Rockman Reserve posted:

...and then there was gary. on the first day i met gary, when he introduced himself, he mentioned that he used to draw pornography of fantasy poo poo and called it the Dragonriders of Porn, super clever huh. gary would go to the hotel gym while we were on project and walk on a treadmill for hours wearing a big chainmail shirt that must have taken up most of his luggage. gary was weird and offputting to everyone he met immediately and i don't understand how he managed to get through our interview process at all.

InternetJunky posted:

Jeza posted:

InternetJunky posted:

I just started a new project a few months ago and we're in the phase of the project were 80% of my working day is spent in phone-in meetings, both internal and external. I've noticed a recurring pattern on the calls now, and ever since I did I have started to get irrationally angry whenever the specific event unfolds.

Person A: "No no, that won't work because it will break this system. Isn't that right Person B?"
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person A: "Person B, you're on mute we can't hear you."
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person B: "Oh sorry everyone, I was talking on mute."
<Everyone chuckles>

It happens almost once per call. People keep laughing every time it happens. I don't find it funny. How hard is it to check if you're on mute?

InternetJunky posted:

I just started a new project a few months ago and we're in the phase of the project were 80% of my working day is spent in phone-in meetings, both internal and external. I've noticed a recurring pattern on the calls now, and ever since I did I have started to get irrationally angry whenever the specific event unfolds.

Person A: "No no, that won't work because it will break this system. Isn't that right Person B?"
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person A: "Person B, you're on mute we can't hear you."
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person B: "Oh sorry everyone, I was talking on mute."
<Everyone chuckles>

It happens almost once per call. People keep laughing every time it happens. I don't find it funny. How hard is it to check if you're on mute?

InternetJunky posted:

I just started a new project a few months ago and we're in the phase of the project were 80% of my working day is spent in phone-in meetings, both internal and external. I've noticed a recurring pattern on the calls now, and ever since I did I have started to get irrationally angry whenever the specific event unfolds.

Person A: "No no, that won't work because it will break this system. Isn't that right Person B?"
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person A: "Person B, you're on mute we can't hear you."
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person B: "Oh sorry everyone, I was talking on mute."
<Everyone chuckles>

It happens almost once per call. People keep laughing every time it happens. I don't find it funny. How hard is it to check if you're on mute?

Tetramin posted:

drat people who didn’t grow up as gamers so muting/unmuting is second nature. I’ve never accidentally been in the wrong mute state.

MA-Horus posted:

my company is global and does a lot of business in japan and germany.
holy gently caress do i get a giggle watching my anglo co-workers try to use japanese and german pre/suffixes/honorifics correctly.

do not, under any circumstances, use -kun when e-mailing a company vp. they do not find it kawaii

Zarin posted:

Your original message asked why your successor left

Jeza posted:

InternetJunky posted:

If you're trying to talk you're on mute.

InternetJunky posted:

If you're trying to talk you're on mute.

InternetJunky posted:

If you're trying to talk you're on mute.

Lazyfire posted:

We have a guy on our team that goes full on "Snake? SNAKE! SNNAAAAAKKKKEEEE!!!" if you don't respond within seconds of being asked a question, even if he isn't the one who asked. I have become incredibly good at getting off mute to say yes or no and then going right back to muted so no one has to hear my keyboard clacking away.

Barudak posted:

One of the 6 teams Im on has 8 people. 4 of them, including me, put in out notice in the past two weeks. Management gave the four of us a hearfelt plea to work as hard as we can during our exit as they have no one to replace us.

I considered buying an inkstained burlap sack before I looked down on them and whispered "no"

The Walrus posted:

I send between 50-150 emails a day so gently caress salutations, it's a same line "Hi Name, and then the content"

Son of Rodney posted:

are you guys working at an email factory or what's going on there

The Walrus posted:

I work in retail, lots of communicating with vendors etc. It's gotten better since we got Teams since there's a lot of in-office back and forth.

stellers bae posted:

I've got a second round of interviews coming up with a company that just found out it was being acquired by a larger firm in the industry - not quite a competitor, but close. Is that a dealbreaker? In telecom it's always horrible to be the one being acquired, whereas you're safe if you're on the other side...

AHH F/UGH posted:

When the pandemic started we were having daily team conference calls every weekday, Monday through Friday

Then it went to M-W-F

Then it went to just Monday and Friday

But not much changes and not many things happen on Fridays anyways, so there's often very little to discuss on Monday, so lately my boss has been somewhat conveniently "having a meeting" at the same time as our Monday or Friday meeting and needing to cancel one of them.

Not a soul has complained.

SkyeAuroline posted:

As one of the acquirers working with the acquirees for our company: honestly we may well have saved them, I've mentioned some of the weird poo poo their business model ran on but that's only the tip of the iceberg. It's really down to who's doing the acquiring. Some firms will 100% gently caress you for a short term dollar. Some firms really want to see a long term return and will invest in & support you (as long as you're making them money - do not confuse this for charity). Most will be somewhere in the middle, less support than you'd hope for but also less vultures circling overhead.

titty_baby_ posted:

When we started we had T and F meetings. My boss has only made about half of them this year and the meetings are mostly me and our coordinator who both just have questions for our boss. No one else in the department shows up. Today I was the only person in the meeting.

We also have to fill out forms detailing how we spent our time during the day. The forms were for ICS people initially to help report time that FEMA would cover, but for unknown reasons they had all remote workers fill them out. We would turn ours in to our coordinator, who apparently turned her in to...herself?

I stopped doing them a few weeks ago because I mostly just gently caress around and coming up with lies to fill my time was stressful, and no one else was doing them anyway. The coordinator hasn't said anything to me and doesn't seem to care anymore.

Tetramin posted:

Just a month or two ago I heard my boss asking my coworkers how they felt about when they used to have to do time accounting like that and obviously everyone was like “it loving sucked”. But we got a new VP not too long before that, and he seems pretty chill and laid back, but that made me wonder if he’s considering implementing that.

I get my stuff done correctly and on time, but my attention gets pulled in 15 different directions all day long so actually accounting for the hours worked on what would make me kill myself. Plus lying about the significant amount of time I’m just dinkin around

Barudak posted:

A friend had a job where you had to report your time in 15 minute increments. They worked on one piece of business doing one thing full time so it was this agonizing slow click multi-hour long process to tell the system 15 minutes at a time they had the same job they had two weeks ago.

Barudak posted:

A friend had a job where you had to report your time in 15 minute increments. They worked on one piece of business doing one thing full time so it was this agonizing slow click multi-hour long process to tell the system 15 minutes at a time they had the same job they had two weeks ago.

NapalmWeasel posted:

Are you answering for other people just so dude shuts up?

Charles Bukowski posted:

Did she flee to the 3rd world and get off scot free? I sure hope so. I hope she's out there in the tropics, fat on the hog and happy. Free like dolphins.

Jeza posted:

I was meaning to respond to talk about project managers/digital stuff pages back but never got around to it.

The dumbest person I have ever met, or at least have spoken to for more than a few minutes, was a lady in her early 40s who was hired on as a Freelance Senior Digital Project Manager, for which she was paid somewhere just shy of the equivalent of $1000 per day.

I don't work with anything digital, and at the time, the most I did was vaguely liaised with their team on certain bits and pieces. But what became very quickly apparent was that this woman didn't know anything about technology whatsoever. I have no idea how she passed an interview, I just assume her CV was completely forged and she blagged through it. The main project (among others) was building a website for a big client and she was meant to be directing priorities and mediating with the client through the process or something, whatever the gently caress a project manager actually does.

I think almost all of the most awkward career experiences of my life were at the hands of this woman. I was basically a junior copywriter (also freelance) working on a bunch of stuff, so pretty tangential to her, yet she would basically rope helpless subordinates into these nightmarish conference calls, including me, where she basically deflected all questions from clients to the team members directly because she was completely clueless about literally everything. She was almost incapable of using a computer or the internet, and soon every single non-management person in her orbit complained constantly. You couldn't actually talk to her normally because she would basically freeze up and go boggle eyed if you said anything slightly complicated, so everybody had to talk to her like a small child.

Her average day consisted of coming in late, leaving early and taking 2 hours for lunch everyday to do some yoga thing. In the office all she did was shop online and, as it turned out, fielded and then sat on increasing angry client emails and calls. It came to a head at one point 2-3 weeks in where she put a call on hold and came over to me with this panicked look and said there was a call for me on the line and forwarded it to me. I got on the line and it was the account manager for the client who was almost in tears of frustration at the other end of the line, who went on this rant about how they were on the verge of cancelling the whole project because this lady "couldn't follow even the most basic instructions." I had to apologise and say that I didn't even really work there or on that project but I would talk to management, which I did, alerting them to the fact that she was the most incredible moron and that the client was nearly cancelling everything.

There was complete radio silence for several days after they said they would look into it. Management then returned that they were completely satisfied with her performance and extended her contract for like three more weeks, but got some other account manager to handle the client emails from then on. The project finished without her input whatsoever and she left when the contract was up, having made like $50,000 for doing nothing but act as an impediment to everyone.

Of course, when you put it like that, she seems like the smartest person I ever met.