The office: Chatter about your job

You've instantly made me very appreciative of our auditors, who dick around on laptops for a couple days and come back with a short list of easy questions like "This liability sure increased a lot. What happened?"

edited 14th Jan '18 8:31:26 AM by Bur

On the other hand after the murders your housing and food costs will be covered, and there will be a little less stupidity in the universe.

I got an interview for one of the jobs I applied for! That was fast. Funnily enough, it's a cafe I used to have lunch at when I worked at another restaurant in Alameda. The hours are a bit severe—a full shift starting at 6AM—but honestly I'd rather have a stable job than the randomized hours they have here at my current place.

I'm debating whether I should tell my boss now, or just wait till I confirm hiring and give them my two weeks' notice. I've literally been applying for a full-time position over and over for the past month, and no one has responded. And since I now live three cities over but have access to a car only half the time, the commute is at least an hour and a half by bus.

I mean, it's still doable if I don't get the job, but I would like to get a car and move out within the next two years.

Lerad: Well good luck on the job front. Hopefully you land something that helps you out one way or another.

My new Sunday guard who was easy to train...had a flop of a shift. He missed the majority of his patrols and didn't even log into the guard computer all shift. He futzed around on his personal laptop and cell phone barely did any patrols. He also failed to fill out paperwork for his shift.

-face desk-

I swear to almighty deities of the universe I left the military to avoid having to deal with E-1 and E-2.

edited 15th Jan '18 4:38:43 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Well, on the way to what I thought was my destination, my sister pulled over and parked at a very different cafe which I had never been to—with a very similar name to the cafe I actually frequented. I scanned the menu and was relieved to find pretty standard hipster fare, but didn't want to lie unless it came up.

Turns out the manager loved that I'd been a "regular." I played along and hoped she thought she hadn't recognized me because I've been out of the city for 3 years.

Shameless lying aside, it went all right. But I wouldn't be too upset if I didn't get the job now.

Oh, Bur, do tell! The last auditor we had, who consistently checked our paperwork for the previous seven years, wasn't trying to make problem where there weren't any. This one? JFC, not even the bureaucrats from the European Commission were as maliciously dense.

We're having a minor shitstorm over the apparent lack of consistency of the context the word "eligible" is used in reference to cost. One meaning is used in the big-ass agreement the EC signed with the guys from Brussels in order to fund them, and under that agreement, the guys from Brussels signed another agreement with every affiliated national organization in order to translate the documents we deal with, EU-wide, to national languages. The second meaning, well, is in the EC-approved forms we're using to list our work and get money from Brussels. Which, go figure, are being audited right now.

Somehow, in the last two years, our previous auditor didn't give two shits about this sort of minutiae, particularly considering that the EC cannot, as usual, tell its ass from a teakettle.

Worse yet, the auditor is having issues with the fact that the EC-approved form, cooked up in Excel, rounds the exchange rate to the fourth decimal place, while EC's website lists the exchange rate for my country to the... fifth decimal place. Sure, Excel does the maths all the same, but displays a rounded value that just wouldn't work if some dumbass worked over the printout with a calculator for some colossally stupid reason, since we're obligated to send the electronic forms in anyway, and the printout attached to the audit report is nothing but an useless bureaucratic totem worthy of Adeptus Administratum.

Notso: Sounds like you work in the financial sector. The place I guard I get to hear all the fun tales about auditing bureaucrats having some highly unrealistic turn around times for requests of any sort. Especially for collecting and collating data sets from multiple and often differing in use active financial digital systems form varying clients and then converting the formats and providing select hard copy.

So far this has been a rough week for me. On the first day of each work week (usually Monday, but this week Tuesday because of the holiday), my main responsibility is compiling my department's inventory numbers for the previous week and entering them into our computer system. But yesterday, for the fourth consecutive week, one of the reports I get some numbers from was late which in turn led me to have to make an incomplete report of my own which I will need to later make corrections to when I do get them. And what's worse, this time the missing report was one that comes from a night shift unit, so I would have to wait for at least today to get their report. But when I came in this morning, it was still not in my e-mail inbox. I'm hoping that with the distractions of the holiday season over with, things should return to normal with getting reports in on time.

And then, to end my workday on another sour note, my electric stapler jammed ... and then started smoking. Thankfully I quickly unplugged it and got it away from the papers on my desk before anything serious happened.

I had an interview and it went reasonably well. I had a burst of anxiety afterwards, but that is probably more because of what happened this morning.

edited 18th Jan '18 4:27:12 PM by Leradny

I got a follow-up call!!! But couldn't hear what they said besides "your references all said great things, please call us back for the next step." Well, I'll call back tomorrow after regular work.

WOO FUCKING HOO, I GOT THE JOB! Now to give my 2 weeks notice and fill out new hire paperwork. And taxes. This will be a busy fortnight.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! <crossed fingers for smooth bureaucratic sailings>

Congrats mate!

Congratulations!

A far as my own job goes, with the US Government shutdown, I may be temporarily without one on Monday. My manager will call me sometime this weekend to let me know if I'm considered essential enough to have to work through it or if I will be furloughed.

I'm in the same boat. It's even worse because myself and an analyst from another lab were supposed to fly to Vietnam for a 2-week project next week and now that's deep-sixed, which is going to throw an entire program into chaos in terms of planning.

After I came home from visiting my mother in the hospital this afternoon, I got a message from my manager that I am essential enough to have to work through the shutdown.

Good news: first, I did not fuck anything up filling the forms, which is... the first time in the eight years I'm doing it, second, the audit is over and we already have a draft report that we can punt over to Brussels, two weeks before the deadline.

Of course my supervisor apparently went mental trying to fix what everyone else fucked up, and that was a lot, because she asked me today whether I was at the audit's opening meeting last week... Where I gave the presentation on the intricacies of the entire grant program, our responsibilities and the scope of the audit itself.

Sounds like somebody needs 1.5 l of coffee and a whole box of chocky biscuits to rejoin the world of the quick.

So she asked if you were there where you told everyone how this crap works and how to not make a mess of it but they did so anyways? Your boss must have had a major reality disconnect.

Yeah, I am strongly suspecting she's not all there.

Sounds like she got slammed by the excess work load.

So I am more or less over the flu but now I have some sort of throat infection making my life miserable. Namely my throat is sore and I have lost my voice. This makes my job somewhat challenging.

edited 26th Jan '18 10:08:18 PM by TuefelHundenIV

...fuck me sideways.

I am still recovering from the whole loss of voice thing and now it turns out I have to babysit and train a new guard tomorrow. My 12 hour shift just got a lot longer.

Dunno whether to laugh or facepalm. The issues I had before with the data log shenanigans seem to have come full circle yesterday. Turned in my logs for the month and the manager wanted to have a look over them. The problem employee had written over a bunch of mine per usual but I had backups. Found that when said employee had tried to write over mine he had ended up making doubles or even triples of his own logs on multiple days, but each entry was a completely different value on the same time and day.

TLDR; pretty much proof he was pulling numbers out of his ass and filling the sheets with them. He's a longtime employee and buddies with the manager, but I can at least hope it ends up with him stopping the log nonsense after the manager spent an hour trying to make sense of his mess.

Though, he's the petty sort. Fully expect him to attempt to sabotage something else if he gets scolded over it.

edited 27th Jan '18 7:15:49 AM by carbon-mantis

I'm about to have a 48 hour week, assuming no additional overtime. This is going to be fun :)))

Carbon: Major suck man. But hey you covered your ass which was good and your boss sees what was going on and hopefully it doesn't blow back on you.

Sixth: Been there before hang in there man.