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We're regulated by a central bank of a country, who then takes their regulations of the European Central Bank. Financial Crimes are a big thing, so that team was given essentially a blank check to do whatever they deem will fulfill our obligations. Only they constantly fail audits, have gotten us a rap on the knuckles from the SEC in the US, and generally do a terrible job at actually fleshing out our policies. So what's their response? Give these same people even more money and autonomy to make sure we stop dialing these audits! Only now they're not just inept, but power mad. So we have all these policies which have no basis in reality, let alone the regulation that we're supposed to be following. When I ask where in the regs a certain thing is or what the risk actually is, I'm told that it's just policy and I should accept that. Well, turns out I have friends at the Central Bank, and running "hypothetical" situations by them always gets a "what the gently caress? No, that's not what was meant at all." So... I found a new job and start in May.
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Mar 5, 2021 14:40
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Steakandchips posted:Ignore the pre-order bullshit then and just rock up and zoom through like your colleague. Well I know that now! Same with all the other good behaviours here, I feel like I'm the only mug walking all the way around the central walkways instead of ducking and weaving among the forklifts. That reminds me of another fantastic project that had just completed, a central set of offices with glass panels for walls that lets you look out into the production areas and warehouse. I think it's basically the panopticon. But having an office area with tiny thin walls slap bang in the middle of a hot, noisy warehouse has not proved to be the wisest choice. Up at the labs, another lab manager took it on herself to rearrange all the desk space, not just her team but ours too. And is now complaining that she doesn't like the look. Well you made this happen so if you complain to me I will definitely be agreeing and asking what idiot decided all this!!
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Mar 5, 2021 14:43
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March 5 is employee appreciation day! Yippee! I got 3 emails about it this morning. Who gives a gently caress. They did get us an extra 5 personal days this year but they announced that last year. Fuckers make that a permanent thing please.
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Mar 5, 2021 15:00
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Saalkin posted:March 5 is employee appreciation day! Yippee! I got 3 emails about it this morning. ... your extra is about as much as we get total a year. 
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Mar 5, 2021 15:47
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We don't get free tea and coffee because
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Mar 5, 2021 15:48
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Mr. Sunshine posted:No coffee (or worse, bad coffee) is a loving sin and should not be tolerated. Last job I worked at had one of those industrial Keurig machine that you had to pay a quarter to use but they provided the k-cups. Someone decided to gank whole boxes of k-cups so they you pay for the kcup and then pay to use the machine. They would not allow you to have a coffee machine at your desk because it's a loving call center. My current job is at a grocery warehouse, so all I need to do is go grab a box of coffee from the racking, have it taken out of inventory by IC and then I can make all the coffee I want for the office. It's a pretty sweet setup.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:06
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Way back our office got a fancy new automatic coffee machine with a reservoir for beans and another reservoir for water. It'd grind the beans and make a decent expresso. Pretty basic but we were impressed back in 2008. Now it was fairly obvious that your poured the beans into the clear reservoir with the beans in it labelled beans. And it was equally obvious that you poured the water into the clear reservoir with the water in it labelled water. Anyway, my perpetual fuckup of a boss did the needful and we had to get a new machine. Honestly it's a miracle she didn't fill our truck's radiator with washer fluid or something.
Outrail fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Mar 5, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 16:07
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If there was ever a canary in the coalmine policy that signalled "help my company is dying", making you pay for previously free coffee is surely a leading contender.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:14
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I can't imagine a company not providing free coffee. I also can't imagine one providing coffee that's drinkable, but it's the thought that counts.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:23
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Jeza posted:If there was ever a canary in the coalmine policy that signalled "help my company is dying", making you pay for previously free coffee is surely a leading contender. Ya. Our canary was being told 'you won't be any worse off under the new management' and then immediately losing our free gym membership and a bunch if other perks.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:37
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Outrail posted:Ya. Our canary was being told 'you won't be any worse off under the new management' and then immediately losing our free gym membership and a bunch if other perks. Hey, that's familiar! "New department lead, nothing is changing" and then our flex schedules that were by far our biggest benefit (and significantly offset the kinda lovely remainder) disappeared so we could always be predictably available for the precisely... zero other departments we worked with. (Just in the last couple months, years after the flex schedule disappeared, finally two of us work with one other department... that's in a completely different time zone that the "standard" workplace schedule has significant periods of no overlap but our flex schedule would have allowed 100% overlap. I'm sure this had a good reason behind it besides just demanding control and being able to watch people, right?  )
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Mar 5, 2021 16:50
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:I can't imagine a company not providing free coffee. I also can't imagine one providing coffee that's drinkable, but it's the thought that counts. A company I worked at had the Starbucks business and so got some insanely expensive looking machine with like 4 flavors of starbucks 3 of which rotated and thats how I learned they can make an ok bean but sweet god Pikes Place is a sin against coffee.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:52
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Sorry everyone I lied. I got two more emails about this employee appreciate day lol. Running total is 5
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Mar 5, 2021 16:53
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TacticalHoodie posted:Last job I worked at had one of those industrial Keurig machine that you had to pay a quarter to use but they provided the k-cups. Someone decided to gank whole boxes of k-cups so they you pay for the kcup and then pay to use the machine. They would not allow you to have a coffee machine at your desk because it's a loving call center. Visit a lot of them on IT contract and the last day is usually they unlock the storage room of nearly expired stock that they pull the break room stuff out of and do the fable treasure room thing where anything you can carry with your own power is yours. Although a few of the more self centered managers will bundle up obviously damaged/nearly expired product as a gift basket and beam while handing it over like they are doing you a favor. This is usually after inventory has let us into the room anyway lol.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:56
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Saalkin posted:Sorry everyone I lied. I got two more emails about this employee appreciate day lol. Running total is 5 let me take this moment to add that SA and GBS would like to take this moment to extend to you ,and all posters in this thread, a blessed employee appreciation day! (there will be no extra pay or benefits. Pls return to work and stop posting immediately)
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Mar 5, 2021 16:56
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Thesaurus posted:let me take this moment to add that SA and GBS would like to take this moment to extend to you ,and all posters in this thread, a blessed employee appreciation day! Donuts in the break room* *one donut per person PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH ALL THE DONUTS Best regards Teen witch
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Mar 5, 2021 16:57
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gently caress I'd kill for a free doughnut right now.
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Mar 5, 2021 16:58
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Not from a break room. Someone always picks up and inspects like four doughnuts before finding the right one. Unless I’m there WHEN it arrives, I ain’t eating it
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Mar 5, 2021 16:59
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Saalkin posted:Sorry everyone I lied. I got two more emails about this employee appreciate day lol. Running total is 5 A company someone I know worked at tried to do "boss appreciation day" which was cut short very very quickly when something like a quarter+ of the staff were weirdly all out sick that day.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:01
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Half of my job is essentially an office manager so people ask me to buy all sorts of things. Problem is that where I work has very tight restrictions on what can be purchased and in what volume. Basically, I can't order a box of pens, I have to order $100 worth to fulfil the minimum contract. People cannot get it through their heads that I can't just get them one little thing that they want and I can't justify spending a hundred dollars on a bulk order that only benefits them. Even if I could just buy one little thing, the procurement, acceptance, paperwork and records management system is so, SO bloated that we spend a couple hundred dollars in labor for every purchase.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:02
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Inzombiac posted:Half of my job is essentially an office manager so people ask me to buy all sorts of things. ok but i need a pen
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Mar 5, 2021 17:04
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Cant you just Amazon a box of pens and expense it?
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Mar 5, 2021 17:07
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poisonpill posted:Not from a break room. Someone always picks up and inspects like four doughnuts before finding the right one. Unless I’m there WHEN it arrives, I ain’t eating it I guess I'm lock in that in my department most people aren't gross. We do have one person that I think picked her nose or sneezed before mixing a salad with her hands for a pot lock (or something like that) but she has a legitimate learning disability. Kinda just don't eat what she brings in.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:07
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poisonpill posted:Cant you just Amazon a box of pens and expense it?
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Mar 5, 2021 17:15
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Inzombiac posted:Half of my job is essentially an office manager so people ask me to buy all sorts of things. Buy a poo poo ton of crap preemptively as a 'forward thinking efficiency and bloat mitigation measure'.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:16
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poisonpill posted:Cant you just Amazon a box of pens and expense it? Nope! We have to use a specific portal of approved vendors but not all of them are approved... but maybe today they are? Better check their profile every single time and remember what a memo from 2013 said about this weird circumstance. Oh, if I need to get any IT equipment including mice and keyboards I have to go through another portal/process where I send out a contract request to see if any vendors want to bid on the purchase. If they don't, I have to generate a new report that gets folded in to the overall portfolio. The government will not spend tax dollars for a communal coffee pot but they will happily spend literally 10X the purchase price in labor every time we need a ream of paper. My partner's company sold off their office, so they disconnected everything and sent an email that was essentially "Your equipment has been tagged with your name. Anything without a name is up for grabs. Go nuts." It was insane to me how casual it was because I work in GOV and every scrap of paper is tracked a billion different ways Inzombiac fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Mar 5, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 17:25
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Our cyber punk procurement future is your ERP let's you plug in an amazon link for 30 bic pens for $5 that your office mate prefers and it interrupts you with "wouldn't you rather buy a pallet of pens from our contract for $500" and you tell it no I just need the $5 small box. Your request goes to a controller who instinctually denies it and tells you to order the pallet of cheap pens that explode 5 minutes after you put them in your pen well.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:26
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In high school I had a summer job at a federal institution making copies and coffee and doing excel poo poo. I didn't have a desk really. My computer was set up on dozens of reams of paper that they had procured to prevent their office procurement budget from going down from disuse. Luckily the building was a brick shithouse from the 50s. If you try to do the same thing in a cheap building, especially a trailer based office, you will put a hole in the floor with that much paper.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:31
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Son of Rodney posted:Just... Buy your own pods :?: With the two Megacorps I've worked for I think the issue has been their food service provider. They both use the same one and both had a pay-for-coffee policy. Both places had people raise money to get Keurigs to put in the break room/kitchenette, which was just sad. I can one-up the coffee thing, though. When I started my previous job they had a water cooler in the break area and when the manager giving us new hires a tour of the office came across this he said "If you want to join the water club, it's two dollars a week." You could either pay to get watercooler water or you could use the city water that came out of the taps and tasted terrible. I had never seen that level of cheapness from a company in my life and I think it was a scam run by the woman who collected the dues of water club members. The water provider clearly had a contract with the company as they had passes to get into the building and could move around unsupervised, so I have no idea how or why people were paying for this. About two years after I started our team moved to a new building with wall mounted filtered water dispensers. The woman who ran the water club in our old office was furious about this and sent out an all group (250 people at the time) e-mail stating she was reestablishing the water club in case anyone wanted "real filtered water" again. I can't think of a single person I knew who signed up for that.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:34
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Inzombiac posted:Nope! for context I worked at a pizza franchise with about 200 employees and had authority to just buy whatever I thought we needed with company money. only my gm was responsible for the budget and even then they only wanted justifications if we went over, not for everything that wasn't recurring
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Mar 5, 2021 17:37
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Larry Parrish posted:for context I worked at a pizza franchise with about 200 employees and had authority to just buy whatever I thought we needed with company money. only my gm was responsible for the budget and even then they only wanted justifications if we went over, not for everything that wasn't recurring I would die a happy man if we had a pot of discretionary money. Just gimme like two grand a year (out of the millions in the budget) so I can hop over to Staples and get some highlighters or whatever.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:39
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zedprime posted:Non refrigerated packaged food warehouses are where you work to get extremely American in size because there's always something about to expire that they just fill the break and conference rooms with. Anything past code date we normally give to the local food banks. Most of the time we bring in stuff we make at home to share with the office. We have monthly BBQs and there is always treats during Christmas. The only time we just hand out food to employees is when a shipping company gives us some other's company food we aren't selling in the stores and the transport company doesn't want to pick it up.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:44
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zedprime posted:Our cyber punk procurement future is your ERP let's you plug in an amazon link for 30 bic pens for $5 that your office mate prefers and it interrupts you with "wouldn't you rather buy a pallet of pens from our contract for $500" and you tell it no I just need the $5 small box. Your request goes to a controller who instinctually denies it and tells you to order the pallet of cheap pens that explode 5 minutes after you put them in your pen well. Why do you have a pen well at work, are you from the past?
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Mar 5, 2021 17:46
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Lazyfire posted:With the two Megacorps I've worked for I think the issue has been their food service provider. They both use the same one and both had a pay-for-coffee policy. Both places had people raise money to get Keurigs to put in the break room/kitchenette, which was just sad. 2 dollars a week x 250 people x 4 weeks a month x 12 months a year. $24000 in water per annum. Even if she spent 50% (unlikely) on the water, she still got $12000, untaxed, for next to no work. Of course this rear end in a top hat was angry they took away her ill gotten gains.
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Mar 5, 2021 17:49
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Steakandchips posted:2 dollars a week x 250 people x 4 weeks a month x 12 months a year.
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Mar 5, 2021 18:11
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Steakandchips posted:2 dollars a week x 250 people x 4 weeks a month x 12 months a year. So far as I knew there were never more than 50 people signed up. You can rent the cooler stands for $4 a month/ea. and each bottle was under $10 (just a quick Google check, I have no clue what they were paying) so she was at most hauling in $5200 a year from water club fees and probably spending no more than $2000 a year. I'm almost positive she instituted this whole thing before there was a water service and just kept collecting like nothing had changed after the company stepped in to pay for it. VVVV All the time, mostly on Saturdays because you had a lower chance to get caught as the people who just walked around looking for a conversation weren't getting overtime. The weirdest thing about the company was always that extremely minor things like taking your lunch break at 12 instead of 11:30 (yes, a department rule) could get you in trouble, but spending all day on Amazon looking at knives or sleeping at your desk (or both!) was fine and no one would bother you. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Mar 5, 2021 |
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Mar 5, 2021 18:12
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Did anyone refuse to join and just sneak water anyway?
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Mar 5, 2021 18:12
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TacticalHoodie posted:Anything past code date we normally give to the local food banks. Most of the time we bring in stuff we make at home to share with the office. We have monthly BBQs and there is always treats during Christmas. The only time we just hand out food to employees is when a shipping company gives us some other's company food we aren't selling in the stores and the transport company doesn't want to pick it up. Managers always explain legitimizing the thing is a huge benefit to shrinkage and pest control because they'll just tear poo poo open on the floor when you aren't looking if they don't have an outlet. Last conversation about this was next to a torn open case of gum next to the case pick line with the guy sighing like "yeah I guess I gotta tell em if they really want gum there's plenty up front" Should also mention this is all in manufacturer distribution centers so the shrinkage accounting hits are sub wholesale. Might be a little more strict if you're writing off at wholesale. Steakandchips posted:Why do you have a pen well at work, are you from the past?
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Mar 5, 2021 18:32
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The company I'm contacted for also does not provide free coffee, though there is a cafeteria with a vendor-run kitchen (well, was in pre-COVID) so it's entirely possible that part of their contract was that only THEY can have coffee, or something? Though every floor has 1 or 2 kitchenettes with a microwave or two, fridge, and a Keurig, so anyone was free to bring their own K-Cups, and at least a couple departments (usually the "nice/fancy" ones like Sales and Marketing) would always have those large Costco boxes of Kirkland K-Cups for their team. But in the same vein as "penny-wise, pound-foolish," our department had to send multiple emails and calls to various managers before they FINALLY approved us buying two new plastic carts for wheeling around equipment, since over the course of a few years the small, cruddy ones we already had kept breaking more and more. One literally had a wheel fall off while carrying some monitors and broke two $150+ high def monitors, and each of these new carts was a whopping $125. Now I'm currently in the process of killdisking and throwing away into an e-waste bin laptops that are maybe 2.5 to 3 years old. Good laptops that run $400-$600 used on eBay and Amazon. But the managers/higher ups who got them don't want them anymore and want new ones. Pretty much everyone on our team that wanted to has taken more than a couple to keep or sell (according to my post history, I've sold at least 9 here on SA Mart alone (though not all of them the $400-$600 models,) nevermind local and eBay). They donated some to some non-profits, but decided the effort to buy non-profit licenses of windows and then have us install and QA them before donating wasn't worth it, so into the e-waste bin (my car) they go.
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Mar 5, 2021 18:39
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Just got off a lovely team meeting that failed to resolve any of the ongoing issues that plague my office. My boss has been checked out of his job for months, and works as mostly an ideas guy now while unofficially kicking all his duties to our coordinator. He's been working with HR to change our positions so the coordinator can become like the vice director, but this is always "two weeks away" and has been for months. Coordinator isn't necessarily the most qualified but puts in a good effort and is actually trying to reform our department, while no one else really cares or wants to play ball. I can tell coordinator is getting increasingly frustrated and is realizing theyre eating a poo poo sandwich. We have an employee who was sort of hired as a favor and this employee does absolutely nothing at all. They were supposed to take over a bunch of duties from the coordinator as they move up, but they haven't done anything. Theyve been put on an employee performance plan by HR and were supposed to be checking in multiple times a day and turning in activity reports, and they've still never done that. Coordinator asks boss today about said employee (who actually works in the office and is supervised by boss) and he basically shrugs and says yeah she doesn't do anything if you don't watch her. Coordinator asks about what our policy is for working on weekend/holidays, which was a question really directed at me, since I dodge all requests to do those things just by going straight to boss and telling him im not doing it. Official policy is that yes, employees can be made to work holidays/ weekends. Coordinator then asks about event coming up on a weekend our department was supposed to help run, and I said I won't be there, and then boss confirms its voluntary, contradicting his prior statement. I said I would work random events if they gave us proper notice ahead of time (they never do, its always week of) and boss said they're working to have a calendar for planning these things. Hes said this for months and still never tells us anything until a week or two before, putting all the planning responsibilities on the coordinator, who then tries to delegate but fails because I dodge (and events are usually funded by another source that im not allowed to allocate from) and other employees ignore.
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