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

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)

ahh gotcha. as long as you don't lose any days.

email sent. not looking forward to 45 email clusterfuck that's coming.

but rather figure this out now than 3 months from now, with my company's legal counsel involved.

well, the opposite has happened, nobody has responded or even acknowledged even to indicate they're going to look into it.

guessing maybe it's due to how many other things I've reported recently, that they're reacting "oh hey look it's chicken little again, delete", like it's some nitpicky thing and not something that could wind up causing us to violate the terms of our client agreements or get innocent people terminated. i didn't seek out to report this either, just discovered the issue this morning while trying to answer a question for an agent, and if it were a stupid pedantic thing, I could pretend I didn't see it, but it's not.

sigh.

One more thing from that dayplan above: "Mark math time sheets that students did today. Put a small box beside a wrong answer so I can get the students to correct it the next day."

1) I marked and discussed them as they brought them up, so need to. 2) Give me a fucking break!

Tiny victory: I avoided the most onerous task on her checklist, #5, and skipped to #6. Class turned out to be great. Even played the "Bizarre Love Triangle" video for them on Peter Hook's birthday--they were very amused by the falling bodies.

lol gotta love people who want to micromanage even when they're NOT there

I kind of lost my shit at work today because someone actually got accused of violating security, and when I investigated, as I knew could happen, the tools they were working from were incorrect. basically, the team's policy had changed to where the customer had to be on the phone to provide information, but the materials that agents use still indicated anybody could call on customer's behalf.

so I had to spend an hour writing a detailed email that stated that the rep should not be held accountable and that no action should be taken against them as a result.

Likewise, another team has the wrong transfer extensions written in their materials....from an old telephony system that doesn't exist anymore. so nobody could figure out how to transfer the call.

it's just absurd that they're basically shitting on a plate and getting mad we can't make salisbury steak

Senor practice manager, trying to get me in trouble, to other manager: "I'm concerned over what was taught. we don't use the term 'XXX' on this team, so I don't know where that came from. also, was 'YYY" taught? I dont' see any reference to it"

me: "the term 'XXX' appears all over your materials, your employee website, and the GUI system that houses account data. in fact, YYY is literally an abbreviation for the term XXX. do you know your own client? here are screenshots"

i really like the idea of you calling some doofus “Señor Practice Manager” lol

you want to know exactly when i'm going to take my holidays when my holidays will consist of me sitting on the sofa and watching tv? i have zero plans but you insist on making me plan.

tempted to take the two 'face-2-face' days off, the days when you want us all back in the office. plus all the other days where you've arranged pointless meetings.

(booking holidays was so much easier when i had gf overseas, those medical appointments in an hospital an hour away or when there was snowboarding on the tv)

he's now suggesting dates to me, such idiocy as mon, tue and fri of the same week, and the entire week following three days i've already booked (12 days in a row = far too long). also, good friday...

he's now on his third iteration

I like when I took the afternoon off to go to a baseball game and the boss' boss threw a fit when she saw me walking down the street afterward.

I TOOK THE AFTERNOON OFF. I CLEARED IT WITH MY SUPERVISOR.

Not like I played hooky to watch a game. I was like "enough of this orwellian shit."

did they lose their shit to your face or did you hear about it the next way?

bosses being incredulous that people occasionally spend this time on this Earth doing something enjoyable rather than being a glorified rusty gear, always the worst

I was in a meeting last week in which multiple supervisors used the phrase “work smarter not harder.”

Neanderthal, to my face. She glowered at me and said "what are you doing out here"?

She's not my direct boss and couldn't do much about it. He signed off on it.

"whatever I goddamn like, that's what I'm doing"

my management encourages me to take my paid time off, and now encourages me to do it regularly because the shit was hitting the fan in november, our pto expires at the end of the year, and after the first week of december I was like “whoops gotta use my pto, see you in january!!”

I was in a meeting last week in which multiple supervisors used the phrase “work smarter not harder.”

When is the arraignment?

the holiday thing is the same here. holiday year ends at end of march so it gets quiet towards the end as people use up their spare days. everyone knows this. but this year they've gone and agreed deadlines for early april. (tbf there are external factors, like national events)

but if you're 100% busy during the rest of the year there's no good time to take holiday. i had a week for my birthday and a week for Christmas (and didn't really enjoy either). i struggle with weekends, even.