought I had the wrong person, and so my first thought was "ok, I've contacted the wrong person".

so I go back and check and during the discussion yesterday, they list his employee ID. I look it up - same person I contacted. so nope, can't be mistaken identity.

but nope, the person who shared the employee ID gave the wrong employee ID. so I get feedback that I contacted the wrong person.

NO FUCKBRAINS, YOU GAVE ME THE WRONG CONTACT INFO. I pushed back pretty hard on this one.

Neando, i’m going to say this in the best way i can:

whenever you feel like you’re able, please quit your job.

it just sounds terrible, and i understand why you’re staying because you’ve written about it, but it also just seems like the organization is inept and that you are dealing with the fallout from that in a way that is negatively impacting yr well-being.

this one's more 'lols' than aggravation or anything, but

there's a blog written by one of our leaders and it says

"What are you doing to prevent another 9/11 attack?"

oh shit, that's MY job now? I thought Matthew was the anti-terrorist coordinator.

(it's actually more talking about the need to follow data privacy rules and be careful about phishing, all things I agree with, but wow, what a hilariously bad title).

Boss wants to "treat" (his word) us to a "nice lunch and warehouse tour" from one of our vendors in a few weeks, although this is clearly mandatory.

The warehouse is 2.5 hours from my house, I will need to leave earlier and arrive home later than I would for a normal workday and spend 5 hours of my Friday sitting in traffic.

Some treat.

you're....billing this, right?

cos fuck, that should be 5 hours plus any other hours you work that day.

I mean, with the travel time it'll end up literally all I do that day, so hard to argue that I'll spend *extra* time that day (unless traffic is really bad). But really annoyed that I have to spend that much time in traffic for mandatory "fun".

expense your gas and any wear and tear

and ofc it's completely inaccessible by public transportation

will be doing exactly that for sure, Moodles