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Paging Baraduk to this suddenly relevant conversation
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Dec 21, 2023 05:52
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Bring in a cat
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Dec 21, 2023 05:54
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Volmarias posted:Paging Baraduk to this suddenly relevant conversation Send the mouse to Singapore
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Dec 21, 2023 05:56
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Time for a possee of semi feral office cats. If they get out of hand then just follow the logical sequence of predators
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Dec 21, 2023 07:23
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Thesaurus posted:Time for a possee of semi feral office cats. If they get out of hand then just follow the logical sequence of predators “And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.”
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Dec 21, 2023 08:29
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Kill the mouse and sleep in the spare overalls
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Dec 21, 2023 10:55
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Car Hater posted:Lure it into a cage with some peanut butter and put it in his office as a pet
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Dec 21, 2023 10:58
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History Comes Inside! posted:lol I got ranked in the top 1% of performers at my 4000+ employee company which in previous years has meant a big fat high 4 digit bonus but since this year has been so lovely it means absolutely nothing This, but the degrade of bonus pay has lowered over the last 5 or so years. Instead of a set bonus, it was half a month salary for the top quarter of performers. Now if you bust your rear end and do 130% of what is your normal work ALL YEAR, you get 200-300 dollars extra, and its getting lower every year too. And they wonder why everyone is just doing 100% and nothing more.
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Dec 21, 2023 11:39
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"The mouse stays. YOU GO."
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Dec 21, 2023 12:18
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Leave a wedge of cheese out and once the mouse looks like this throw it in a shipping crate labeled "To Timbuktu".
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Dec 21, 2023 13:00
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happyhippy posted:This, but the degrade of bonus pay has lowered over the last 5 or so years. This is a big clue that it's time to get the gently caress out. At my last job I was in a comfortable little groove where I could tread water and not really advance, but they also expected gently caress all of me. The pay was a tad low, but the fact that I put in 80% when everyone else was putting in like 40%, tops, meant that I was constantly getting max bonuses at the end of the year. It came out basically being an extra paycheck, which was enough to raise over-all compensation to about what I should have been getting in the first place. Then COVID came, and our bonuses were slashed to basically nothing because "the economy." That dramatically changed the calculus for me staying or not, and I had resumes out a week later and a new job three months later. New pay was about where I should have been if I'd been getting regular raises before. Now I'm someplace where I actually have to work, but there's also much more of a pathway for getting eventual raises. Basically "bonuses" aren't. You need to figure them in as part of your total compensation and take that into account when figuring out if you need to jump ship or not. Axing bonuses is effectively a pay cut and should be treated as such.
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Dec 21, 2023 14:49
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I worked at a place that didn't have great base salaries, but sometimes had bonuses in the range of 40-60% if the business did really well. When they restructured that, the meetings had a tension level similar to 'imminent naval mutiny'.
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Dec 21, 2023 14:56
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Xlorp posted:“And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.” I once worked in a rural office in a converted kiln (not a small one like you'd use for clay; a huge one used for drying hops) - half the office was the small agency I worked for, the other half was bats. Just like loads of and loads of bats if you walked through this one specific door. There were also rats in the walls, lice in the carpet, a bunch of feral farm kittens, the boss was bipolar, and often there were sheep in the carpark. Still not the worst place I've had to work (office kittens!)
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Dec 21, 2023 16:03
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happyhippy posted:This, but the degrade of bonus pay has lowered over the last 5 or so years. Quiet Quitting!!!!
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Dec 21, 2023 17:44
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Dumb poo poo your work does: half the office was the small agency I worked for, the other half was bats please mods, please
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Dec 21, 2023 18:38
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A friend at a previous contract job for IBM got fired because he installed a new PC for a person at the insurance company we worked at and didn't have a new keyboard for them. Not that he refused to give them one. He explained that IBM was currently waiting for the arrival of new keyboards at the facility, they were currently backordered, and they can continue using their current keyboard with the new PC until the shipment shows up. That department had this awful, horrendous, unreasonable, insulting, angry rear end in a top hat as manager. She went to IBM and demanded he be fired for not giving one of her employees their promised fuckin new keyboard when they got a new PC. Didn't matter that it wasn't his doing or his choice. She wanted him gone for breaching protocol. And he was then fired for it, despite a track record of solid job performance. Absolutely asinine, vengeful, entitled bullshit from a piece of poo poo company.
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Dec 21, 2023 19:26
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Catastrophe posted:A friend at a previous contract job for IBM got fired because he installed a new PC for a person at the insurance company we worked at and didn't have a new keyboard for them. Not that he refused to give them one. He explained that IBM was currently waiting for the arrival of new keyboards at the facility, they were currently backordered, and they can continue using their current keyboard with the new PC until the shipment shows up. That department had this awful, horrendous, unreasonable, insulting, angry rear end in a top hat as manager. She went to IBM and demanded he be fired for not giving one of her employees their promised fuckin new keyboard when they got a new PC. Didn't matter that it wasn't his doing or his choice. She wanted him gone for breaching protocol. And he was then fired for it, despite a track record of solid job performance. Absolutely asinine, vengeful, entitled bullshit from a piece of poo poo company. Please tell me he lawyered up for wrongful termination
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Dec 21, 2023 19:49
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Pyrtanis posted:Please tell me he lawyered up for wrongful termination Dude was like 19, at the time. Kind of aloof. He didn't care too much. He just found a similar job across the bridge in NJ a couple of weeks later.
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Dec 21, 2023 19:50
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Catastrophe posted:A friend at a previous contract job for IBM got fired because he installed a new PC for a person at the insurance company we worked at and didn't have a new keyboard for them. Not that he refused to give them one. He explained that IBM was currently waiting for the arrival of new keyboards at the facility, they were currently backordered, and they can continue using their current keyboard with the new PC until the shipment shows up. That department had this awful, horrendous, unreasonable, insulting, angry rear end in a top hat as manager. She went to IBM and demanded he be fired for not giving one of her employees their promised fuckin new keyboard when they got a new PC. Didn't matter that it wasn't his doing or his choice. She wanted him gone for breaching protocol. And he was then fired for it, despite a track record of solid job performance. Absolutely asinine, vengeful, entitled bullshit from a piece of poo poo company. That feels like the kind of thing where you should say "ok, yep, consider him fired" and then just make sure he isn't assigned any more jobs to that place.
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Dec 21, 2023 20:02
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A whole bunch of constant coughing and sneezing around the offices. Great.
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Dec 21, 2023 20:50
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cynic posted:I once worked in a rural office in a converted kiln (not a small one like you'd use for clay; a huge one used for drying hops) - half the office was the small agency I worked for, the other half was bats. Just like loads of and loads of bats if you walked through this one specific door. There were also rats in the walls, lice in the carpet, a bunch of feral farm kittens, the boss was bipolar, and often there were sheep in the carpark. Still not the worst place I've had to work (office kittens!) How many folks did you lose to rabies?
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Dec 21, 2023 21:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is a big clue that it's time to get the gently caress out. My company offers bonuses at specific levels, and this was going to be the first year I would be eligible after I took my current role if they reinstated them after pausing during COVID. In April the Fiscal Year Ahead presentation one of the bullet points was about changing who would get bonuses and it was now a level above me. My wife is several levels above me and what she's heard from her boss' boss is that bonuses this year are going to be pretty small. People work 60 hours a week on high stress programs for money and advancement, the company is on track to reduce availability of both for the foreseeable future for reasons I'm not able to fathom. I think it's probably an attempt to get people to leave the company, but we're already at skeleton crew levels and working the people who stick around even more seems like a great way to death spiral.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:14
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But how's that shareholder value?
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Dec 21, 2023 21:18
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As we were told in our most recent all hands, the money we use to buy back stocks and the money we use to pay employees is from two different buckets and you need to shut the gently caress up if you think you deserve a raise above inflation you crybaby.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:21
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Dec 21, 2023 21:32
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Lazyfire posted:As we were told in our most recent all hands, the money we use to buy back stocks and the money we use to pay employees is from two different buckets and you need to shut the gently caress up if you think you deserve a raise above inflation you crybaby. Is there a reason why you're still with your company? It doesn't really seem like your special project is moving you places in the company.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:42
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DrBouvenstein posted:2) You know the other contracting company I mentioned? Well, according to the contracts, they are actually 100% responsible for ALL of the inventory management. All monitors, laptops, thin clients, etc... have asset stickers and are tracked with who they belong to, what desk they sit at, etc. It's a good system...if it were accurate. They got a huge penalty hit to their contract at the end of 2022 because it was SO out of line with reality. The stock reports saying we were supposed to have like 100 monitors in the stockroom, and the reality was like 30 (number made up, but you get the idea). Laptops and thin clients weren't AS bad, but still not right. So they implemented a new policy last February. Now, only THEIR employees (in fact, only like two of their employees, plus their manager (so three people out of a total dozen or so on the desktop team)) can make changes to the asset database, and only their badges get into the stockroom. So now, the process I need to follow to get a new monitor to employee, is that I take the ticket in the system that says "Equipment request - new monitor" but then I make a SECOND ticket and assign it to the inventory team for them to pull a monitor from the shelf, assign the asset # to the employee, and bring it to me so I can bring it to the employee. Why can't the inventory person just bring it to the employee themselves? I honestly have no idea. Actually, I have an inkling, and that's that the other company wants to artificially increase the total ticket count to make it look like they're doing more work. So quoting myself from several months ago. The inventory got WORSE (as a lot of us knew it would) with only those two people in charge. One of them just...didn't do most of his job. He left in early fall (should have been fired before that, but not my decision), so for a month or two before that, it was a complete roll of the dice if he assigned equipment correctly. So most of us got in the habit of double checking, and when we reminded him to assign it, he'd just say "oh yeah, I forgot" or "Yeah I got the list, I'm just going to do them all in a big batch later." Which can be a valid strategy...but sometimes this was days or weeks later. We had to set up about 150 temp workstations for a conference... none of the stuff he set up was "checked out" of the stockroom. Like 50 monitors and thin clients all still recorded as "in stock." The other guy meant well, but...he is just too disorganized to do this job. Everything would get written down on random scraps of paper and either lost, or one piece got in the wrong pile so it was mis-assigned, or he'd enter all the stuff he did so late, it had already changed by the time he'd get to it. For example: Let's use that same conference. He set up a bunch of the temp workstations and wrote down where they all went...but he was so slow at entering the info in, we collected it all and returned it to stock at the end of the week when the conference was over. And he got about halfway through his list of changing them to the temp seats before we noticed and told him not to bother because it was all back in stock. But he still wanted a "record" that they went to the floor for a week and back. So we let him finish...but then he never entered like half of them back into stock after changing them to being on the floor. So he was taken off that team, and I was added to it (even though there are weird issues with the contract where I don't think I'm supposed to be but...whatever.) and a new person was hired in late July to assist when the first guy quit. She was actualyl VERY useful and helpful, and she was great at organizing things. Cleaned up the stockroom and put things in better places, etc...But she got sick of her commute and left in November, and no was else has been hired/added to the equipment team so it's basically just me.* The benefit? I'm in charge of the inventory. I can keep it organized, and the information is accurate. The downside? Everything else. I TRY to insist upon people not to wait till the last minute to ask for things, but it's inevitable that I'll be in the middle of something else, and I'll be asked to go downstairs to the stockroom to get a new monitor for someone because they need it ASAP for some reason. And no sooner do I bring that back upstairs than someone asks for something else. *There are 3 other people with access to the stockroom and the rights to make changes to the equipment database in case I'm not around. My manager, the telecommunications guy, and the audio/visual guy. And technically even if NONE of us are around, the security or facilities team can let someone into the stockroom to get things in emergencies, and they can just send me info on what they took and who it's for and I can enter it in later.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:52
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Client: Unfortunately, our plans have been changed for January due to changes in the company priorities I feel sorry for such changes however we cant confirm it for now. Let us play it by ears when we come closer. This means "We're doing it in January but you're not invited," right?
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Dec 21, 2023 23:40
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It's means 'Wr are in a state of disorder so bad I have no idea what the gently caress is happening and if you're lucky I'll figure it out be January but don't hold your breath'
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Dec 21, 2023 23:52
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Sounds like Japanese for "We no longer require your services, but are too polite to tell you directly."
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Dec 21, 2023 23:52
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We swapped a vendor from 3% N30, N31 terms to N60. The panic about this non issue with money and changing all vendors to N60 means that we've already lost 5800 dollars in discounts we didn't take. We're entering our slow season so it should only be like 60-80k by the summer. Assuming they allow us to go back to discount terms and we don't have to renegotiate all of that. Best part, the terms change to N60 was decades by the in house counsel and the Director of Operations who retires in 6 months. No one in finance was even aware this was happening until we were handed back checks and told to hold payments until N60. We still don't have a list of who they contacted and who agreed to change terms. It will be funny come August when the 60 terms from mine and the 30 terms from July all come do ar the same time. During our high cost period of the year. I'm taking informal bets on what comes first, bankruptcy or selling the business to "pursue other interests"
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Dec 22, 2023 02:16
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Dance Officer posted:Is there a reason why you're still with your company? It doesn't really seem like your special project is moving you places in the company. As much as I bitch about it, this is still the best company I've worked for. It fails us frequently because the same MBA mentality drives the decisions here as much as anywhere else, just amplified because we have half a dozen systems and SOP that no one knows about causing extra chaos. Taking on this project was a huge career booster, but this was supposed to be a six month thing that is closing in on a year because inertia won't allow for the change I was put here to institute. My next project is lined up, but is on hold until we can convince a team of people to take on what I do solo now.
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Dec 22, 2023 04:03
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DrBouvenstein posted:The downside? Everything else. I TRY to insist upon people not to wait till the last minute to ask for things, but it's inevitable that I'll be in the middle of something else, and I'll be asked to go downstairs to the stockroom to get a new monitor for someone because they need it ASAP for some reason. And no sooner do I bring that back upstairs than someone asks for something else. Establish and publicise "hardware times" at an appropriate interval (twice daily? Once daily? Once weekly?), collect requests and fulfil them when the next scheduled time rolls around. Allow fulfilment outside those times, but make it somewhat slow/annoying (add a form, slow-walk it), so that people get used to getting best results from the established times.
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Dec 22, 2023 04:12
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Ravus Ursus posted:We swapped a vendor from 3% N30, N31 terms to N60. Didn’t your finance folks just give a bunch of money to a scammer via ACH too? Sounds like they’re batting 1.000.
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Dec 22, 2023 04:46
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Yes. This strategy of delaying payments and not taking discounts is a direct response to that. I honestly think the owner has all the remaining cash in a high yield savings account and thinks a month of interest is going to make a difference. I mean, when there was a cool 10 mill sitting in there and making entire salaries in a month, sure. But the discounts across the board out pace whatever rate were looking at. Maybe? It might actually be worthwhile. I couldn't tell you because they're so tight fisted about about information being shared, but the corporate card is saved on like a dozen peoples browsers and the passwords for everything used to be stored on an open excel file on the shared drive. Not even hidden, just in the accounting folder and labeled 'passwords'. We didn't have an accounting email until last year. And even now they have this aversion to putting anything in an email. So any question is just met with emails going "please come to my office to discuss." We're still filling filing cabinets with reams of printed invoices, but ask for last year's balance sheet or income statement or even this months bank statement? It's 3 days of meetings arguing about whether or not we have to comply with IRS audit requests and if we can give them a statement omitting the apartment they rent in town thst no one lives in and has been empty for 2 years but will has an active Internet account? I'm telling you, if I was back in college they couldn't use this place as a case study because it's too unrealistic with how pamfs in head it is. On the plus side, there are still people here who think we'll get a small bonus despite missing sales goal by 30mil and profit goal by 15. LMAO.
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Dec 22, 2023 06:46
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Re bonus chat, every Christmas the massive multinational I work in gives me Amazon vouchers equivalent to 0.14% of my yearly. I really don’t know why they bother.
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Dec 22, 2023 08:25
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My work does profit sharing which is nice, I just started like 3 months ago and halfway was when the sharing hit. I think I got 13 bucks which is fair since it gets prorated on how long you've been there I don't think there's yearly bonuses below manager level, but I also don't think they tie the profit sharing to your performance
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Dec 22, 2023 13:49
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DrBouvenstein posted:We've been told that our current PDF editing software, eCopy, is EOL and we are NOT to deploy it. install LaTeX on all of those crappy old laptops: it’s free and surely will cause no frustration. e: if they need to *edit*, MikTeX comes with Ghostscript to they can edit the pdfs directly with no need to waste time mousing around
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Dec 22, 2023 14:30
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Lazyfire posted:As we were told in our most recent all hands, the money we use to buy back stocks and the money we use to pay employees is from two different buckets and you need to shut the gently caress up if you think you deserve a raise above inflation you crybaby.
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Dec 22, 2023 15:00
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Atopian posted:Establish and publicise "hardware times" at an appropriate interval (twice daily? Once daily? Once weekly?), collect requests and fulfil them when the next scheduled time rolls around. I assure you, I have tried drat near everything. I try to only go down there two or three times a day (oh, and have I mentioned I've got persistent bursitis and tendonitis in my foot since July and I'm currently wearing an orthopedic boot? Cause I do and I am. So it's really annoying for me to make these frequent trips.) The problem arises that one of two things happen: 1)The other IT tech tells me they only JUST heard about it from the user, who says it's an emergency and they need it now. or 2) They fully admit they forgot to ask earlier...BUT the user needs it now because they are leaving early for the day and it's important work from home equipment they need. So I have to still go get off my rear end and get the stuff, because we can't possibly inconvenience any of our users in any way, shape, or form. Never mind the fact that 99% of the time, these are not "user down" scenarios. They are, "I have mismatched monitors, can I get a newer Dell to replace the older HP so both are Dells?" scenarios. But again...upper management has told us we, as best we can, have to fulfill these requests from the business users ASAP and then gently remind them that we prefer as much advance notice, and a formal ticket in the online portal request system. But when we make exceptions to the rules every time, there's functionally no rules. There's really only one other tech who seemingly does try his best to inform me ahead of time and not have every request be ASAP. But he always does so in the most annoying manor. 1) He will walk up and tell me that he is putting in an equipment request for a monitor, for user Generic Person, who sits at Desk 123. 2) He then puts in the request with all the same info he told me. Which, BTW, emails me, appears in my online ticket portal queue, AND SENDS ME A TEAMS MESSAGE. So I really didn't need #1. Or the upcoming #3. 3) He then walks BACK over and tells me he just put the ticket in, and gives me all the details about it again. And then once he gets the equipment and swaps it out for the user, he then has the broken equipment he has to bring back, and then repeat steps 1-3 for the disposal of the equipment.
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Dec 22, 2023 15:41
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