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ItalicSquirrels posted:I'm really proud of my employees, especially after today. We thought today was going to be nice, slow, lots of paperwork backlog to clear out. Nope. Turns out one of our contracts goes on multiple non-consecutive days and this contract was put in a single write-up. This has never been done before (it's always multiple write-ups for multiple days, especially non-consecutive), so no one of the four of us who put these into effect caught it. Maybe it's just me, but this post is pretty unintelligible. Maybe it's just lacking context? I have no idea what you do. Glad your team kicks rear end, though. (e: fixed typo) Cranbe fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 5, 2014 |
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Mar 5, 2014 18:58
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A customer has decided they can do my job better than I can and have decided to take it over, despite not knowing anything about how the process works. I have to e-mail her to get dates for an order, wait for her to get confused and freak out about the previous order that we've already nailed down specifics for, then wait again until she figures out when she wants it. This process takes days via e-mail when we often don't have that much time. This is somehow easier than giving me a schedule like everyone else. This all came about because she was putting "ship ASAP" on absolutely everything. Apparently "asap" does not mean "asap" and the once-weekly updates I send with all their order information, with dates provided 4-6 weeks in advance(!) are just too hard to read.  If it didn't result is several hours extra work per week, I'd kind of tell my boss to go with it just to see the glorious freak outs when something doesn't go the way they think it should. 
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Mar 5, 2014 19:43
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Cranbe posted:Maybe it's just me, but this post is pretty intelligible. Maybe it's just lacking context? I have no idea what you do. It's not just you. I see words there and they form gramatically-correct sentences, but I'm not really deriving any meaning from it. Having dependable teams is awesome, though.
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Mar 5, 2014 20:47
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It's been a magical week, the new org chart came out and my team isn't anywhere on it Nobody knows what's going on and the director is being vague and doesn't want to "speculate" about where we will all end up. I sort of don't care since I'm a consultant and I want out of this contract anyway, but I feel awful for the FTEs and my manager.
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Mar 5, 2014 22:03
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So I did my goals my 2014. And by that I mean my supervisor E-Mailed me what my personal goals should be, and I copy pasted them into whatever system we use for "Employee Growth". On one hand, it seems to go against the spirit of the new goal system they rolled out. On the other had, it made it really easy to do, and the goals amounted to "Continue doing what I'm already doing" which just makes it easier for me at the end of the year. e: It's also worth nothing I set my goals while on a phone call for a different outage.
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Mar 5, 2014 22:08
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peter banana posted:Recruiters always say never take a counter offer from your current employer and its really a case of a broken clock being right twice a day. You stopped committing to that current employer long ago. Move on. The only, and I mean only, time this can be ignored is if someone way, way high up has a political reason to keep you, and is willing to paper over being butthurt at the thought of you leaving in an effort to save face with someone else.
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Mar 5, 2014 23:11
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Tim Thomas posted:The only, and I mean only, time this can be ignored is if someone way, way high up has a political reason to keep you, and is willing to paper over being butthurt at the thought of you leaving in an effort to save face with someone else. There are rare occasions when taking a counteroffer might be the right call. I was working for a web hosting company once that had been bought out by a larger company based in another state. I got an offer from another company that paid a bit more and was probably going to be around longer than our local office. My current boss must have put in a hell of a good word for me with the higher-ups, though, though, because when I turned in my resignation, our parent company countered with a 50% raise, fully paid relocation to their HQ in Atlanta, and a promotion off the phones to tier II support (basically the last stop for tickets before stuff went to the sysadmins themselves). I took that offer and it ended up working out well. That situation was a rare exception to the rule, though, and an offer of "hey, we like you, why not keep working for us in a different position in another state with a big raise instead?" is a lot more likely to be a genuine offer than the usual "oh god you're leaving, here have this token raise so you'll stick around for a few months while we figure out how to replace you with someone cheaper" counteroffer.
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Mar 6, 2014 00:39
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I'm finally in a new position since Nov, and by my, and other accounts, kicking rear end. Im identifying long time problems,inefficiencies, offering streamlined alternatives, the works. And now I get the email from my immediate boss, filling in for the boss boss, to stop after every step and await approval and instructions to move on. So I sat for 6 hours before I am given the go ahead to do what I should have, and was ready for, then. *sigh* time for a frank, honest discussion about expectations and letting people do what you hired them for
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Mar 6, 2014 01:32
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I'm in the unique position of working for a small consulting firm with some extremely large clients, so I get a lot of the good of working small but also get to experience indirectly the horror that is Corporate America. The poo poo I see makes me never want to go corporate but there's always the allure of "if you could make just a few small changes you'd leave your mark forever!!! "
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Mar 6, 2014 02:00
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Man, I used to think that. I made some smart changes that saved my company a bit of money and got chump change for it. I mean, great I saved the company money now my employer can waste more money or give the vice president (employer's son) a raise. Whoopee! I really like the work I do but once I'm in a better position I'm going to start applying for government jobs and that's it. I can stay at my current job forever because it's easy and I only have to put up with stupidity a few times a month so it's not all bad but the experience has convinced me never to work for a company again. Sephiroth_IRA fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Mar 6, 2014 |
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Mar 6, 2014 03:43
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Sundae posted:308 e-mails in my box this morning. They are all reply-alls to a global distribution list asking why they're on the list and please remove them and stop responding to global distribution lists. Had this happen for the first time yesterday. The DL had over 90k addresses, if Outlook is to be believed, so I was pleasantly surprised to only have like 15 emails asking to be removed from it.
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Mar 6, 2014 15:23
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Today I came back from my lunch break 10 minutes early, juuuuust in time to run into my boss and a couple of other coworkers in the lobby, they were on their way to visit a client. "Oh jkk there you are! We were looking for you! Can you take care of this task that needs to be done immediately? The budgeted time is 75 minutes and the deadline is in 40! And by the way, there's nobody around today who can brief you on how to do it, so just read the documentation in our system and don't worry about it too much! Bye, good luck!" Luckily the documentation was pretty clear on how this task was supposed to be done, but I still had to write a bunch of words about a subject matter I'm not very familiar with. I hope I did a reasonable job with it.
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Mar 6, 2014 18:25
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Roundboy posted:I'm finally in a new position since Nov, and by my, and other accounts, kicking rear end. Im identifying long time problems,inefficiencies, offering streamlined alternatives, the works. Sounds like the perfect time to streamline the step he's implemented to stop you streamlining 
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Mar 6, 2014 19:34
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Dukket posted:I put in my two week notice yesterday, at which point I was told they were planning to promote me later this week and would I be willing to stay for said promotion. That made me chuckle. I said "no, it time for me to move on". Quoting for context So, the big boss man CEO was in today to say hello and try to convince me to stay (he's lives and works in another state and comes to town once a quarter or so). He and I have had some idle chat from time to time over the years "how was your drive?" "The pens are on the top shelf" Stuff like that - He can connect my first name and my face, but I'm never in meetings so we just haven't had any interaction. He gives me the "sad to see you go" "you do good work here" lines - then this gem: "So, I've seen your name on a quite a few emails - really I've seen your name lot more then..." (he was going to say my manager's name, but stopped) but I don't really know...uh...so what...um - what is it that you do here...for...the company? What's your title?" It was really funny and I have no idea what my facial expression was like, but it coulda been a good one.
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Mar 7, 2014 01:03
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Consulting as usual. Someone tried to pull retroactive 50% paycut, but I worked things out. The key as an outside worker is to make sure whoever's signing your checks actually reads and reports them, because otherwise someone in chain of command will get sticker shock.
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Mar 7, 2014 01:27
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The powers that be came up with a brilliant solution to our budget problems: take all the staff except for 10 people off the project (Literally. We should have 100+ AT LEAST). I was one of the ones who got kicked off. This is the project I was sticking around to finish out, so now my give-a-poo poo-o-meter has reached 0. I'm sticking around until the end of next month because I need my health insurance for a procedure I have scheduled, then I am going to GTFO.
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Mar 7, 2014 02:42
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So my "career goals" that were closed and approved got somehow reopened and my supervisor told me that I needed to revise goal 3 which was "career planning" (basically work with management on finding a better job in the company) and totally axe it because I only have 9 months of experience. At this point I am pretty done with this clownshoes company.
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Mar 7, 2014 03:03
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https://www.facebook.com/notes/divine-pharaoh/a-scenario-for-a-utopian-society/939453186184
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Mar 7, 2014 04:06
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My campus is being relocated across the country at the end of the year, and I declined the offer to go. I was looking forward to getting laid off, collecting my severance check, doing some traveling and working on some side projects. I had dreams about it. It sounded delightful. Then somehow, through the magic of not giving one single poo poo during the "negotiation" phase of trying to entice my relocation, I have since received a promotion, and a long term travel package for next year. The package will pay me a tax free per diem to cover lodging and food, plus a rental car, and a free round trip ticket home every month. That sounds cool, yes, but here's the thing about the per diem. It's a tax free $200 a day  Oh and since the travel package doesn't re-badge you to your destination, I will remain badged to a site that will closed once I leave, hence ergo when my year of travel is up, I will be insta-laid off and STILL collect my now slightly fatter severance. Plus various other boner inducing perks such as open season on comp time during my year. Meaning that I could finish the year with like 3-6 months of comp time due to me, which would either be paid in full as a check, or simply provide me a very long, very paid vacation before my ultimate layoff. I turns out, I can be bought *single tear* 
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Mar 8, 2014 04:03
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we're a small luxury accounting firm so everyone is technically client service on top of whatever else they do because when [US SENATOR] demands to speak with the person doing his domestic servant taxes, he's drat well going to speak to them. I was recently given the job of answering all emails to our client service email address that arrive between x and y hours (another 2 associates are in charge of answering emails that come in between other sets of hours to divide the work, which is unfair because more emails come in during my assigned hours but whatever). Emails arrive in a big pool everyone can see. Two days into my new task, answering fuckloads of emails on top of the other tax accounting nonsense I do, my boss asks me by email, "did you know you're supposed to answer emails now?" I responded letting her know, yes, I did know I was supposed to do that, and in fact I was doing that, just as instructed. I think her response was "wasn't sure, just checking!  "I got a similar email the other day asking if I was doing task x or emails. When I said emails, she also said something like "oh I couldn't tell." So I guess I could have been sitting on my rear end doing gently caress all and my boss wouldn't know the difference. Hooray. Not to mention my computer is like 6 feet away from hers and she could have glanced at my computer screen at any time. Or she could check the sent messages. Or notice the number of emails in the inbox decreasing? Maybe instead of working I should masturbate in the bathroom.
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Mar 8, 2014 16:59
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Something like that is better to ask than assume. I sent an email to someone on Monday telling them they needed to wire money out of their account (specifically) by Wednesday or there would be a $10,000 late fee. I asked on Wednesday if she did it since I hadn't gotten a response, and she said she didn't because she didn't have access to the account (referencing another account that hadn't even been opened yet). I guess she just wasn't going to respond and figured it would be sorted out at some point.
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Mar 8, 2014 18:17
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Xibanya posted:Not to mention my computer is like 6 feet away from hers and she could have glanced at my computer screen at any time. Or she could check the sent messages. Or notice the number of emails in the inbox decreasing? It sounds like you don't even need to worry about going to the bathroom if your boss can't be bothered to look over at you every once in a while 
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Mar 9, 2014 02:09
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Honestly those comments sound less like she's not paying attention and more like she thinks you're doing a bad job for whatever reason.Xibanya posted:
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Mar 9, 2014 02:54
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Xibanya posted:I got a similar email the other day asking if I was doing task x or emails. When I said emails, she also said something like "oh I couldn't tell." It's hard to say for sure, but I'm thinking that you should just stick her name in BCC for every email until she asks you to stop.
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Mar 9, 2014 03:16
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:It's hard to say for sure, but I'm thinking that you should just stick her name in BCC for every email until she asks you to stop. Yes, passive aggressive e-mail spam is my favorite thing in the world. We rolled out a new internal tool here that everybody hates. Every day we'd compile all the bugs and issues we ran into, and e-mail them to the developers for investigation. The developers made believe they didn't see the e-mail and insisted that the tool was working perfectly, and a few weeks went by without any acknowledgment. Eventually we got fed up and started e-mailing each individual instance of a particular bug to them as it occurred, which ended up being every single ticket we created. After about two hours of this they told us that they started working on a fix and for god's sake stop with those blasted e-mails. (A week later they rolled out the fix which broke it even more, they rolled it back and have since given up on it. Yes these are contractors.) e: Also it's worth mentioning that this bug was incorrect times being put into tickets, marking the create time 10 minutes later than it should have been. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal except management refused to acknowledge the issue as well and they started pulling metrics on us to see if we were below the 15 minute SLA. So just from tools misreporting we looked like we were doing really lovely, when in actuality the numbers were very comfortably within our SLA. Renegret fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Mar 9, 2014 |
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Mar 9, 2014 14:36
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Renegret posted:e: Also it's worth mentioning that this bug was incorrect times being put into tickets, marking the create time 10 minutes later than it should have been. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal except management refused to acknowledge the issue as well and they started pulling metrics on us to see if we were below the 15 minute SLA. So just from tools misreporting we looked like we were doing really lovely, when in actuality the numbers were very comfortably within our SLA. This works in your favour though? It gives you 25 minutes to meet the 15 minute SLA.
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Mar 9, 2014 15:50
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EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:This works in your favour though? It gives you 25 minutes to meet the 15 minute SLA. Other way around, I did an incredibly lovely job explaining it. They're measuring time it takes to act on alerts that come in. Without going into too much detail, the alerts are coming in time stamped 10 minutes in the past. That means I'll get an alert at 10:10AM saying something broke at 10AM, and I need to have a ticket created by 10:15AM. Also the ticketing system runs on a 5 minute cycle, so if I catch the back end of the cycle I come very close to missing SLA assuming I was right on it without a moment's delay. The process is heavily automated, alerts come in, we verify, then send it to a ticketing queue where a ticket is automatically created and a bunch of scripts are ran on it. The only action we need to take is the validation aspect of it and sending it to the ticketing queue, but every attempt at automating the validation has failed miserably because our developers are just that bad and can't even get time stamps right. I understand why it doesn't work as far as the back end is concerned, but I don't give a poo poo because their gently caress up is making me look bad to management. Renegret fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Mar 9, 2014 |
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Mar 9, 2014 16:03
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Renegret posted:Other way around, I did an incredibly lovely job explaining it. Sounds like a great entry for this thread!
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Mar 9, 2014 17:11
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Volmarias posted:Sounds like a great entry for this thread! Yeah, I've posted a few times there and I've read the entire thing but what I do isn't a very good fit. I've probably mentioned that before in passing as part of some metric woe. Part of the reason I don't think my job fits that well is that I work at a NOC, so my job is to be the rear end in a top hat that wakes up the people in that thread at 3AM on a Sunday because some server poo poo the bed and I'm not smart/trained/informed enough to know that it's a test server mistakenly added to monitoring. Basically I am the enemy. My day today has been to listen to some grumpy people on a troubleshooting call who convened on that call at 11PM last night to stand by and verify that nothing goes wrong for Daylight savings. Then Daylight savings hit and...everything broke. Most of these people have been awake for over 24 hours at this point and they're at each other's throats. I think it's hilarious because I have no involvement with it anymore, I don't have to touch it until it's fixed.
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Mar 9, 2014 17:42
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Renegret posted:Yeah, I've posted a few times there and I've read the entire thing but what I do isn't a very good fit. It is a good fit.
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Mar 9, 2014 18:22
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jkk posted:Today I came back from my lunch break 10 minutes early, juuuuust in time to run into my boss and a couple of other coworkers in the lobby, they were on their way to visit a client. "Oh jkk there you are! We were looking for you! Can you take care of this task that needs to be done immediately? The budgeted time is 75 minutes and the deadline is in 40! And by the way, there's nobody around today who can brief you on how to do it, so just read the documentation in our system and don't worry about it too much! Bye, good luck!" This happens to me and my team constantly. I'd like to think we're just a bunch of magicians, because we tend to be able to pull reasonably well-written content on topics we have no knowledge about out of our collective asses. In other news I applied for a job that I am totally passionate about but is a bit sideways from what I currently do. I hope I get it but I fear for my team if I leave, because I am basically acting as a dam at the moment and if I leave I think they're going to drown in garbage because there won't be anyone in my position to push things back.
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Mar 10, 2014 21:20
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Okay. Office manager has access to a shared drive folder that absolutely nobody else has access to except The Director. The Director barely knows how to use his computer and only vaguely knows what shared drives are. Director gave the office manager some confidential task to do and had her work on it over her lunch because it's so drat important that he needs it NOW. An hour later she goes to ask him a question about it ... and he's gone home for the day! So much for needing it now. He pulls this poo poo on her regularly and I hear her spew streams of curse words and I solemnly nod in approval. Except then I find out the next morning that she had some doctor appointment and will be two hours late for work. And The Director wants his project. I don't have access to the shared drive folder and he does. What is your solution, Mr. Director? Don't look in the folder for it, even though it is doubtless already completed and waiting for you, as you have mentally Usually, the people in charge are so far removed from reality that they make your life hell without trying (and when they ARE trying, god help you). So the laity knows to do bizarre contortions that conform to this upside-down version of reality. We know these contortions are far easier than being pummeled by the fallout that results from trying to merge the two realities together. (Insert physics and/or Star Trek references here.) I call my reality common sense. I haven't been working in this vortex long enough to know much about the nature of the other reality except that it has stemmed from almost thirty years of office politics. I fear that like Persephone, eating too much of the fruit of this Underworld will taint me in a way that will make it impossible for me to be capable of existing in either reality. That or I need to form a drinking problem to cope with these idiots (except these idiots don't pay me enough to afford alcohol).
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Mar 11, 2014 02:08
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So my yearly review came in! And it went exactly how it went for almost everyone else in this thread! Fantastic comments across the board, not a single negative. Encouragement to keep up the excellent work! Average marks across the board. This is just six days after my director gave a mini speech about management looking to acknowledge and reward hard workers and high performers, he then forces his supervisors to give every single person the same exact score. So thank you TPS report thread, because I knew exactly what to expect walking into my review, and I got exactly what I expected. Money will be discussed in a separate meeting so that self growth and compensation can be kept apart and focused on evenly, word on the street is 3%. I'm glad I had this review, now I know I have room to slack off to still get the same raise for next year.
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Mar 11, 2014 22:39
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For awhile now we have had issues getting samples done on time, this seemed to be because we have more projects that need complex tests which tie up worker bee time. So a few months ago the department head announced that to solve the problem a new manager was hired, I am still perplexed as to how he was supposed to help since for his salary we could have hired another three or four worker bees to help with the busy workload. Apparently after observing the workflow in the department for a month, the new manager has determined that the problem with testing not getting done on time is due to the QC worker bees dropping what they are doing to run more important samples. So the new policy for now on all is that each type of testing will get done on one day a week. So for example Tuesday is now KF day, if I need a KF and it's not KF day I need to come back when it's KF day to get results. In the past I'd giggle at the QC bees misfortune but my group reports to manager as well and once he's done "improving" QC I think my group will be improved as well once this guy is done making the QC group want to kill them selves. *Edit* tried to unfuck it so its more readable. Shrieking Muppet fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 02:56
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Ezekiel_980 posted:For awhile now we have had issues getting samples done of time this seemed to be because we have more projects that need complex time intensive tests which tie up worker bee time. So a few months ago the department head bee announced that to solve the problem a new manager bee was hired, I am still perplexed as to how he was supposed to help since for his salary we could have hired another three or four worker bees to help with the busy workload but I am only a worker bee and don't know anything but what I am told. Apparently after observing the workflow in the department for a month manager bee has determined that the problem with testing not getting done on time is due to the QC bees not focusing their work correctly. Thus For now on all of a particular type of testing will get done on one day a week. So if I need a KF and it's not KF day I need to come back when it's KF day to get results. In the past I'd giggle at the QC bees misfortune but my group reports to manager bee as well and once he's done "improving" QC I think my group will be improved as well because we have more work than worker bees. This is slightly more intelligible than ItalicSquirrels' post from the previous page, but holy poo poo is it infinitely harder to read.
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Mar 12, 2014 03:24
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Penguissimo posted:This is slightly more intelligible than ItalicSquirrels' post from the previous page, but holy poo poo is it infinitely harder to read. I think this is the logical end result of corporate style writing. My supervisor takes a few paragraphs to write what can be condensed down in two or three sentences.
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Mar 12, 2014 04:50
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Sundae posted:308 e-mails in my box this morning. They are all reply-alls to a global distribution list asking why they're on the list and please remove them and stop responding to global distribution lists. PS http://www.ilovebees.com/ Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 04:50
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I'm on a few global lists I wish I could unsubscribe from (like a 6am reminder on timesheets, every single day) , but that's what Outlook rules are for.
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Mar 12, 2014 04:52
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Xandu posted:I'm on a few global lists I wish I could unsubscribe from (like a 6am reminder on timesheets, every single day) , but that's what Outlook rules are for. All new mail -> Move to folder: Trash 
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Mar 12, 2014 05:10
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Peven Stan posted:I think this is the logical end result of corporate style writing. My supervisor takes a few paragraphs to write what can be condensed down in two or three sentences. Why is that evasive, verbose bullshit so common? It's an epidemic.
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Mar 12, 2014 06:44
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