Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

i'm the most senior employee at my company, largely because of turnover in the industry, and i hate job hunting and i get paid pretty well. we have three products, i'm the only person who has ever seen the old product in action and one of two people who knows how the middle product works. everyone else of our many employees works on developing or selling the new product, which has a healthy and growing market share. a decent amount of our yearly revenue comes from recurring licensing on the older two products, which are entirely my responsibility to support. the total revenue from these zombie fees more than covers my salary

our time tracking software has many categories for new product development, but only one category for legacy product support. the legacy products also have their own ticketing system, of which i am the only user, and most of the tickets which are opened are automated notifications to long dormant email addresses, which i close immediately. about two in five tickets are actual product questions, nearly all of the time questions with easy answers. so my ticket closure metrics are fantastic. because it appears from the outside that i am working very diligently holding down the rear guard of legacy revenue by myself like some kind of magical hero, nearly everyone in the company leaves me alone. seriously, when people ask me to get on a call to explain some obscure feature or to book a training session, they approach me like they've just climbed a mountain to speak to an ancient monk who only speaks in obscure riddles of perfect wisdom. i'm not even middle aged, its wild the level of reverence my coworkers have for me like i'm some kind of greybeard who invented telephones or some poo poo

i've also inherited a large number of oddball responsibilities due to my long tenure, including the actual physical hardware of our remaining server stack which isn't yet moved to the cloud, for reasons. we have an offshore devops guy who is my work buddy, and he gets paid in american dollars and not local currency, so he's very happy and not wanting to rock the boat. i wire up the hardware in the small office the company rented on the edge of town because it is cheap during covid times. the office is also used sometimes to pretend to clients our all-virtual firm has a physical presence, and most of the VPs have vanity offices so they can say to their spouses "i need to head to the office" and they sit in the quiet of a half vacant office park. otherwise the site is only used for our in-house servers, and my devops pal manages these servers remotely. this arrangement suits the both of us just fine because it seems more complicated than it really is. because it is a pile of blinking boxes and cables, clearly it is only to be touched by the qualified thing-knower, me

some time ago, the CEO messages me with an urgent problem. one of our critical build servers is nonresponsive. if my schedule isn't too busy, could i drive out there immediately and check on it? well, my schedule is completely open, so i tell the CEO i'm setting all other tasks aside and treating this as my highest priority. i drive out there and pass through security - who is surprised to see anyone other than the c-suite who use the office as a place to flee their home offices - and i check on the box. it got hung up during an automatic update, and someone needs to press F1 to continue. with all my skill and might, i press F1. the server boots, and i verify it booted and is on the network, and i text the CEO personally to let him know the problem is now resolved, and the core dev team can now continue their work

for this feat of monumental heroism and prowess, i get a companywide attaboy email and a personal shoutout at our next all hands meeting


technically i am still the PBX admin, but nobody uses the phone tree anymore. back when it was in common use, in the Before Times when people made calls, i would flex my power by threatening (jokingly) to give people annoying hold music so that the people they put on hold would be angrier when finally picked up

anyway,
http://conferencecall.biz/

Full Metal Jackass posted:

Without knowing your situation, that did sound like it had sexist undertones, even before I read your last part where your actual manager mentioned it. It reeked of it tbh

Play posted:

I feel like that kind of autonomy should be preserved, the ability to just do your work and get through the day without making lame small talk with people all the time. And it is really loving rude to insist that someone display a level of sociality that doesn't fit their preferences or character.

Lazyfire posted:

Saalkin posted:

Yesterday I sent in a ticket to have some access added to my account.

Instead they wiped all my access for that program and I can't do my job this morning.

That's a lol.

Charles Bukowski posted:

Does this thread give anyone else anxiety?

You poor loving people.

Zarin posted:

I try and keep a personal rule that "an email means you can answer this at your discretion; an IM means I need an answer now please kthx"

teen witch posted:

Oh my god it is 2021 do not embed a massive image in an email please lord Satan

a hot gujju bhabhi posted:

This thread is doing some amazing mental gymnastics to justify assault. Kinda hosed up, sorry if this is a hot take.

poisonpill posted:

The employment guide for my work!

OSS handbook for industrial sabotage in occupied France

Local Weather posted:

This is shocking to Americans but I've seen my Dutch co-workers tell the boss flat-out "no, we're not doing that" on multiple occasions. The first time I ever saw it happen my jaw dropped. Now I'm way more used to it and totally into it.

nexus6 posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/10/train-firms-worker-bonus-email-is-actually-cyber-security-test

Scientastic posted:

I don't really understand why any business would want to have people working in an office. Surely keeping a fancy office is a massive expense? Wouldn't it be better to have a smaller office that people can book for meetings etc. but then let them work from home the rest of the time? I generally trust my team to do their jobs, and I have very clear and obvious metrics that would show if they weren't.

I'm guessing that the concern is that people will slack off without having someone over their shoulder the entire time, but I don't care if they achieve what they need to in a few hours and spend the rest of their day playing video games or looking after their kids or whatever, as far as I'm concerned, they're paid for the results they get, not the hours they do to achieve those results.

SkyeAuroline posted:

Dumb poo poo my work recently did: hire someone for a data entry position heavy on Excel & formulas who has had to ask me, multiple times, how "greater than" and "less than" signs work.
Not promising.

Althalin posted:

To begin with, there was some awkward tension because I, the lowly engineering intern, reported directly to the VP, rather than to the engineering manager. Why such a vertical structure was required for 4 full-time employees, I have no clue.

...

I spent about 1 day a week reading PDFs of Asimov books that someone'd left on the company share drive (which, of course, had no perms - including the HR "department" files)

Althalin posted:

A follow-up issue is that they only had one laptop to loan; I was the first engineering intern they'd ever had, the previous interns had been in sales. Because I had, essentially, a sales computer, CAD was completely out of the question, as was getting a license in any reasonable amount of time. So they had me make drawings in (I poo poo you not) Visio, and one of the actual engineers would re-draw them in CAD.