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Renegret posted:It's supposed to be buried in a lot of places, but that doesn't stop idiots with a backhoe. Never underestimate the ability of a redneck with a backhoe to find your fibre. It's like a dowsing rod.
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Apr 4, 2016 18:20
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Apr 4, 2016 18:20
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Khisanth Magus posted:Hahaha, "work/life" balance? In an IT related field in the US? You should be willing and able to work whatever your superior thinks you should work, with no notice and with no compensation. Wow. Really? I'd say it depends on the company. I'm IT field in the US. "Why weren't you in that meeting, flosofl?" "After work hours, and I'm not the on-call" "Did you have off-hours marked in your calendar?" "yep" "Oh, OK. I'll let them know they have no room to bitch about the fact they can't use the schedule feature" Semi-related, there was a group of some network guys that all took a walk, because their asshat manager pulled this poo poo of "you need to be available whenever I say." Manager was fired, and clarification was sent down that it was unacceptable to demand personnel be "on-call" 24/7/365. It really helps that upper management is mostly made up of engineers and other technical people, and direct managers are mostly the same. Don't get me wrong, there's still poo poo that I can't stand and infuriate me about the way things are run here. But so far I still like more stuff about the job than I don't.
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Apr 4, 2016 18:21
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I just left Florida because gently caress that state and went to Massachusetts. My last job there was 'IT'/logistics. It was a small sports clothing manufacturer that made clothing for either small start ups and a couple bigger (Adidas/reebok) that needed small runs of say 25-50k polos for special events that their primary factories wouldn't touch because of the small quantities. He was an rear end in a top hat but the non-IT part of my job was making sure factories in the Far East weren't child labor sweatshops, do surprise inspections (Never buy Nike they don't give a poo poo as long as it's cheap, Adidas/reebok will send their own inspectors and fail a factory if a more than 5 step stairwell doesn't have a handrail) so at least not a scummy rear end in a top hat. When I got there 6 years ago their set up was: A cracked windows 2000 server I had temporarily installed as a contractor in 98 because Sage then required it's database on a server OS, of course he never bought a real license. Still backing up to DAT drives that took 11 hours. For the 6 designers $300 slimline Dell POS's using onboard video cards. Running 7 home so 3 whole GBS to share with the onboard video. All running a cracked copy of Adobe CS4. That had a Trojan dropper. This company ran on Excel. For everything. PO to a factory? Excel. Printed then copied onto paper with the photocopied letterhead the scanned and emailed. PO from a vendor, even a PDF? Entered into an excel sheet then hand entered into Sage Businessworks. Our VPN's?, separate excel sheet per customer PO. If we used our GS1 for smaller companies UPC's? Excel sheets. He did write a little sheet that calculated the check digits but they would have to manually enter each one since he didn't even concatenate the whole number so you could copy/paste the cell. Customer SKU's, one sheet per vendor PO. Finding any of this info required navigating a directory tree on the server that could go 20 levels deep and God help you if you missed one and reused a VPN/UPC. The way to find if say if a UPC had been used was to search the shared UNINDEXED server folder. He was so anal he had every single PST file saved since the start of his company, each time he got close to the current office outlook version limit the current became archiveX+1, archiveX removed from outlook and saved on his non backed up PC and made a new pst. He was at archive 27 when I left. He kept track of sales on a spreadsheet that was up to 27,000 rows going back to when he started. He at least wasn't completely cheap, when I got hired they were about to move and gave me a decent budget to upgrade well, everything. Built a licensed 2010 R2 server, built all new PC's with the designers PC's designed around illustrator (I swear I could have slept with two of them they were so happy), replaced his web of 5 4 port linksys switches with an actual gigabit switch. Also when I found out AFTER I wired the office that the city of Boca Raton requires lan cables to be plenum coated. So rewired then the loving fire inspector comes back again to tell me lan cable can't touch anything, not even water pipes so had to lift them all and lost 10 feet of the 15ish slack in the server room. The old lan cable I re-used for the phone system (A 1990 Merlin system), that could touch anything, only lan had to be lifted plenum  Shiny new server finally indexed, mirrored system drive and raid5 for data so their downtime vanished, nightly backups to an external drive to keep an offsite copy, his PST's included. Designers PCs that could open an illustrator file in seconds rather then literally minutes. Full legal copies of 7 pro and office 2010. Then the brick walls start. Moved email in house to IMAP. No like. Move it back to POP. Also VP of sales refuses to replace his original blackberry Q10 which getting his email set up over the phone was like trying to teach a caveman how to drive I just gave up. Boss has his emails going to his home, phone and work and has work remove them from the server. Therefore it can't be IMAP. Ok whatever. At least I got to put in a quarantine filter to drop spam from 100 a day to 2 or 3. Had me blacklist every country outside of North America and the Far East, when some new clients emails wouldn't come through he flipped his poo poo, took me 3 minutes to find out their email server was in France. Still can't unblacklist Europe because spam might go up. Set up SQL lite, combined one smaller vendors data (VPN's, SKU's, UPC's, etc) into one easily searchable system with access. It's not excel, too hard to learn. Plus now with an indexed data folder searching is so fast! As long as you search for the right thing. Also made a unified UPC database they could enter the vendor, VPN, SKU, color/description/size have it generate new UPCs and export to their beloved excel sheets. Too hard. Every now and then his OCD would kick in and he'd go on a cleaning rampage in the storage room. Had a PC that blew a drive so while reinstalling everything I look for my motherboard box that had every single license key and a bootable 7 ISO thumb drive in it on the supply shelf. He had thrown it away because he didn't know what it was. He also threw away all the bulbs for the color check lightbox the designers had been begging for (another missed office sex opportunity) because they didn't look like the ones in the ceiling. What finally got me to say gently caress it was for factories that couldn't make their own UPC stickers I had gotten a small thermal UPC printer since the shop they used in Miami decided to stop doing UPCs and focus on their motorcycle shop (I have no clue) and since stickers were always "Send them today!!!" We couldn't use Avery or anything. By January this year I had printed 997,000 UPC price stickers, UCC shipping labels, MID labels whatever. In one afternoon of "holy poo poo this factory in Laos needs stickers NOW" I hosed up 650 price stickers. Out of 27,000. Cost him ~$300 to have the California warehouse re ticket them so I got read the riot act and told him to go gently caress himself. Some new wireless Wacom tablets came in soon after, when you open the box there's essentially a pieces a paper that's just "HOLY poo poo UNINSTALL THE OLD DRIVERS BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING" since a I was now incompetent he installed them. Without removing the old drivers. Gee, wonder why they don't work. He hired two consultants to go over my now obvious terrible work. One wanted to hire me. The list of issues included "C drive on server only 100gb, could be bigger". It's only got the OS and space for updates?? "SSD's not partitioned right." Because illustrator for God knows what reason likes a separate drive for its scratch file so they all had 246g for the system and 10 for illustrator dipshit. "Server has two virus scanners and could impact performance". Windows defender and the built in one in the quarantine manager that scanned incoming mail. On the four server cores I never saw any two pass 30%. The second said I could have gotten quad cores for the designers instead of the fastest duals I could get till I had to show him Adobe CC Illustrator (and only illustrator) will only use a single core period. Oh. So now since these guys want $200 minimum and take a day to show up for service calls and nobody knows how to update the excel sheet (of course) I wrote to convert EDI documents to a txt file that can be uploaded to Sage and three dozen other things I'm now getting $50/hour about 10-15 hours a week to do his IT via RDP into my old PC. Made $100 last week checking the UPC stickers a factory made. 100% contained errors. Guess those 650 don't look so bad now rear end in a top hat. He also hasn't taken a backup offsite since I left. He doesn't want to at least do cloud backups because someone might hack his Sage files.
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Apr 4, 2016 18:51
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NeuralSpark posted:Never underestimate the ability of a redneck with a backhoe to find your fibre. It's like a dowsing rod. Ha! This just happened to one of our stores this morning... They where scraping off the top layer of gravel to smooth the rutted surface out and broke the cable. Good thing we have backup internet connections. But they have been without phones for a few hours now.
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Apr 4, 2016 19:05
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in my observations work/life balance starts tilting towards the work side when newly minted MBAs start getting hired with their One neat trick to boosting efficiency, workers HATE it! playbook of making everyone do more with less
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Apr 4, 2016 19:05
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Frequently disguised as something else though.
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Apr 4, 2016 19:06
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Apr 4, 2016 19:07
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go3 posted:in my observations work/life balance starts tilting towards the work side when newly minted MBAs start getting hired with their One neat trick to boosting efficiency, workers HATE it! playbook of making everyone do more with less Also the card that startups love playing: all the free food/snacks/coffee/beer you can handle, ping pong/foosball, why would you ever leave work?!
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Apr 4, 2016 19:12
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air- posted:Also the card that startups love playing: all the free food/snacks/coffee/beer you can handle, ping pong/foosball, why would you ever leave work?! Yeah, the whole "you might work 60 hours every week, but we wheel in dinner for you!" thing is definitely something they love to parade around. Thanks for the baked ziti, assholes.
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Apr 4, 2016 19:15
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go3 posted:in my observations work/life balance starts tilting towards the work side when newly minted MBAs start getting hired with their One neat trick to boosting efficiency, workers HATE it! playbook of making everyone do more with less "Work smarter, not harder" is their battlecry. And response to "I need more people".
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Apr 4, 2016 19:17
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I'm a bit bitter on the whole "work/life" balance thing because it turns out that my new manager is a big fan of making his employees(but not him) work on weekends with no overtime or comp time when getting near the end of a release, and on top of that he wanted us to work in the office(despite the company having a pretty robust work from home policy even for normal work days) at normal start times. I suffer from a sleeping disorder, but I have never bothered to get it officially diagnosed because 1) a good number of doctors refuse to diagnose it despite it being an officially recognized sleeping disorder and 2) There is diddly squat that a doctor can do to treat it. I am pretty much the poster child of the sleeping disorder in regards to symptoms though. The net result of it is that I do not get much sleep during the week(4-5 hours a night) and then sleep a ton on the weekends to make up for it. I emailed him and explained that due to this there was no real way I could work in the morning on a weekend, but I would be willing to do some work, from home, in the afternoon and evening if I had to. He calls me this morning(he doesn't even work in the same state as our main office that I work in) and says that if I want "special accommodations" I will need to have a doctor fax HR about what accommodations I need for my disorder(in my mind there is an implied "or else I may look towards getting you fired", but that may just be my paranoid mind who distrusts all management at work). loving hell, the only "accommodation" I wanted was not to have to loving wake up at 8 in the morning on what is supposed to be one of my days off. It wasn't even that I wasn't willing to work(uncompensated) on the weekend, just not in the morning. I guess it was a mistake actually telling the truth instead of just making up some lie about having some plan that I couldn't change, but, thanks to Easter weekend preventing me from catching up on sleep the previous weekend, I was so sleep deprived by the end of last week my brain wasn't really functioning.
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Apr 4, 2016 19:34
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Khisanth Magus posted:I suffer from a sleeping disorder Undiagnosed sleep apnea? Get that sleep study done asap, the treatment changed my life. Starting your days feeling refreshed versus feeling totally lovely will make a big difference. Mental health issues feel so much worse since your body is already struggling.
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Apr 4, 2016 19:49
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Judge Schnoopy posted:Pro-Tip; Work with old people. The older they are, the more ingrained they are to push back on work / life balance issues. Recently turned down an offer from a place that did not have "a culture which supports telework." Last time I checked it was 2016, folks. 
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Apr 4, 2016 19:50
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Khisanth Magus posted:I guess it was a mistake actually telling the truth instead of just making up some lie about having some plan that I couldn't change Even this is too much. "Hey you need to work unpaid, unscheduled hours this weekend." "No."
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Apr 4, 2016 19:51
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Khisanth Magus posted:I'm a bit bitter on the whole "work/life" balance thing because...<snip>...It wasn't even that I wasn't willing to work(uncompensated) on the weekend, just not in the morning. You need to stop this. Do not work uncompensated, we're not talking about just staying 5 minutes later or whatever.
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Apr 4, 2016 19:54
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air- posted:Undiagnosed sleep apnea? Get that sleep study done asap, the treatment changed my life. Starting your days feeling refreshed versus feeling totally lovely will make a big difference. Mental health issues feel so much worse since your body is already struggling. No, I suffer from delayed sleep phase syndrome. It is a circadian rhythm disorder that means that my natural sleep cycle is signicantly later than normal, in my case being 3am to noon. No matter how tired I get from limited sleep my brain will not go to sleep before then. For people with DSPS just giving them sleeping meds to make them fall asleep sooner(the way some doctors try to "treat" it) doesn't result in any additional meaningful sleep, as your sleep cycle will wait until it's natural time anyways. There is no real way to treat it. Despite officially being recognized a lot of doctors still refuse to take it seriously, which is the main reason I haven't gone through getting it officially diagnosed.
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Apr 4, 2016 19:59
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Khisanth Magus posted:There is no real way to treat it.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:04
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nexxai posted:That's not entirely true. If you look into chrono-therapy, you may find some success. You have to be insanely rigid about your bedtime not just *during* the chrono-therapy, but once you've locked your body into the cycle as well. My wife has DSPS as well and chronotherapy worked for her until she went on vacation and started staying up too late. I've done it before, and it does kind of help, but it is almost impossible to maintain, and then after one screw up you are back to square one. Combine it with a wife who has assorted health issues that end up causing a few midnight ER trips a year that gently caress everything up and I kind of gave up on it.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:08
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Khisanth Magus posted:No, I suffer from delayed sleep phase syndrome. It is a circadian rhythm disorder that means that my natural sleep cycle is signicantly later than normal, in my case being 3am to noon. No matter how tired I get from limited sleep my brain will not go to sleep before then. For people with DSPS just giving them sleeping meds to make them fall asleep sooner(the way some doctors try to "treat" it) doesn't result in any additional meaningful sleep, as your sleep cycle will wait until it's natural time anyways. I had it as a teenager, it was awful. Apparently it's really common in teenagers. At its worst, I couldn't get to sleep until 4AM. Even when I tried going to sleep at midnight, I just laid in bed until 4, even if I tried getting up for a few minutes like the sleep hygiene sheet recommended. Thankfully it's mostly better, although mornings are still murder and I have a hard time sleeping before midnight almost every night unless I'm extremely sleep deprived.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:17
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I had it as a teenager, it was awful. Apparently it's really common in teenagers. At its worst, I couldn't get to sleep until 4AM. Even when I tried going to sleep at midnight, I just laid in bed until 4, even if I tried getting up for a few minutes like the sleep hygiene sheet recommended. Thankfully it's mostly better, although mornings are still murder and I have a hard time sleeping before midnight almost every night unless I'm extremely sleep deprived. "Sleep hygiene" is such a crock of poo poo. Is there anyone who it has actually worked for?
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Apr 4, 2016 20:20
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Toasticle posted:He also hasn't taken a backup offsite since I left. He doesn't want to at least do cloud backups because someone might hack his Sage files.  I've told this story before, but I once worked at a place where the CEO refused to allow people to work from home because "MY SON the computer security expert says that our corporate enemies could intercept the transmissions between the office and people working at home, and get a list of our donors!" Notes: 1. Donor list was publicly available as part of state law governing charitable contributions. We also published it in our newsletter. 2. Backups of our Sage files were stored locally, because offsite backup was a SECURITY RISK. 3. The admin password for the server was written on a post-it note stuck to the side of the server. I joked at one point, "Look, if you really think the people that don't like us want to try something, they're not going to hire elite hackers. Someone will come in wearing a generic uniform and say they're from the phone company. They'll mumble something about utility work, then walk out with our server under their arm. And nobody will stop them because you are right now chasing off the only employee you have who cares about security." You're never going to guess what eventually happened, minus the uniform!
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Apr 4, 2016 20:24
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Ugh... apparently when the fiber provider originally installed their line 6-7 years ago they only buried it about 4-5 inches down. Contractor called 811 who told him unless he was digging more than 12 inches down, then it was not necessary for them to have utilities marked as they would all be at least deeper than that. He proceeded to scrape off the top layer of the entire lot, finding and breaking said fiber optic cable after the first pass. Provider agreed their original burial contractor hosed up and had not placed the line deep enough. So they put in a new air drop from the pole to the building. So after a 4 hour internet and phone outage, they are back up and going.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:38
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ConfusedUs posted:Even this is too much. I was gonna say, aren't there a ton of laws against making employees work unpaid? I'd have hopped on the "gently caress No" train even if it got me fired, because gently caress that noise...bad enough working with friends or family that want me to fix poo poo for free, I ain't doing that with an actual employer, regardless of how cheap they wanna be.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:41
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Ozz81 posted:I was gonna say, aren't there a ton of laws against making employees work unpaid? I'd have hopped on the "gently caress No" train even if it got me fired, because gently caress that noise...bad enough working with friends or family that want me to fix poo poo for free, I ain't doing that with an actual employer, regardless of how cheap they wanna be.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:46
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The Macaroni posted:Downside: old people firmly believe in facetime. As in, "If I can't see you physically located in the office, pushing buttons that make DOOT DOOT noises, you couldn't possibly be doing work." not all of us old fucks feel that way.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:48
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Ozz81 posted:I was gonna say, aren't there a ton of laws against making employees work unpaid? I'd have hopped on the "gently caress No" train even if it got me fired, because gently caress that noise...bad enough working with friends or family that want me to fix poo poo for free, I ain't doing that with an actual employer, regardless of how cheap they wanna be. Hmm it looks here on your review that you haven't been a team player this year! You'll only be getting 50% of your normal raise, and I'd like to see a better attitude mister!
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Apr 4, 2016 20:48
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anthonypants posted:Nope, they're called "exempt". Still can't require you to work unpaid. So don't.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:48
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flosofl posted:Still can't require you to work unpaid. So don't. And can still fire you for saying "no", because Capitalism, Bitches! Edit: I think that the supreme topping on the shitcake of my boss's seemingly implied "have a doctor fax something to HR or else" is that we ended up finishing everything by EOD Friday and no one had to work over the weekend anyways. Khisanth Magus fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 20:51
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Khisanth Magus posted:delayed sleep phase syndrome Oh my god. I never even knew about this term until now; the symptoms fit me to a loving T. I'm seriously looking into this, so for what it's worth, thank you for bringing it up.
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Apr 4, 2016 20:57
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flosofl posted:Still can't require you to work unpaid. So don't.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:03
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NeuralSpark posted:Never underestimate the ability of a redneck with a backhoe to find your fibre. It's like a dowsing rod. We used to have a branch in the north west. I once got a notification of a fiber break in Montana caused by a bunch of dudes using some birds hanging out on our fiber as target practice. I know we don't typically associate the northwest as rednecks, but my supervisor at the time was from there and he told me that it was an appropriate description.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:08
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Toasticle posted:So now since these guys want $200 minimum and take a day to show up for service calls and nobody knows how to update the excel sheet (of course) I wrote to convert EDI documents to a txt file that can be uploaded to Sage and three dozen other things I'm now getting $50/hour about 10-15 hours a week to do his IT via RDP into my old PC. Made $100 last week checking the UPC stickers a factory made. $50 an hour is really cheap for consulting work. Our lowest hourly rate is $140 an hour, and that's for when we have a support agreement with from years ago, and they are nonprofits, and we are already billing them for monitoring/hosting/backups. You have experience that is valuable to the business and it would be costly for them to hire someone else and get them up to speed. They are paying you to solve their problems when no one else can, not just an hourly wage at this point. Also have a minimum time billed like 2-4 hours. Find out what it would cost to have them hire someone else to do it and negotiate from there.
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Apr 4, 2016 21:26
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flosofl posted:Still can't require you to work unpaid. So don't.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:01
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Renegret posted:We used to have a branch in the north west. I once got a notification of a fiber break in Montana caused by a bunch of dudes using some birds hanging out on our fiber as target practice. Uhm, I'm in Eastern WA, grew up in the middle of Montana, and been dealing with folks from up this area my whole life. "Redneck" fits, you just don't get the Southron drawlin' is all. I've become fond of "backwards-assed hill hicks" in recent years, because drat the stupid is getting stronger...
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Apr 4, 2016 22:38
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flosofl posted:It took me a second to realize you meant texts to the phone as 2FA, because the Google Authenticator App (which is a soft token installed on the phone) works just fine without a phone or wifi connection. But yeah, if you don't have some sort of out-of-band method for getting your validation code (either physical or soft token), you're poo poo out of luck. Ours isn't even polite enough to send you a text. It CALLS YOU and you have to hit a button to continue, all with the timer running.
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Apr 4, 2016 22:43
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Renegret posted:We used to have a branch in the north west. I once got a notification of a fiber break in Montana caused by a bunch of dudes using some birds hanging out on our fiber as target practice. Redneck isn't location based, its a state of mind. The fun thing about northwest rednecks is that you can get the militia/freeman on the land groups way up in the boonies. There are some scary people up there. NeuralSpark posted:Never underestimate the ability of a redneck with a backhoe to find your fibre. It's like a dowsing rod. A joke I heard once that if you are going hiking in the woods, bring some fiber cable with you. If you get lost, bury it in the ground and wait an hour, someone will be by in a excavator to dig it out, and you can catch a ride back with them.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:29
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anthonypants posted:No poo poo, and what do you think being classified as exempt from overtime regulations means It means that if you want me to work over 40 hours in a week without comp time or other compensation, it's not happening. I don't know what it means for you. If your work is pulling this poo poo, find another job.
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Apr 5, 2016 00:44
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quote:An exempt employee has virtually "no rights at all" under the FLSA overtime rules. About all an exempt employee is entitled to under the FLSA is to receive the full amount of the base salary in any work period during which s/he performs any work (less any permissible deductions). Nothing in the FLSA prohibits an employer from requiring exempt employees to "punch a clock," or work a particular schedule, or "make up" time lost due to absences. Nor does the FLSA limit the amount of work time an employer may require or expect from any employee, on any Yeah FLSA fucks exempts. I sort of agree with flosofl that it should be the exception but employers can require you to do whatever they want wrt overtime. (source: http://www.flsa.com/coverage.html )
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Apr 5, 2016 01:50
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Remind me to never move to the land of the (un)free. 
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Apr 5, 2016 02:08
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