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

I got an assignment to do a page for an online collection, yay.

However, someone at the library asked me to put together examples of my design work for a staff exhibit.

I balked - I am too busy to assemble this bullshit on short notice. The This is the second fucking job where mgmt has demanded off the books personal contributions. Not to mention the fact that I had an arm injury, Im in physical therapy, and it's just depressing to revisit my old work right now.

I hope I find something new soon.

Disco, do you get shit dumped on you and told its a "compliment" because you know what you're doing? And find there is no one around to help you?

Happens ALL THE TIME.

when you announce a new process last September, but as of yet you still haven't documented the process in our SOPs, and you continue to insist we should be using this new process, but as of right now, the only documentation of said process is an email from last September that is missing details and occasional word-of-mouth mention in meetings, I will ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. especially when I pointed out the lack of transparency back in October.

I have a coworker who is such a grumbling, miserable troll with an all-encompassing hatred of change and new technology, that if someone pitched her as character for The Office they would get laughed out of the writer's room for her being too unbelievable.

Anyway, back in 2019 we finally convinced her to let us dispose of the old fax machine that had sat in our copy room, unplugged and gathering dust for at least a decade as I was told. Walked in the office yesterday to overhear her on the phone with purchasing trying to get permission to buy a new fax machine because, "you know some of us don't think scanning works right and I just don't trust it, these people who complain about fax machines are just dumb kids that never used them and don't know how much better they are". All of this despite several of us, repeatedly, showing her how our copier can be used to fax things if she found it absolutely necessary.

I'd hate to see her apartment.

So would I, considering the state of her workstation alone.

This is the same co-worker who wanted to share the slides from a virtual meeting with us and did so by taking photos of each of the slides with her phone, emailed each photo to herself in individual emails, then printed each of the emails, then scanned them in to convert them to PDF and emailed them each to us. Individually.

I wish I could be making this up.

omg

lol old school fax machines are riskier from a security standpoint because people leave confidential documents at them all of the time.

xpost omfg dying at the taking pics of the slides with phone

Know who still uses FAX machines? The IRS.

xxxp that's outstanding

"why are the slides all crooked?"

'sorry, I thought this class wasn't going to all be members of Big Photocopy, this presentation is over"

a new hire lost her father in December. I wanted to make sure she got to take bereavement time AND keep the job, so I worked with leadership to create a plan that she could rejoin after bereavement and get caught up on everything she missed. I also secured a trainer to lead a one-on-one training session for our phone systems scheduled for her on the 22nd. everything was going fine.

this afternoon, one of our other leaders comes in, says starting Tuesday she'll move to the next phase of training, despite her being nowhere closed to finished (there's still 4+ days of prerequisite material she hasn't learned). it's like telling someone they begin training with the varsity basketball team next week when they haven't even finished learning the rules of the game yet.

she also says "hey Neanderthal's special phone training is on 1/22 but we can move that no problem if need be". nevermind the person leading it might not be available another day.

i was calm in my response but...pretty damn heated.

"so, don't name this new Class after the file format, ie GifHandler, because that's not important and we may have other methods later that used the same file format for a different thing, name it after what we use the contents for."

PR is raised, new method: GraphicsInformationFormatHandler

I'm out tomorrow and Friday. this has been on the Tracking spreadsheet AND my boss's calendar since November, and I sent my entire team a reminder today.

my boss is out from 9 - 11 tomorrow and he puts on his out of office message and lists me as the sole contact for three things, then left for the day. really hoping someone tries to msg me during those two hours tomorrow so he gets called out on it (which...wouldn't be the first time)

Use a payphone and a disguised voice to leave 6 increasingly panicked messages for him.

"mein name ist...Karl Magnite. I vas looking for sur colleeg and hees not here."

I have a 401k loan that I need to pay off so I can take another one. hate to, but it's necessary in my circumstance. this is a fairly easy process - you request an invoice, it gives you three different payoff dates to choose from, and your payroll deductions for the loan continue until paid off, in case you change your mind. So the payoff amounts are supposed to decrease for each payoff date, reflecting those deductions.

I requested mine, and my payoff amounts went up for each payoff date. This is usually something you'd see with someone on an unpaid leave, so, obviously a mistake. I actually administered this process for 401(k) clients at my company for 7 years, so I did some sleuthing and seemed to have figured it out - back in 2022, someone accidentally changed my job code in the system, and as a result, they had to issue my paycheck off-cycle, so there was a delay in reporting the payroll deduction, which must have reamortized the loan.

so I put all of this detail in the ticket, with screenshots and old paystubs. they assign the case to the wrong team, ignore me when I point this out to them, let the ticket sit for a week and a half, and then closed it saying "we can't figure it out, just pay the extra amount and we'll refund any overage to you".

Nevermind the fact that I'm not going to just pay more than I owe by like $250 only to have to wait several weeks to get it back, there's the possibility that the processing of the payoff might be delayed, and there's already a 16-day wait period before I can take a new loan....this is 5k we're talking about here, I can't be out of pocket that much money for more than the three weeks I'm already committed to.

so now I have to re-open the ticket. if it wasn't against the code of conduct I"d ask for them to give me access to my own account and I'd fix it in five minutes.

I wouldn't trust them to give me a refund of the overage if they're that screwed up on the loan.

yeah I mean that's the other thing!

the refund process is an automated one, but if the system seems me as inactive, it's charging me interest on what it sees as a 'missed payment' which I don't actually owe, so the refund calc might be wrong too!

12 developers in a two hour meeting about sizing tickets like we haven't been sizing tickets for four years already. New manager obviously thinks we're doing it wrong and that arranging fruits by complexity and guessing the area of France will somehow help.

Cool cool cool, what our department with crushingly low morale across the board definitely needed was the new boss dropping the word "restructuring" in reference to our department multiple times in different meetings over the last three weeks while refusing to add any context, answer questions about it or clarify anything. That makes people feel super good and motivated buddy, yes indeed.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

The meetings will continue until morale improves.

One of the companies I work for just hired a new VP instead of promoting my boss into that position (which everybody, including her, more or less expected), so now we're all waiting to see what the repercussions will be. She's definitely not happy about not getting promoted, but her work persona is "super smiley LDS mom," so kinda curious whether the facade will crack.

had to file an HR complaint about the aforementioned 401k ticket that's been unresolved for almost 3 weeks. on my own company's service center. lol....so great that we invest all of our energy into our client's service centers and neglect the one for our own employees

So Friday morning (1/26), I, along with two other coworkers, I get an email from my newish manager with a really heavy lift for gathering a bunch of information. Not difficult, but tedious, time-consuming and a lot of effort to pull things from various sources, including digging into physical archives to pull things out. The due date is tomorrow, 1/31. The request came to him on 1/9. So it sat in his inbox for two and a half weeks before being shared and now it's an emergency.

On top of that, of the other two people he tasked with this one is working from home due to surgery recovery for another month, so they can be of some help but obviously very limited help in digging through physical files. The other one had been out sick since last week Wednesday and is still sick, as of today. So it's all on me.

I explained to him the challenges and how big of an ask this is in such a short time and he was unapologetic and actually kind of annoyed that I was even bringing it up to him (despite his email explicitly stating, "let me know if there are any challenges in meeting this deadline") and told me to "work the weekend if necessary". Which, just isn't the culture here. At all. There has never been an overtime expectation, in fact our old boss was famous for "we aren't curing cancer, go home" to anyone working after 5. This new guy comes from an entirely different culture (in fact the same one I came to this job specifically to escape) and seems to want to force that on us.

Idk, basically just venting here, but I'm having a hard time with how to address this. The sitting on it for 2.5 weeks thing really gets to me, meaning either a) he did it intentionally for some sort of weird "loyalty" or "stress" test or, b) he is that clueless and doesn't pay any attention. Both are concerning.

from my experience, it's almost always B. dude got the request on 1/9, slept on it, got a reminder from someone higher up who basically said "what's the status", and he freaked out because he forgot about it and is now putting the pressure on you.

saying "work the weekend if necessary" is such a bullshit 'fuck you'. is there HR you can speak to? I know that's an escalation a lot of people don't want to do because even though you're protected from retaliation, we know people disguise retaliation as "concerns with performance", but....I think you have a valid right here, and if there's no expectation in your role requirements of overtime, or at least, not an expectation that you have to give up your weekend at a moment's notice, and with the late notice of the request....I think you have a valid case.

Yeah, I've been weighing that. The whole thing has just been annoying, like this is a case where an apology about the short notice would go along way, instead he just doubles down on the "just get it done" attitude. Also, he was well aware that the two other people he tasked with this weren't around... that part sticks in my craw too.

Fuck that guy. I wouldn't go to HR, I would just start working on the project at what I considered a reasonable pace, and every time he asked what was up I would just say, "Yeah, I'm working on it, I should have something for you soon." No timeline, no nothing. Eventually deliver, of course, but not until it's done properly. And if someone higher up than your immediate manager gets involved, explain the situation to them.

now have a meeting scheduled w/ HR tomorrow morning to discuss my concerns w/ the service center who still hasn't resolved my 401k issue 3 weeks going.

19 years, my first ever convo with HR. not looking forward to it because I'm pessimistic it will do anything but I have to at least try.

wrapping up my training preparation and got access to one of the client's HW recordkeeping systems to get familiar with it. this client, mind you, is already live, with agents taking calls.

I look at the panel the agents use to provide customers the overall premiums for their benefits, which the header says are Monthly totals. I go into the behind the scenes GUI panel that supplies this data, and it shows the customer is paid bi-weekly. I do more digging and find out everyone at this company is paid bi-weekly.

so I go to compare the numbers, to see if the field that says Monthly is just the bi-weekly premiums recalculated to a monthly total. Nope. They're the same amount. So agents are probably telling customers "this is your monthly deduction" when the deduction is actually "per pay period", making it significantly higher.

this client's been live for years. how in the f-

i'm being submitted for a potential financial reward for this project. I think part of the reason is my boss's boss feels for me with having to deal with

1) Being asked to build activities that learners will use their tools to perform
2) the tools were going through a redesign that occurred last week, meaning I only had the old version to work from during development
3) The agents have a filtering feature that I STILL haven't fucking seen, and training begins tomorrow. so everything I created is hinging on a feature working the way I think it does in my head, which it probably doesn't.

no wonder I can phone it in and still get rewarded, people are so dumb here that merely treading water is good enough

I mean, Office Space could have been a documentary.

no wonder I can phone it in and still get rewarded, people are so dumb here that merely treading water is good enough

If I do like two concrete things a day (and answering an email or showing up for a Zoom meeting count as things), that's a productive day. I genuinely feel like a thief sometimes at the end of the week when I file my timesheet, but I just tell myself I'm on call, like a fireman.

lol just got told by the person in charge that they're not done, won't be done today (as they repeatedly promised), and told me i can only use one of the five clients' tools for most of the week of training. my entire training was built on using all five.

no warning prior that they were running behind or not going to meet deadline, in fact on Thursday morning, anticipated a Friday completion date, then weirdly stopped responding to everybody until 5 minutes ago.

99% chance the live date is now in jeopardy. I'm laughing at this point. esp since we had the chance to move the live date already, which would have bumped training back 9 days, and I was basically the only one who wanted to do it, so it was voted down.

just work as a developer trainer for microsoft.

one guy showed up years ago, had never seen the slides before he arrived, and the slides were for the wrong version of the product. I had one question about populating a certain type of grid on screen and refreshing it, asking whether there was a way to make sure it wouldn't leak memory and slow down until it'd crash, and his answer was "no, it just does that"

LOL well at least he's honest haha.

lol i'm so glad i'm an expert bullshitter. somehow pulled off 4 hours of training this morning despite having little to no time to prepare with the new tool, and boss's boss is nominating me for a special bonus now.

(I won't get it because only techy folks do but still nice to be recognized).

so class is going well, but the team that I mentioned above that left us without functional tools continues to dick us around.

we are halfway through training, and the setup for all 4 client tools was only finished this morning, almost an entire week after it was promised. It has caused frequent problems during our training that my partner and I have had to adapt to on the fly.

the reason they didn't finish? Instead of setting up just the 4 clients going live in February, they set up those PLUS the three going live in April, and inexplicably prioritized two of the April clients over February. When they were asked why by an extremely frustrated leader, they claimed they "didn't know the live dates", even though they've been attending weekly meetings since November, where we routinely go over the agenda document top to bottom, which has the live dates listed in a table at the very top.

then, two of the clients weren't working properly for half the class, so one of the idiots on this team removed access to the training environment in a weird attempt to fix everything, so when they came back from lunch, nobody could access the tool at all.

lol....clown show.

This sounds odd but I know I won’t be able to find the answer without some serious searching, but what exactly do you do again, Neando? Legit curious, I can sort of describe it in my head (lead education trainings for call center workers or IT help desk people?) but have no idea whether I am otm or not.

You pretty much got it.

This time around I'm teaching people how to process life event coverage changes for health benefits and handle the phone calls and such.

Cool, thanks for answering!!

Grade 3 class today. 1) a seven-page dayplan, including notes, which links to a 2) Powerpoint with 100 slides (obviously not all for today, but I do get to wade through in search of the ones I need), and 3) a list of six things to do during my last-period planning, headed by a note to "Please complete in the order that I’ve listed them."

#1 priority today: don't get all six things done, and do them in random order.

boss: deadline, deadline, deadline. we can postpone your holidays until after the deadline if need be.

but also

boss: let's drag 14 people into a meeting to talk about "the anchors that weigh us down" and "the winds that move us forward" for an hour

oh god, that sounds like complete hell.

also fuck postponing holidays

welp...new project goes live today. found out that for all four clients, they changed call center security protocols as per a company-wide initiative last year, but not one of them updated their agent reference materials, which all have outdated info.

this is shit that could get someone fired for violating it...and the info is wrong. so now spending my morning having to put together a long email to basically say "you must update this immediately and you cannot hold anybody accountable for making a mistake while the info was wrong"

(the holiday thing is more that the holiday year runs April - March and you can only take 5 over but that means everybody uses up any excess in March, which is going to impact the work. i have 18 days to take... postponing would allow me to take more over, and not lose them)