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Esmerelda posted:My boss does this all the time. He also walks back to the restrooms while talking on his bluetooth, for some reason I find that sort of creepy. So he just walks to the restrooms while talking on the phone? I've seen people talk on the phone while in the bathroom, as in at the urinals or in a stall.  Next time I see anyone do this I'm going to immediately flush the nearest toilet before they can hang up.
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Aug 15, 2012 20:07
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About a year ago I was sitting in a stall and someone walked in and chose the stall next to me. Well that's a little odd since there were seven to choose from, but whatever. Maybe the dude just didn't see my feet. Or doesn't care. Whatever. That's not the creepy part. The creepy part is that about ten seconds after he sits down I hear this super cheerful, "Hi!" I was stunned. But being brought up to always be polite, I give back a sort of timid, "Hey," and try to decide if I can risk squeezing off here and getting the hell out or if I really need to see this through. Then I get a still cheerful, "How's it going?" I decide that I really need to get the hell out because maybe I'll see his head appearing Wilson-style underneath the divider. "It's going okay," I reply, hurrying up, "But I really think I need to go now, I mean-" "Hold on," he mutters. "Do you mind, buddy? I'm on the phone here!" And that's why it's creepy. Not because you're having a conversation with someone while taking a dump, because you don't know how close the two people conversing are. Maybe they always used to take a dump together back in college, right onto that hooker's chest. No, it's loving creepy because that person is very likely going to scare the holy hell out of some poor unsuspecting person.
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Aug 15, 2012 20:11
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mobby_6kl posted:So he just walks to the restrooms while talking on the phone? I've seen people talk on the phone while in the bathroom, as in at the urinals or in a stall. I flush CONSTANTLY if I'm in the bathroom and someone walks in on the phone. That damned stall is my one moment of peace and quiet during the work day.
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Aug 15, 2012 20:50
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Stoatbringer posted:I had a boss once who would take all his calls on his Bluetooth headset, and stroll up and down the office talking loudly into it, often even sitting on the edge of people's desks while he carried on his conversation. Jesus. I don't understand this mindset at all. How can people be so rude?
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Aug 15, 2012 21:44
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mobby_6kl posted:So he just walks to the restrooms while talking on the phone? I've seen people talk on the phone while in the bathroom, as in at the urinals or in a stall. That's always my cue to loudly perform my well-renowned impression: 'explosive diarrhea'.
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Aug 15, 2012 23:20
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The good: I am no longer sharing an office with 4 other people, and I am now at the brand new, state of the art building. The bad: As a cost cutting measure, we got these weird cube/office hybrids instead of full offices at the new building. It's still an improvement, though. The ugly: The building isn't finished. When we showed up, they had neglected to give us phones, and cabinets, and drawers. I built a temporary shelving unit out of empty cardboard boxes. The washrooms are still being worked on so there are two fully operational washrooms (one for men, one for women) in an 8 floor building. There are electricians in the ceiling and they're still vacuuming drywall dust on a daily basis. The lights keep going on and off while they perform tests, and the fire alarm goes off intermittently. The building will be nice when it's finished... but they shouldn't have moved us in until then.
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Aug 16, 2012 17:30
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Ihad a graphic design job where I would create ads for different magazines, so generally the files I needed to access were larger and complex. The workstation they gave me was loaded with an outdated Photoshop and sported a whopping 512mb of RAM. It took a good 5 minutes to load some files, even more if I happened to have Outlook open at the same time.
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Aug 21, 2012 17:48
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I work for a large european governing body in the medical field. They contract out the IT service desks, of which i'm part off. My boss has been on this desk for 11 years through various agencies. 11 years as a service desk manager, you'd think they'd learn a thing or two. A ticket came in about someone needing a new PC, we just got 2 batches of new computers, some with Core i3 processors, some with Celerons. She not only doesnt know what that means, she has no idea on the performance differences and just dishes them out randomly regardless of the client's needs. So this call came in, one of the team picked it up and she interrupted them saying "Don't give him one of the core 13 computers, give him a celerous one". We, as a team of 6 just stared dumbfounded. 2 of us have quit in the last 2 weeks and i'm quitting in a few more.
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Aug 21, 2012 17:59
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Our office is relocating! A better location, nicer views and everything was supposed to just super... as we were led to believe.  See it was all true, except we're apparently getting shafted anyway! Open floor plan of course, and the floor space evens out to something abysmal like 140sqft per employee (including literally everything like restrooms and public areas). That's really cramped, and I expect loud and obnoxious. I'm not gonna get any work done at all.
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Aug 21, 2012 20:56
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Get some noise-cancelling headphones and take your iPod in.
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Aug 21, 2012 22:03
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Oh god. Old people trying to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. Don't complain about things being different after turning down my offer to make it look and act like XP.  This is both hilarious and horrible at the same time.
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Aug 21, 2012 22:28
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Stoatbringer posted:Get some noise-cancelling headphones and take your iPod in. Haha yeah, we'll have to find ways to deal with it. It's just... some aspects of our group's collaborative work are gonna be difficult, with having hundreds of people strolling by our desks every day. They say we'll have boatloads of conference rooms though! They'd have to be really tiny for that to be true. :whine: Threadkiller Dog fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Aug 21, 2012 |
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Aug 21, 2012 22:30
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So we had a fire drill. Thats alright. Getting a bit of fresh air, weather was nice. Not like the fire drill we had while i was working at an Amazon Warehouse and everyone was in shorts and t-shirts because it was loving hot in there and than we had to stand outside for half an hour and wait to be counted in the middle of the loving winter. Anyway, fire drill's over and we head back in only to be greeted by another fire alarm. Well thats just weird. Half the people aren't even back at their desk. Turns out this time it wasn't a drill. While its important to leave the building as fast as possible in case you hear the alarm. Its also pretty important to turn off all the stoves before you leave if you happen to work in the loving cafeteria...
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Aug 21, 2012 23:24
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dpack_1 posted:I work for a large european governing body in the medical field. Eleven years as a service desk manager seems more like a warning sign to me as opposed to an indication of skill. Threadkiller Dog posted:Haha yeah, we'll have to find ways to deal with it. It's just... some aspects of our group's collaborative work are gonna be difficult, with having hundreds of people strolling by our desks every day. Noise isolating headphones should work better for random office noises. I use in-ear monitors and they work perfectly because you don't even need to play any music (or even plug them in, for that matter) to shut out all the annoying assholes. The biggest problem that I see wrt collaboration is that you can't really have a lively team discussion without disrupting everyone else on the floor so you have to pack and go to conference rooms more often than is really necessary.
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Aug 21, 2012 23:24
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The Berzerker posted:The good: I am no longer sharing an office with 4 other people, and I am now at the brand new, state of the art building.
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Aug 21, 2012 23:43
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GWBBQ posted:Even under comically terrible US labor laws, I'm pretty sure they can't move you into a building without enough bathrooms. Sounds fishy. You can, but your union should file an OSHA suit. It's happened here after our move. Two stalls per gender and that's it for an office with a potential for 40 employees during the slow season. We've already had lines for the men's room, which is a new one on me. Does anyone else get told "Hey, we're all on the same team" by someone who's just done something that really pisses you off and never get told that when things are going well?
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Aug 22, 2012 12:55
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My last days here will be rather absurd. By coincidence, four weeks' time from my notice day is 9/4. This is the Tuesday after Labor Day, and the way HR has scheduled my exit interview I won't be able to really come into my normal office and do any work. Showing up is essentially a formality to match up calendar dates and turn in my keys one day later. This gets better because a batch of new hires is causing office moves, and I am one of the people who is moving. Of course, the new hire will not start work until September 4th, and at that time they'll be in the other office all day anyway. Sure, their computer needs to be be imaged beforehand, but they could probably just image my computer on the 4th before the new hire gets to this office around 4pm, if at all. This is arguably easier than moving all my things to another room for 6 days so that they can then be moved into a closet or something. I have tried to convince them that I should just stay where I am but the procedures for moving and resigning don't really care about each other and THE PROCEDURE MUST BE FOLLOWED.
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Aug 22, 2012 19:08
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oops
transient fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Sep 1, 2012 |
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Aug 23, 2012 03:04
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transient posted:Spent two hours on phone and chat with IT to have the final resolution be that my Salesforce permissions had been altered and they didn't know how to fix it. Let me guess, they closed the ticket at this point? 
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Aug 23, 2012 03:17
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Not corporate but its "corporate"s fault Today I moves a house that was meant to have basic furniture and 50 boxes. We moved 412 boxes. 13 hour day. I told my boss we need to inventory these moves with lists because customer ALWAYS add things on. "We cant change our business process because of one move"  My last day is the friday before labor day and if this poo poo gets pulled again I'm not even bothering with it. He can put on his loving work shirt and do it himself. Maybe policy will miraculously change then!
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Aug 23, 2012 03:24
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GWBBQ posted:Even under comically terrible US labor laws, I'm pretty sure they can't move you into a building without enough bathrooms. Sounds fishy. I'm not entirely sure how many people were on the other floors - we were part of the first batch to be moved in. Also, Canada - not US - and I'm contract, not unionized. My solution was to say "this environment is ridiculous" and work from home for a few days. The building is further along every day, so hopefully it's finished soon. The bathrooms are all up and running now, anyway.
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Aug 23, 2012 04:19
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ItalicSquirrels posted:You can, but your union should file an OSHA suit. It's happened here after our move. Two stalls per gender and that's it for an office with a potential for 40 employees during the slow season. We've already had lines for the men's room, which is a new one on me. This doesn't seem all that ridiculous to me. My office has probably about a hundred people there, if not more, and we work in a larger complex. The restroom on our floor at the end of our hall has two stalls in the women's room and probably the same number in the men's. It's never been an issue, even given that we're sharing it with a couple other companies. I can remember one time I've had to wait for a stall in the ten months I've worked there. Does everyone at your company take breaks at the same time or something?
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Aug 23, 2012 12:55
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kernel panic posted:The restroom on our floor at the end of our hall has two stalls in the women's room and probably the same number in the men's. No, I mean there are literally two stalls per gender for the entire facility. And for the guys, only one of them is a sit-down affair, so if that's occupied you are (ha-ha) poo poo out of luck. And it's less that folks take their breaks at the same time as we have influxes of people heading out or coming back from their shifts. In a couple weeks, we're going to see a seasonal up-swing and we're probably going to have 60+ folks operating out of here. It's a new facility, everything's pretty swank, but no one apart from the Upper Bosses has anything like enough room. I went from sharing an office with two others to sharing with 4 others. Same square footage, too.
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Aug 23, 2012 13:45
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We were notified that people need to stop sleeping in the bathroom stalls. This answers why I heard someone snoring in the handicapped stall last week.
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Aug 23, 2012 15:42
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Pope Mobile posted:We were notified that people need to stop sleeping in the bathroom stalls. This answers why I heard someone snoring in the handicapped stall last week. Well it certainly explains what you heard in the handicapped stall, but it doesn't really explain why someone was sleeping in there. Certainly there's a broom closet somewhere that would be preferable?
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Aug 23, 2012 18:18
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Pope Mobile posted:We were notified that people need to stop sleeping in the bathroom stalls. This answers why I heard someone snoring in the handicapped stall last week. Stall sleepers! There was a guy in our building who would come from the floor below us to sleep in our handicapped stall (bathrooms are in the elevator lobby of each floor). He did it at least twice a day, usually around the same time. He would run the faucet, as if that was loud enough to drown out his snoring. It stopped after about six months. I wonder if he got fired... Nah, probably just picked a different floor.
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Aug 23, 2012 18:20
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davebo posted:Well it certainly explains what you heard in the handicapped stall, but it doesn't really explain why someone was sleeping in there. Certainly there's a broom closet somewhere that would be preferable? Nah, the custodian has keys to all the broom closets. Besides, we're talking about people who literally fall asleep in the midst of working because they're so old and fat. Over 50% of the workforce here is retiring within the next three years.
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Aug 23, 2012 18:24
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Hello fellow time killers - check out http://www.podlinez.com/directory and listen to podcasts on your phone while pretending to make that client call 
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Aug 23, 2012 18:50
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Shai-Hulud posted:While its important to leave the building as fast as possible in case you hear the alarm. Its also pretty important to turn off all the stoves before you leave if you happen to work in the loving cafeteria... Back when I used to fit resturaunt fire systems for a living, it wasn't difficult (or indeed expensive) to fit a system that'd lockout the power/gas to stoves and the like, but common sense and fire procedure often don't go hand-in-hand. We once serviced the system in a factory whose entire fire-stopping mechanism was thus: "turn on sounders and fill the room with CO2" Totally illegal to do this with Halon, but anything suffocating but not poisonous? literally Knock yourself out! Kerbtree fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Aug 23, 2012 |
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Aug 23, 2012 22:12
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I just started a new job for a federally(US) funded NGO as a Section 8 Case Manager although my actual title is far more obscure. There is a woman in my department named Carol who, along with being impolitely unaware of her own obesity, often smells faintly of urine. She's also a cubicle singer and a dedicated user of the speaker phone. But I need some goon advice on another matter. I'm glad to have my own space, even if it is just a cubicle, but there is a particular problem with the arrangement. Before I worked here, this cubicle was the seat of a receptionist, and accordingly has a sort of customer service window in the wall with a counter. On the counter sits the outgoing mail basket for the whole wing of the building. This leads to people constantly walk up to the window to deposit mail and feel it necessary to engage me in polite banter. This wouldn't be so irritating if it didn't happen several times an hour and consistently require me to stop what I'm doing, engage the speaker in conversation, and then return to what I'm doing. I've drawn a picture to illustrate the problem:  I've asked about moving the mail basket and been promptly shut down. So what can I put on that counter, like a plant or something, that would discourage conversation?
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Aug 25, 2012 21:49
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Mr. 47 posted:I've asked about moving the mail basket and been promptly shut down. So what can I put on that counter, like a plant or something, that would discourage conversation? A giant dildo. Are you allowed to wear headphones? It might discourage casual chatters to see you listening to your own thing, where as if it's actual work-related stuff they wouldn't be discouraged?
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Aug 26, 2012 05:17
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My lead suggested we all get purple construction paper "cones of silence". Someone put a cone on my desk and it encouraged a lot of conversation for the hour it was up...
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Aug 26, 2012 09:11
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One of my lady bosses who's calendar I manage recently performed what I consider an act of administrative loving-up genius. As background, I have access to her inbox because she has so much crap going on and I often need to look through her stuff to figure out what's happening. In my searching, I incidentally found an email that her older kid has a court date because he was picked up with some weed. About a week after that, she sent me an email saying she was going to be out on that day because they were taking a long weekend to go on vacation, and could I block that day for her. Ok, cool, so she's not going to tell me about her kid getting picked up. I got it. So I did. Well last week she comes to me asking why the date is blocked. I tell her, and she says that's wrong they're not going out of town that day. Crap. I actually like my lady boss, so I find her original email telling me to block it. And I'm saying "ARE YOU SURE?!" over and over, and am kind of in desperation because I know why she blocked it but shouldn't. So I sigh and unblock it. A couple of days ago, she comes back and has me reblock the date, moving all the accrued appointments, for the second time. Ah academics -- unable to remember either the truth or the lie.
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Aug 26, 2012 14:03
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Gullous posted:My lead suggested we all get purple construction paper "cones of silence". Someone put a cone on my desk and it encouraged a lot of conversation for the hour it was up... I thought this meant you'd wear one of those veterinary cones, which would be hilarious.
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Aug 26, 2012 15:05
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fivre posted:I thought this meant you'd wear one of those veterinary cones, which would be hilarious. Hahha, oh man... It was pitched to us as a display for the top of your cubicle such that your status is visible from afar, but it looks a lot like a hat. I like the pet cone joke more, though.
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Aug 26, 2012 18:33
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I read the hell out of this thread but never post in it so here goes: I work for a company that provides Audio/Video Design, Build and Service for clients. I'm a site facilitator for our second largest client. This basically means that I either sit on site or at home (I only live 10 minutes from the offices) and wait for problems to crop up with their systems we've provided them. I also do some consulting for them when they want new rooms, theaters, video conferencing or whatever else. I'm 'on call' 45 hours a week but I generally end up working around 50. Anyway, we have a set of rooms that have been having consistent problems with their Audio Conferencing systems. Somehow the Microphone volume has been getting turned down, making it impossible for people on the far end to hear anything going on in the rooms. Now, there's NO way to turn the mics down from the touchpanels; the only control you have over them is a Mic Mute and that doesn't mess with the levels, it only changes the actual state of the microphone. To remedy this, I put a 'failsafe' of sorts in the Audio Conference's program that forces the Mic level up every time a call is placed. A couple weeks went by and we had no problems. Then it started happening out of the blue. So, I looked and the failsafe was gone. There is NO way this could have happened by accident, it had to have been done by someone going in and deleting it. The thing is, the clients that use these rooms day-to-day barely understand how to use the systems and the IT/AV guys that are our contacts only have some rudimentary understanding. Or so I thought. After I noticed the failsafe missing I put it back in and then made it so a password had to be used to even access the settings or program. It was a week before we got an email asking for the password from their IT/AV guys. I spoke with my boss about it and he said to give them the password, because in their contract with us it says we have to turn over all written programs and passwords. Over the past couple weeks it's been happening again. I KNOW it's this one guy that's doing it, and I think he's doing it so that they can get out of their contract or at least make it so we have to roll over and do whatever they want us to for them. Them being our second largest client and then being upset allows them to push my company around. I was originally writing this with the intention of asking what I should do but there's really probably nothing. I'm going to just have to suck it up and keep fixing it because even if I can outright prove this guy keeps messing with the system I don't think it'd get me anywhere.
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Aug 27, 2012 01:55
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I'm not going to quote all of that. Check that contract again. Usually in those kind of situations there's a clause about using the tech for unauthorized purposes or dicking with your proprietary technology. I must add the very goony disclaimer, however, I am not a lawyer. I'm just the guy who looks at legal stuff at work.
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Aug 27, 2012 03:03
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The obvious solution is to make the code as cryptic and indecipherable as possible. The contractors who we use for installations have a guy who's a programming wizard and manages to cram dozens of button press operations for an AMX-controlled classroom into two or three functions that handle everything by incrementing a single variable each based on a handful of global values. Troubleshooting is hilarious, you end up having to write out a flowchart of what the code does because it's not readable by normal humans. It's impressive code optimization but if something has to be changed, especially years later, you just want to find the guy and slap him.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:51
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Mr. 47 posted:I'm not going to quote all of that. Check that contract again. Usually in those kind of situations there's a clause about using the tech for unauthorized purposes or dicking with your proprietary technology. I thought about that but the problem with my company is that they'd roll over for these guys in a second. They could push a rack full of equipment over and we would eventually replace all of it and eat the cost just to keep the client. GWBBQ posted:The obvious solution is to make the code as cryptic and indecipherable as possible. The contractors who we use for installations have a guy who's a programming wizard and manages to cram dozens of button press operations for an AMX-controlled classroom into two or three functions that handle everything by incrementing a single variable each based on a handful of global values. Troubleshooting is hilarious, you end up having to write out a flowchart of what the code does because it's not readable by normal humans. It's impressive code optimization but if something has to be changed, especially years later, you just want to find the guy and slap him. The problem is that it's not the program (in this case, Crestron) code. There's a separate program that runs the Audio Conference that doesn't deal in lines of code but graphical representation. It's more of a configuration than program, really. Anyone with any bit of knowledge on the subject could sit down and figure out how it works and what does what with a little time and effort.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:54
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I know it can be tough to do when you care about your job, but try to keep in mind that it's not your money, or really your problem. If the company wants to bend over for this client, there's not much you can do. The good news is that, at the end of the day, your check is still the same. I mean, sometimes you have to pick your battles or you wind up dead at thirty nine with an aneurism.
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Aug 27, 2012 04:59
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