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I moved into a role that needed me to be able to work at multiple sites so was given a tremendously old piece of poo poo laptop that had been being kicked around the building for years before I got it (still had a “windows vista ready” sticker on it in 2019!), right as we went into Covid lockdown and WFH became the norm rather than the exception. Battery life could be measured in seconds but it was just about capable of doing what I needed to do with it when docked at a desk so I just stuck with it. About a month into lockdown it started blue screening multiple times a day, and despite the fact the company had just started bulk buying brand new machines to roll out across the entire company to enable them to WFH so had literal pallets of spare laptops just hanging out in the empty office buildings, I still had to jump through a million hoops to get IT to replace my very obviously hosed laptop. Because it was happening completely at random the local IT team said it wasn’t a reproducable fault so tough poo poo, and in the end I resorted to just sending my boss a photo of the BSOD every time it happened until it was happening more than once an hour and IT finally relented.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:00
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if i heard my admins were treating users like that. hoo i would not be pleased.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:04
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History Comes Inside! posted:I moved into a role that needed me to be able to work at multiple sites so was given a tremendously old piece of poo poo laptop that had been being kicked around the building for years before I got it (still had a “windows vista ready” sticker on it in 2019!), right as we went into Covid lockdown and WFH became the norm rather than the exception. Battery life could be measured in seconds but it was just about capable of doing what I needed to do with it when docked at a desk so I just stuck with it. Right at the beginning of COVID my wife's office got nice new monitors and docks for their laptops. I don't know the exact specs, but from the way she described it I'm guessing something like 27" 1440p with a decent refresh rate. Everyone goes WFH and people start putting in requests for monitors at home once it's clear that we're in for the long haul. IT really, REALLY does not want to let people out of the building with equipment but eventually relents. They cleared out some ancient loving storage closet instead of letting people have the good equipment. My wife came home with some gently caress ancient 4:3 aspect ratio screen that was something like 16 inches. Just horrible loving image quality. It had a VGA connector on it so they also sent her home with an adapter that was clearly the absolutely cheapest garbage that they could order off Amazon. Those nice, new monitors rotted on people's empty desks until they finally closed down that office location in favor of a smaller one towards the end of the lock down. No one got them, we think they surplussed them out. I ended up buying a new monitor for my gaming PC half way through COVID and just threw her the old one that i was replacing. When she left that job I made drat sure she gave them that ancient loving monitor back because I didn't want htat crap in our closet any more.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:08
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/\/\/\ oh man yeah glad you lobbed that back their way they were trying to pass off the task of disposing of that poo poo lol History Comes Inside! posted:A nd in the end I resorted to just sending my boss a photo of the BSOD every time it happened until it was happening more than once an hour and IT finally relented. It was this scenario but with bosses in absentia so no one ever relented, it was just this horrible void of everyone absolutely ignoring all of my documentation. That is the company literally paying their workers to put together the data on why they can't work and then ignoring that very data they paid a premium for lol Meanwhile cost consultants will be rolling in like 'wheres all the money going??' StrangersInTheNight fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 23, 2024 15:11
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Today is the annual company meeting. They spent 120 bucks on noise makers. I walked into screaming and dooting as HR and their lackey ran around the conference room attacking each other with noise makers. The owner was sipping her coffee. Oh god she just walked down the hall and shouted "Execution! That's what we do." I hope to be on the chopping block.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:17
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Weirdly despite their reluctance to replace my obviously broken poo poo the same IT dept were happy to let the vultures descend and absolutely pick the building clean for docks and monitors when it was clear nobody was going back to the office for a while. The duality of admin. Edit: actually it’s probably because it was all ancient garbage roughly the same vintage as my laptop History Comes Inside! fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 23, 2024 15:17
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I mean, the pressure of competing with each other for resources to get your work done disappears once the company folds so yeah, makes sense to me. 'I'll protect this kingdom while you're paying me, but not a moment beyond' is fair enough EDIT: also yeh a lot of it is probably trash they'd have to figure out how to get rid of lol giving it away is another chore done. StrangersInTheNight fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 23, 2024 15:24
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I don't know why anyone would want to switch out a pc or phone that is working. It always takes me forever to get everything copied over and all the settings right for how I'm used to. And I inevitably forget something that breaks my workflow, like forgetting to copy my macros so my monthly reports take a whole day again instead of 10 minutes.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:37
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https://twitter.com/thetomzone/status/1760833981904228508?t=-k0srnC-f9jUMilW-iKfLw&s=19 Not sure why IT didn't poo poo down all of his account access, unless slack was his personal email But also, lol
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Feb 23, 2024 15:40
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It's s just really frustrating that most corps handle IT by setting up a mini version of capitalism and relying on the worker competition for resources to keep the bottom line as lean as possible. 'Work against each other to save us money in this one way, ignore that it is entirely inefficient if the goal is smooth collaboration'. Most companies could afford to give their workers better tech and still make plenty of profit, but will not unless it's absolutely necessary. It's just more scraping extra dollars from us, the workers, to give to their bosses. StrangersInTheNight fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 23, 2024 15:45
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StrangersInTheNight posted:and still make plenty of profit, Hey now, that's implying that the goal isn't to make all the profit.
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Feb 23, 2024 16:00
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StrangersInTheNight posted:It's s just really frustrating that most corps handle IT by setting up a mini version of capitalism and relying on the worker competition for resources to keep the bottom line as lean as possible. 'Work against each other to save us money in this one way, ignore that it is entirely inefficient if the goal is smooth collaboration'. When I first started at my previous company they were expanding so fast that CSC (now DXC) couldn't keep up with doing refreshes of the current employees and get new hardware to freshly hired people and so played a shell game where those onboarding were given the old PCs and the new PCs were being installed as required. This backfired for me and a few others when we completed training and were using TeamCenter heavy client on 1.35GHz DUAL CORE Dell desktops boasting an amazing 2GB of RAM. This was 2014 and they expected us to load models and BOM export files on something I wouldn't try to OPEN TC on five years earlier. The company priorities were to refreshing the existing machines regardless of the programs they used. It took me almost four months to get a PC that could handle the things I was being asked to do because I was so vocal about it. Others took over a year to get something they could use because they just didn't submit tickets. I eventually built a desk map of people who had more modern PCs and their schedules. On weekends and on the days those people had off (many worked 4 10 hour days) you would see people running back and forth between stations trying to get things processed.
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Feb 23, 2024 17:07
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When covid first hit and the whole company went to WFH, the problem of home-office hardware came up. Everyone at my company was already on laptops, but the monitors and whatnot were all mounted to the desks. Getting them unmounted, and distributed, and shipped, and tracked, and reclaimed, would be an enormous nightmare for an IT department that was already stretched to the limit by all the sudden changes. So the company simply threw some money at the problem to make it go away: everyone got a one-time 400 dollar stipend with which to improve their home workstation to their liking. If we wanted a monitor or two, or a standing desk, or anything else, we could just go buy it ourselves. If you already had a setup you liked, then congrats, enjoy the money anyway, the entire point was that the company didn't want to deal with the bureaucratic overhead of approving and tracking and reimbursing all that random mismatched poo poo. If you left the company, they wanted the laptop back but not anything you bought yourself with the stipend. It worked very well, both for us regular employees and for the company itself, which completely avoided a huge ongoing headache with a one-time cash outlay that probably worked out cheaper in the long run.
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Feb 23, 2024 17:19
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Powered Descent posted:When covid first hit and the whole company went to WFH, the problem of home-office hardware came up. Everyone at my company was already on laptops, but the monitors and whatnot were all mounted to the desks. Getting them unmounted, and distributed, and shipped, and tracked, and reclaimed, would be an enormous nightmare for an IT department that was already stretched to the limit by all the sudden changes. My work did the exact same thing. I got myself a comfy chair and a really nice gaming monitor. Everything else I already had. It definitely made the transition easier and I've been WFH since.
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Feb 23, 2024 18:47
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My workplace sent everyone home with whatever was in their desk, then after the fact we had to fill out a register with the serial numbers of the things we took I already had everything to plug my laptop into so it made no difference to me, but I did end up getting to use 3 monitors (2 monitors and a laptop) for a time
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Feb 23, 2024 18:51
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My job at the time scrambled to get everyone WFH literally the day after the pandemic was announced, and I'm pretty sure they didn't keep track of equipment at all. They gave us a one day notice to essentially ransack the office for whatever equipment we would need and anything from our desks we wanted to take with us. I quit that job 3 full years ago and I still have the lovely Chromebook just taking up space in my closet. I made a couple attempts to contact them to get it sent back but they never actually followed up with me to tell me how to get it back to them.
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Feb 23, 2024 18:57
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We got gently caress and all with my work. Half my coworkers are still using their laptop screen. I already had my gaming setup but you better bet I wasn't reimbursed for the USB hub, monitor switch, etc. that I picked up. Frankly I don't really care. All told it was something like $200 which, yeah, I'd like it back but also they haven't crawled up my rear end about coming back into the office. At this point I'm more than happy to write that off and stay working in my underwear.
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Feb 23, 2024 18:58
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For anything additional we wanted to buy we couldn't be reimbursed, but you could claim it on your taxes so that's something But hey, nerds stay winning
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Feb 23, 2024 18:59
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Just had a 2-hour meeting because, after weeks of working on it, one coworker cannot understand the concept of "deadlines". We have all our timelines for projects approved, and by mid-January I had the due dates for every project put on a task board. I literally just needed people to go into a project board I created and just work backwards from the due date I had input. IE "Your project is due on August 30th, so work backwards from that and add in deadlines and timelines for each of the 5 major tasks to complete that project, which have a consistent amount of time required for each". It was literally just looking and saying "Project is due August 30th, so work backwards from that by subtracting the number of days required for each task until all tasks have timelines and deadlines". I had to bring in my direct manager to sit down in this meeting and explain to one person how this works. Questions included: "How do we know when the project is due?" "How do we know the timelines for each task?" "Do we need to pick our own timelines?" "What do I do is a task is due on the 10th, but I have already finished it by the 5th?" This coworker is 40~ years old.
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Feb 23, 2024 19:56
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Hotel Kpro posted:I know I get bothered when I can’t see other windows. Nothing is minimized and everything is all over the place but dammit it works for me Even as an old Windows user I kind of get that - though I will say that the Exposé clone thing on win+tab (or four fingers up on the trackpad) has completely resolved my "where even are my things" worries. It's very much like relying on search instead of meticulous sorting for your email, though; it's not for everyone.
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Feb 23, 2024 21:10
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The job titles that show up in m365/Teams are all messed up One of the QAs has "Qualty Assurance" as their title like come ON man. I pointed this out to the IT guy, who seems to be the guy in charge of this stuff. My title changed, everyone else's is still the same. Nobody in my company gives a gently caress about anything lol
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Feb 24, 2024 01:53
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Feb 24, 2024 02:41
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Another reminder we need thread title images.
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Feb 24, 2024 02:46
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I apparently am going to become unfettered from "objectives" and "targets" soon so I dont even know what I do anymore or what my company like, does, but the bonus was fat.
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Feb 24, 2024 03:39
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Barudak posted:I apparently am going to become unfettered from "objectives" and "targets" soon so I dont even know what I do anymore or what my company like, does, but the bonus was fat. Your job is to say exactly that on the stand.
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Feb 24, 2024 04:31
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Barudak posted:I apparently am going to become unfettered from "objectives" and "targets" soon so I dont even know what I do anymore or what my company like, does, but the bonus was fat. The job I have now is the first job I've ever had like this and it weirds me out. There's almost nothing for me to do most of the time and they really don't care that I just sit around shitposting on the internet or whatever with the rest of my time. I'm not measured on literally anything beyond "are you available when we need you?". I have ~30-45 minutes of tasks to do in the morning and then the rest of the day I pretty much just answer the phone 3 or 4 times, and none of those calls have ever lasted more than 2 minutes because it's literally just someone saying "Hey I need you to figure out schedules for [xyz] because [so and so] called out." or something, and I say "okay I'll do that" then spend a minute doing it. And the best part is it's a not-for-profit organization that doesn't outsource anything except IT so I'll probably never get cut. It's truly the most blessed job I've ever had but I also worry constantly that I'm supposed to be doing more because every job I've ever had had been "always find something to be doing and continue meeting ever-expanding KPIs", lmao. But I'm also filling a position that they couldn't operate without so ????. I'm making enough money to live alone and pay out of pocket for school (which they're reimbursing 100% for me anyway!). I don't want things to ever change. Hell, I don't even want to graduate and move on to something else at this point. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Feb 24, 2024 |
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Feb 24, 2024 04:43
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FYI given half the chance I will kidnap you and do a Faceoff regardless of how ugly you are. Just giving you fair warning so I don't feel too guilty about it.
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Feb 24, 2024 04:50
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Ravus Ursus posted:Dumb poo poo your work does: "Execution! That's what we do."
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Feb 24, 2024 04:57
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deep dish peat moss posted:The job I have now is the first job I've ever had like this and it weirds me out. There's almost nothing for me to do most of the time and they really don't care that I just sit around shitposting on the internet or whatever with the rest of my time. I'm not measured on literally anything beyond "are you available when we need you?". I have ~30-45 minutes of tasks to do in the morning and then the rest of the day I pretty much just answer the phone 3 or 4 times, and none of those calls have ever lasted more than 2 minutes because it's literally just someone saying "Hey I need you to figure out schedules for [xyz] because [so and so] called out." or something, and I say "okay I'll do that" then spend a minute doing it. And the best part is it's a not-for-profit organization that doesn't outsource anything except IT so I'll probably never get cut. My job is kind of like that and I feel the same way. Ostensibly I am watching the ticket queue 8 hours a day and responding accordingly, but we self assign tickets and there isn't usually enough volume for us all to be busy with that, and there isn't any hard time pressure on most things or any clear structure for who should be doing what so a lot of the time my actual job duties are "???" or "I guess I'll play video games until someone emails me something I care about" and it all ends up making me alternate between anxiety and apathy.
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Feb 24, 2024 05:28
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I thought I was on a full on sinecure on the project I was on that just wrapped up but no, that still had deliverables and things. I've since transferred to the beleaguered 3-year-duration-project-because-????? which discussions with the client VP in charge (same as the last one) has left me to believe I'm really just here to make people shut the gently caress up when they try blaming the functionality I am an expert in. I just wrapped up 2 weeks of on site testing with everybody like "this project sure does suck doesn't it?" meanwhile I am trying to keep a straight face while thinking "haha I kind of feel like I'm on vacation."
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Feb 24, 2024 05:55
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There was a slide with this on it. It had a clip art of a crying grim reaper. We sell Chinese made arts and crafts to dollar stores. I've never seen such an inversion between perceived vs actual value.
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Feb 24, 2024 13:28
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deep dish peat moss posted:It's truly the most blessed job I've ever had but I also worry constantly that I'm supposed to be doing more because every job I've ever had had been "always find something to be doing and continue meeting ever-expanding KPIs", lmao. But I'm also filling a position that they couldn't operate without so ????. I'm making enough money to live alone and pay out of pocket for school (which they're reimbursing 100% for me anyway!). I don't want things to ever change. Hell, I don't even want to graduate and move on to something else at this point. Don't feel bad - availability is an asset. Your not doing anything is the point. Its basic elevator theory. If you always need to be able to take the elevator whenever you want, you need at least one that is always empty and on standby. In order to have someone who is ready on a moments notice, they can't be full-up on other tasks. The idleness is exactly what makes you suited for the position. This is why loading up a receptionist with tasks because they're supposedly 'idle' is a bad idea, because their main function is to be available for patrons. The things you gotta watch out with these jobs is something I call night watchmen syndrome*, where you kinda get fatigued being on alert all the time while nothing is happening and get lax. Or you might end up constantly tightly wound while idle because you have a quiet job where you have to be ready to spring at a moments notice, such that you have trouble relaxing in your own time. It's about filling up the large swaths of time while still managing to be there for those key moments, which seems easy but a lot of people end up getting bored and wandering away when they have gigs like this and gambling on if they'll be called on. Staying 'on' for hours on end while no one is calling on you can take a toll, and the constant waiting can make the days long and not super fulfilling. So it becomes kind of a mental battle with the self, monk-type poo poo. *= I call it this bc it's what I imagine would happen to old night watchmen of yore, needing to be 'on' to watch poo poo for everybody all night, but often not having much of anything going on while doing so. And night watchmen were incredibly valuable to a community, even if the work they're doing is 'just' standing by and watching over things; and in order to do it well it was basically their only function. StrangersInTheNight fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Feb 24, 2024 |
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Feb 24, 2024 13:40
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Reading laptop stories: My work sent me a brand new laptop, unprompted, well over two years ago now and never said anything about it then, doesn't know about it now, and my old laptop works fine. Kinda want to just "make it disappear" into my collection
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Feb 24, 2024 15:01
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When I got laid off along with 2000+ people, they just told everyone to keep their laptops. They did a remote wipe and then it was free and clear. I guess they didn’t want to bother with the logistics of getting them all back, whether it be hounding people to return them or how to then resell or reuse them. Easier to write it off. Now I have a Macbook M1 Max with 64 GB that can poo poo post extremely well!!
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Feb 24, 2024 15:30
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Cool Dad posted:My job is kind of like that and I feel the same way. Ostensibly I am watching the ticket queue 8 hours a day and responding accordingly, but we self assign tickets and there isn't usually enough volume for us all to be busy with that, and there isn't any hard time pressure on most things or any clear structure for who should be doing what so a lot of the time my actual job duties are "???" or "I guess I'll play video games until someone emails me something I care about" and it all ends up making me alternate between anxiety and apathy. That's kinda how my team is - we have a queue and self-assign (Except for occasionally the boss will pick one of us to handle something specific). Some days poo poo hits the fan and gets busy, but largely it's - IM the users in all my tickets to ask if the issue is still happening - F5 our queues to see if anything new comes in - Maybe actually handle users responding to the morning's IM - Shitpost on my phone, watch TV, and if I'm at home, play my Switch Long as our work gets done and we don't cause HR incidents, he doesn't give a poo poo what we do - hell, he has one monitor connected to a gaming laptop and plays Diablo for a bit each day. Meanwhile, the other teams are holding on to tickets from loving July and take a week to replace a dead laptop.
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Feb 24, 2024 18:41
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Captain Yossarian posted:Reading laptop stories: My work sent me a brand new laptop, unprompted, well over two years ago now and never said anything about it then, doesn't know about it now, and my old laptop works fine. Kinda want to just "make it disappear" into my collection It's yours
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Feb 25, 2024 00:37
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It's mine
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Feb 25, 2024 00:37
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Cthulu Carl posted:That's kinda how my team is - we have a queue and self-assign (Except for occasionally the boss will pick one of us to handle something specific). Some days poo poo hits the fan and gets busy, but largely it's I'm part of a team of nine and we do a weekly rotation for queue manager. That works out pretty well, except whoever has the queue also has to handle capex items that come up; getting them set up right with a PC can drag for weeks and weeks.
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Feb 25, 2024 00:56
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mllaneza posted:I'm part of a team of nine and we do a weekly rotation for queue manager. That works out pretty well, except whoever has the queue also has to handle capex items that come up; getting them set up right with a PC can drag for weeks and weeks. We're apparently just hyper-competitive - no one did anything to encourage it, we just are - so the year we actually had a team managing our queue and assigning us tickets was oddly enough a year we didn't perform as well because I guess we respond to micro-managing by just slowing down a bit so they stop assigning the tickets to us?
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Feb 25, 2024 01:20
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My personal MacBook (that I was using for my few admin tasks at work) died about a year into my job here. They gave me one of the boss’ old ones. The battery doesn’t function at all, it must be plugged in at all times. We have an immensely bloated google sheet tracking all our brews, with a tab for every single one (413 tabs as of current), and this thing will barely load it. I spend about half an hour cumulative per day just waiting for this one spreadsheet to chug into existence. The H key only works sometimes. A chrome book is what, a few hundred bux? The sales guys have literal gaming laptops. Like, I know admin isn’t a big part of my job, but I still need to be able to do my inventory management and brew tracking. I do want to replace my personal laptop this year but gently caress if I’m going to bring a new personal lappy to work, I barely make a living wage here.
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Feb 25, 2024 01:33
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