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Could we have a ban forever on 60+ year old women in managing positions? Every single one I've encountered in the work place has just been a nightmare since I graduated college. At my current job, I work in a law firm and I literally received an email from the office admin stating how I should sign emails with "Thanks in advance" instead of "Thanks" and spending paragraphs just stating why and how it reflected poorly on me if I didn't.
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Apr 21, 2010 21:18
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Also here's a fun recent story, one of my responsibilities is getting people their business cards. Its one of a thousand things I do and its about the lowest thing I do. One day a few months ago, one of my attorneys talks with me and says "I need some business cards made up." I tell him thats fine, let him know it takes about a week as it does with everyone's, he walks off. The next day, the attorney storms into my office and literally yells at me, "WHERE THE gently caress ARE MY BUSINESS CARDS? YOU SAID YOU'D HAVE THEM! I'M LEAVING TOMORROW!" I calmly tell him that again, it takes a week. He screams for a bit more and demands them immediately. I tell him I would see what I could do and call the company that gives us the cards. The company proceeds to do a rush job and somehow, SOMEHOW manages to get the cards to us about ten minutes before we close by sending it through a carrier. I look at the cards.....and there's a typo. I tell the lawyer about it, more yelling, and he tells me if I don't get those cards for him by tonight then I'm out on my rear end. I talk with the lawyer and say that I will have the business cards delivered that night to my own house and will drive them to his house and give them to him. He then tells me that he always goes to sleep at 8 o'clock as does the rest of his family and if I wake them up, his wife will come out and kill me. Like literally. His wife will come outside the house and yell at me. So I need to: a.) get the business card typo fixed and get the cards delivered to my house b.) drive 30 miles to this lawyer's house c.) in cover of darkness, without making a sound or ringing the doorbell, leave them in front of his front door d.) text his cell phone to let him know that the cards are outside his house. I manage to somehow do all of this and I go home at around midnight and pass out. The next day, I receive a long written up "warning" sheet, which is in essence a demerit, about my "attention to detail" skills.  Thank God I'm leaving in a week.
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Apr 21, 2010 21:40
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standardtoaster posted:gently caress that! You don't need that job! That's loving terrible. I'm actually sitting in my office now, halfway through my two week exit and haven't felt this good at the job in a LONG time.
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Apr 21, 2010 21:48
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standardtoaster posted:You should order that rear end, like, $1,000 worth of business cards on your last day. And make sure there's a period somewhere in his n.ame. He asked me to order some, I've been continually saying, "Yeah they're on their way" for the past week and haven't done poo poo. gently caress that guy.
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Apr 21, 2010 21:57
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Roberto_Silencio posted:Network guy was a typical fatty fat fat, who lost most of his sense of smell and his meals showed it, stinking up the office every single day. Also had a major phlegm problem, constantly clearing his throat. There's an older secretary in my office who works down the hall who clears her throat every 30 minutes. I can hear her everytime she does it as if she were sitting right next to me, thats how loud it is. Its the most disgusting poo poo ever.
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Apr 22, 2010 14:39
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Dead Cow posted:Stop refusing to replace people who leave. In the continuing tale of me leaving my current job for a bigger and better one, I was told today that they would be hiring from within to replace me. I thought this was odd at first because as far as I knew, no one had the experience I did for my position in the firm. I had told my office that I had a number of people I knew in mind who would be happy to fill my position, friends of mine looking for work with marketing experience in the legal field, but hey, all I can do is make the recommendation. So the office admin calls me into her office and tells me that the 23 year old receptionist is going to fill my position because she's worked on "newsletters and stuff in the past".  Keep in mind, I'm the firm's MARKETING DIRECTOR. I handled a million dollar budget, managed the website, took care of the marketing needs of 30 attorneys, hosted seminars, sponsored events, published articles in major publications, got clients for the firm, etc etc. Now I'm torn, do I go with option a.) and ask what the gently caress she's thinking? or option b.) train the receptionist for three days and watch the firm collapse in on itself. Decisions, decisions.
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Apr 23, 2010 03:27
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Lets talk about consulting jobs....for the government! If anything in this life will make you more disillusioned with the way that the government handles its day to day tasks, its doing work for them as an outside contractor. How a contract for the government comes to fruition is that, for example, a job will be created that will state, "Well we need an outside contractor to do a job for us that will take around a year with a budget of $5 million." Cue a long line of consulting firms yelling, "We'll do it in 6 months for $3 million!" "We'll do it in 3 months for $2 million!" And so on and so on until you are left with a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Case in point, I was 24 and in a well known consulting firm doing a project for the Pentagon that entailed looking through their massive amounts of congressional acts and making recommendations as to what I thought should be eliminated to save them money. I had no experience doing this whatsoever and neither did anyone else working with me in my team of 3. There were literally 10s of thousands of these things and we had to read through all this in like 3 months. Every recommendation we made was shot down, so really we did nothing at all. Just money flushed down the drain. People in certain government jobs will arrive to work at 10 in the morning, leave for a two hour lunch at 12, then leave work at 3. I remember working 14 hour days while I watched all these government workers happily skip off to have a 24 year old, in essence, make decisions that could ultimately effect certain branches of government. It was the first job I had ever quit even though it paid unbelievably well. So glad I quit that field.
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Apr 26, 2010 22:06
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I'm three days away from leaving, I'm training my replacement, I take her to visit the people I work with and introduce her so if they have any questions, they can ask me before I leave. I am sticking around out of goodwill more than anything and my a-hole of a boss sends me this: "It was inappropriate for you to take blank to the workload meeting when no announcement has been sent. The announcement would have come from me. There are partners in the firm that will hear of this tomorrow at the meeting, or perhaps by word of mouth from the associates who report to them. Your role is to show blank what is on your computer and give her a status of where you are in each project." I am two seconds from just throwing up my hands and leaving the job. The unbelievable balls of my boss to chew me out for this when I only have three days left. The best part of the meeting, one of the attorneys asking my replacement "Do you have any marketing experience?" "Nope." followed by nervous stares.
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Apr 27, 2010 18:12
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As for vacation time, my new job is giving me a month per year. Every job I've had since graduating college has been 2 weeks, so my eyes nearly popped out of my skull when I saw how much I got when they sent me the offer.
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Apr 29, 2010 14:48
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Astro7x posted:I love how the purpose of resetting passwords and forcing weird characters in them is to make them safe, but then half the office has their password on a post-it note on their monitor because they can't remember it. On my last day of my previous job last week, I had to list all of my passwords for the ten thousand things that I was part of before I left the company, this included association memberships, online publications, etc etc. There were at least 20 of these things. I look through the long list of these things that I put into a word document. My boss/office administrator came in last Thursday, my last day was supposed to be the following day, and says, "You know, we'd like to encourage you to use one of your vacation days for tomorrow so that you can be rested up for your new position." I saw through this poo poo in a second as "I'd like to save the firm money by convincing you to use one of your vacation days so we can pay you less and I'll get credit for it with the partners." I agreed since I was totally fine with having an extra day off before starting my new job. In the afternoon, two hours before I was ready to leave the firm forever, I was saying my goodbyes and our crazy IT guy comes in to look over all of my passwords and change them to new passwords for the firm to use. Fair enough. Funny that he chose to do this kind of important task with so little time left before I walked out the door. So he shoves me away from my computer and begins typing in these passwords into each website, the first couple work, but he has some problems changing my name to his name. He calls one of the places, and since he has a thick accent and English is his second language, the person on the other end of the phone gets his name wrong in the system and he has to call back repeatedly to change everything. He then proceeds to call the woman on the phone, "A stupid loving bitch" and immediately says, "gently caress my life!" I'm kind of taken aback by this but with only 30 minutes left (Yes, this had been going on for nearly 2 hours), I shrug it off. "When is your exit interview?" He says. "Whenever we finish up I guess, but I'm leaving at 5 regardless." "No....no your not. Your here for as long as I say your here." I have never gotten pissed off to the point where I was shouting at someone in the office before, but I had 30 minutes left in a job where there were literally no repercussions for my actions at this point, so I start raising my voice. "Oh yes I am! You can't dictate how long I stay here." "No, you're not! And if you don't agree to it, I'll call Boss #1/#2 and have them talk to you!" I rip the phone off the receiver and just wave it in his face. "GOOD! I'LL loving DO IT FOR YOU!" He backed down, didn't call them and let me go at that point. Christ, what a nightmare.
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May 7, 2010 07:32
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I keep returning to this thread to talk about how horrid my old job was compared to my new one. In my old job, I was the department in the firm. It was a loving nightmare. Before I left my old job, the firm was getting decimated by the economy dropping. Clients of the firm had basically wanted cheaper and cheaper prices for the firm's services and our firm, terrified of ever losing any business, would simply accept any price changes thrown at them by clients. This caused ridiculous cut backs and would result in monthly firm wide meetings where we had the office admin telling everyone what the next thing was that the firm would be taking from its employees to make up for losses. When I started the firm would get donuts every Friday for its employees, which was taken out as a cost saving measure (Two dozen donuts a week are like $10-20, was it really killing the firm to keep up this kind of employee morale?) This began happening more and more with meetings about the firm not giving raises or bonuses for the year, not springing for kitchen utensils anymore (yes they had a meeting to inform us of this), and various other cost saving measures that made you just want to get the gently caress out of there as soon as possible. Before I left, we had a meeting informing everyone that longevity bonuses would now be nixed completely (which left a lot of the old timers get VERY pissed off.) It was around this time I received the offer for my new job and skipped to my horrid office admin's office to tell her I was leaving. As I had been the 4th or 5th person to leave in around 4 months, the higher ups were becoming a little nervous that everyone was abandoning ship. As part of staff appreciation week, they brought everyone into the conference room, told us how appreciative they all were of our services and gave us each $10 Giant gift certificates.
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May 17, 2010 04:24
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Keetron posted:First off, I desire to work in corporate as a freelance consultant. The pay is sweet (up to $100 an hour, 40 hour weeks, several months assignments) and I can set my own hours. So far, so good. That sounds like a dream come true. On the topic of coffee, my office has those Flavia machines that you just slip a single coffee packet into and it makes your cup of coffee instantly. Love those things.
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Mar 9, 2011 17:18
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AlphaDog posted:Yeah, when Mary happens, find a new job, it's not worth the effort. My last job had a "Mary" who was my direct supervisor. I should have quit much sooner than I did.
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Jun 30, 2011 19:06
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Defenestration posted:I have a meeting with the head of local HR tomorrow, which I'm sure is designed to placate me as I have been the most vocal opponent of this plan. Does anyone have any ideas on how I should handle this? I don't know if you can change this or not, but I'd say try making the argument that to get some of your work done, you need privacy and space in your environment so you'll be working from home half the week.
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Oct 20, 2011 15:19
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When I graduated college, I had a job consulting that threw the most absolute insane Christmas parties of all time. They spent upwards of a million dollars on these things and it showed. For one year, they decided to set up the big conference rooms on the first floor for the Xmas party, making each one based on a different movie. One room was "The Jaws Room" which had seafood and a loving ice sculpture of Jaws in the middle. Another was the "Willy Wonka Room" that had Wonka bars, desserts, and marshmellow mushrooms with whipped cream in them. The coup de grace was the "Star Wars Room" that was made to look exactly like the bar from Tattoine, where people dressed as Ewoks and Wookies served you drinks. Every room had a free open bar and insanely good food (The Godfather room especially). I kept hearing stories that every Christmas party, the company would basically fire about three people due to rowdy behavior, which I could totally believe. I eventually left the company, but drat if I won't ever forget those Christmas parties.
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Dec 13, 2011 15:37
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Just got laid off. What a fantastic start to the holidays. At least I get another month to search for a new job and plenty saved up. Still 
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Dec 15, 2011 18:52
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Cup of Hemlock posted:Sorry to hear this, E. Let us know how we can help! Thanks Cup. Honestly, I saw it coming and I really didn't like my job, but it paid well. I was planning on leaving it in September to go with my girlfriend out of state while she goes to grad school and I start the process of applying to one for a potential one year masters in education program. So I have a couple of options in front of me right now. I have enough money to live on right now for about two years without even needing to go get a job. I don't have any kids to support and I can live pretty frugally if I need to. My resume is strong but I might use the "resume to interviews" thread just in case. I had a job in marketing so I'll see what else is available in the 9 months I have left in here. Of course I'm also loving freaking out inside because the economy is in the shitter and this is the worst time ever for getting a job.
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Dec 15, 2011 22:37
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Ogive posted:'Sup layoff buddy. You're not alone this season. Although I am glad I got laid off -- I hated my job but had trouble admitting it to myself because it was a 'cool' job. I'm thinking of becoming a teacher myself. Just was told I will be getting a severance package, unemployment benefits, and my boss will write a glowing recommendation. Nice to know at least. I've been sending out resumes like no one's business this morning so hopefully I get some leads.
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Dec 16, 2011 20:20
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Meeting with HR today to discuss me being laid off. I'll get unemployment, a severance, the whole deal. Got plenty of money saved up and some leads in terms of jobs, but still, I feel nervous/anxious/all that.
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Jan 5, 2012 16:05
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Let's talk about being unemployed! It's been a week since I've been laid off and I've found that with my experience, I've actually been getting a lot of interest from different places and recruiters' offices. I have two interviews lined up in the next few days so I'm upbeat (not to say there wasn't a night or two earlier in the week that I wasn't freaking the gently caress out.) The thing I hate the most are the ridiculous emails from places that start off with "NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY! ALL YOU NEED IS ENTHUSIASM!" It sucks to be looking for jobs and receive an email from a company that thinks you'd be perfect for a managerial position....right after you do some door to door sales for a couple of months.
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Jan 12, 2012 19:37
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Cluricaun posted:I....I took that job once when I was desparate for work. It's worse than you think. Do tell. I'm curious to hear how awful jobs like this are.
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Jan 13, 2012 17:49
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I'm about to come up on my second month of unemployment. It sucks but y'know, I'm dealing. I've had a bunch of one on one interviews and two interviews that got to the second round, and am currently waiting to hear back on those. The worst part is how long the process is to see whether you're getting the job or not. For one of the second round interviews, I've been interviewing for nearly a month.
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Feb 23, 2012 19:41
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I GOT A JOB. Those couple of months being unemployed were pretty lovely, but I worked my rear end off and have a pretty nice new gig (that's also .2 miles from my house. Best commute I'll ever have outside of telecommuting). Meanwhile a place that I interviewed with starting at the end of January has yet to make a decision, but assures me they are very interested in me. The pay would be better, but Jesus do I really want to work for a place that takes three months to make a decision? Its insane. E the Shaggy fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Apr 4, 2012 |
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Apr 4, 2012 22:41
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I have an interesting current situation. I got a job recently that was a "temp to hire" position and my boss was....a psychopath to say the least. I'm leaving the area at the end of the summer to head to grad school so it wasn't really that big of a deal. I have a strong resume, good experience, and more than enough money saved up. Within three weeks of working for this job, I was working 13 hour days and doing things that were not in my original job description. Things like, within the first four days of my employment, having to run a 100 person event for CEOs and write a speech for the CEO to deliver...as a temp. I honestly wish I was making that up, the CEO read my speech word for word. I got no credit for it of course and my insane boss spent the entire event snapping at me for things that were totally out of my control: "THE WAITERS AREN'T TAKING THE FOOD AWAY FAST ENOUGH!" "MAKE SURE THAT NO ONE COMES INTO THE ROOM WHEN THE CEO IS SPEAKING! STRONG ARM THEM IF YOU HAVE TO!" "WHERE IS THE PRESENT FOR OUR CEO? I AM NOT HAPPY ABOUT THIS!" Literally screaming this to me after four days of me being employed there. I just completely broke down after that day mentally. The next week, the pace just got worse and worse. The hours were increasing, and my boss was becoming more and more overbearing. At one point within the first week, he came up to me and told me to let him know how long a project I was working on would take. I ballparked it and said "Two hours". "TWO HOURS? I WANT IT IN 30. ASAP!" He would also say things like "Don't talk! I'm typing!" and "Don't ask me about any details when it comes to your job, because I don't know them." This kept happening, causing me to have another breakdown later that week. This guy would literally just throw project after project at me, not thinking about how long anything took realistically, and being screaming angry if I didn't have it within his insane time requirements. A few days before I left, he was throwing things at me that he wanted turned around in less than 10 minutes, and these were things that would probably take a few hours to put together. I worked with one other girl who was in the same situation as me, only she was fresh out of college and they were having her write giant proposals for the company. It was insane. So, last week, I informed my boss that I absolutely positively had to leave work at 5:30 at the absolute latest, as I was dog sitting for some friends. He says "Fine." He forgets of course and makes a huge stink about it as I leave the office. I tell him that I can finish a research project that night for him. I spend an extra four hours that night on this thing and send it to him the next morning. He is off in another state that day for a meeting, but I get a phone call later that morning from him, with him screaming that the packet I put together "WASN'T FLASHY ENOUGH! WOULD YOU F-ING READ THIS???" I snapped. I told him in no uncertain terms that it was impossible for me to keep up the insane pace that he was demanding, I had had no training or orientation for my job, and our entire team was compromised of three people (Myself, my boss who was always working on something else, and a recent college grad who was working on proposals 24/7). "Don't bother me with that poo poo. I don't care." I hung up the phone. Stood up, went to HR and said in no uncertain terms that I cannot work with him and I was leaving that day. The HR person was shocked but had gotten complaints about this guy previously. Later that day, I received a call from the company's National Director, who was very interested to hear my side of the story. I told her everything (including the two incidents where I found the guy falling asleep in his office) and she had no idea that he was operating things the way he was. Long story short, I never want to work in an office again. I am so loving done with it. I don't care about making a lot of money, I just want a job that isn't filled with insane people that want me to work 14 hour days. Is that really so much to ask for? E the Shaggy fucked around with this message at 00:14 on May 4, 2012 |
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May 4, 2012 00:11
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Solkanar512 posted:You have my sympathies, working for a bully of a boss is incredibly traumatic and many don't understand the extent of the damage that goes on. Yeah, the national director was higher than this guy and was very interested to see how he was running things. She even went so far as to say she wanted to keep open communications with me in the future. After I went to HR, I left the company just because there was no way it was going to get any better under this guy and I'm leaving my current state in about four months anyway for greener pastures of grad school. I was getting paid for overtime, and yeah money is pretty good when you're working 14 hour days, but that's about it. The guy was just unbelievable, like I can't believe someone like that exists and got such a high position. But then again, if you do nothing but work and crush everyone else under your heel in the office, I assume you can get pretty far in life. It was after the third project in under two weeks that he had given me that was impossible to complete in a short amount of time by one person that I figured he had hired me to just be a fall guy for everything that went wrong under his watch. I mean for God's sake, I was brought on and received absolutely no orientation or training whatsoever while working for a company that had a background with which I had no experience in. The fact that I actually pulled off a 100 person event which required me to write the CEO's speech three days into my employment was loving insane.
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May 7, 2012 20:39
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I wanted to swing by this thread to share my story of this year. I was laid off in January, got a temp job in April that lasted three weeks, and was unemployed until November of this year, where I got a job in a new city. This year was TOUGH. I was never in financial straits, thank God, but the psychological stress of going to interview after interview was soul shattering (I must have gone to at least a dozen job interviews, with one position that had interviews lasting for around two months and it came down to me and one other person, and the other person got it  )Anyway, I had originally grown up and worked in a really demanding city (DC) and when the opportunity arose for my gf to move for a master's program, I jumped at the chance to move with her. After living here for two months, I got a job that paid pretty close to what I was making, but since living expenses are so much lower here, I'm taking home WAY more. I've been working at my job for about a month now and things are going great. My boss talked with me after three weeks of my start date and told me how great a job I was doing. I've NEVER had that happen before in any of my jobs post college. For the first time in a long time in my career, I'm happy. It can happen. I'm as surprised as anyone.
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Dec 3, 2012 04:57
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Apparently, it's "Admin Professionals Week" and since I'm my firm's Marketing guy, I fall in that camp. This morning I walked into my office to find a plastic bag of cookies with a note attached: "Dear E, We just wanted to let you know how much we appreciate all the hard work you do. We are really impressed with how fast and easy you've adapted to your position and we are extremely lucky to have you. Sincerely, The Firm" 
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Apr 23, 2013 00:22
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lavaca posted:HR's latest bizarre idea: put markers in one of the stairwells (of note: the one used by HR, not the one used by everyone else) so that we can write messages on the walls. I think we're supposed to write about how much we love the company and our co-workers, but that really happened yet. One person did draw a dinosaur. I have been thinking about writing something along the lines of "do you really think you can buy us off so cheaply?" but I fear they've installed hidden cameras for just that occasion. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
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Jul 7, 2013 15:29
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At my previous job, I worked for a law firm where the review system was based on interviewing like 20 people you worked with and basically having them fill out a scorecard from "Poor to Excellent". You could only get a raise if you averaged "Excellent". No one averaged "Excellent" because attorneys could give two fucks about filling out those cards, so they just marked everyone "Good". They told us this was the way it was going to be after showing the firm's record profits for the year.
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Jul 14, 2013 01:11
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Re: Work Hours, I work from 8 to 5 with an hour of unpaid lunch (which are boring as all get out, even with other people, so I'll usually just work through it) A few folks in my office work from 6:30 till 3:30, and I've been mulling over whether I should ask for that schedule as well. It would reduce my commute by a lot I'm sure, but I'm not a morning person at all and that would take some getting used to.
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Aug 3, 2013 20:44
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ItalicSquirrels posted:Spoke up in a meeting with our senior staffer in charge of morale. Mentioned that morale is horrible. Listed some reasons morale is horrible (micromanagement, lack of trust, etc.). Got thanked afterwards by three people for saying "what the entire department is thinking but is afraid to say" and for "speaking on everyone's behalf". Felt I owed the senior staffer an explanation (no, I don't know why) and wrote her an email further explaining my reasoning. In an hour I'm scheduled for a one-on-one with her for a discussion on my "perception on how actual change can occur". I have a new business director who's trying to pin the "morale officer" thing on me (even though that's not my job in the slightest.) I don't even know where to start. Request money to get people loaded every other week?
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Oct 4, 2013 05:22
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Got this in my inbox today: ""Dear All, It has been brought to my attention that there was a situation that occurred today that should have been handled a bit differently than what the person opted to do. Apparently someone cut their hair in the ladies bathroom and left said hair in the sink. (I’m assuming and hoping that the hair was cut and not pulled out due to frustration!) That alone was bad enough and should have been brought to my attention. However, someone felt that it warranted posting a sign on the hall wall OUTSIDE of the bathroom. The sign stated the individual’s objection to the hair in the sink AND they decided to tape the hair to the sign, as well. Not only is this offensive across the board, but we are a professional environment and we have clients that frequent our offices." I don't even... 
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Dec 10, 2013 03:52
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