The office: Chatter about your job

We were cutting some steel pipe in the middle of nowhere once and lost a portable bandsaw. SOL for the entire day 'cause the property owner had neglected to mention that he had filled it with concrete. . .

Ow. That's a lot of investment to get the Mafia treatment.

Starting to feel like working this job I don't like isn't leaving time for finding something better. I didn't complete any applications over the weekend because I worked so late, and today I had to decline an invitation to an Apple Store job fair because I didn't think I could go to it and get to work on time. I did complete an application assessment, but it was a particularly long one (and every third question seemed like it was a variant on either "stealing from work is okay y/n" or "getting high at work is okay y/n") that took up most of my evening.

I've got four sites pinned right now ready to put in applications, but I don't have the time to do them.

edited 8th Dec '14 11:41:50 PM by TParadox

Ag. I hate applications like that. "Are you brain-dead? y/n"

You would be shocked how much stupid you have to weed out.

Crap on a cracker it was dull at work today.

Audience: "How dull was it, Nohbody?"

I was so bored I spent the last hour and a half of my shift reading an FB thread with an argument between a Troofer^note 9/11 conspiracy theorists style themselves as "Truthers", as in seeking the "real" explanation for the events of Sept 11, 2001 and a handful of people with access to various bits of engineering knowledge.

On a 7" tablet.

edited 15th Dec '14 8:18:30 PM by Nohbody

Wow. That is a high level of boredom. Did they use the melting steel argument?

Yup. Also debris field size outside the Pentagon, claiming it was too small for the aircraft size, and claiming that there were two reinforced columns inside the walls (or something to that effect) that the fuselage wouldn't have fit through (the last was new to me, but I never put much effort in Troofer bullshit before tonight, and admittedly even then I was doing a bit of skimming at points).

Those knuckle heads astound me. They can be entertaining to read. If you want to read a pretty sound thrashing of the troofer garbage theories Popular Mechanics does a very good job of it. They also thoroughly trashed the FEMA death camp theories.

So Drunkie almost got in a fistfight at work today.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. We're working on a very complicated project right now, and we're doing it without much in the way of leadership - my boss has to both be in the shop and the office, which means he's not often in the shop to handle problems. Since nobody's around to coordinate who is responsible for what part of this very complicated project, miscommunications have multiplied like bunnies on coke.

One of those miscommunications went pear-shaped today and I was in the middle of it.

Long story short; something got screwed up on my watch that was the result of screw-ups happening where I wasn't around to watch. I didn't catch the screw-up until there almost wasn't time to fix it. People got mad...including one employee (we'll call him Bob) who'd been given vague authority over the situation in question. He got in my face first.

Now apparently this had been a recurring problem that I was not aware of; I'd been setting things up incorrectly, he'd been quietly correcting them and getting madder and madder at me rather than coming to me and saying "dude, this isn't right". So I got a little hot at him about that when he suddenly blew up at me. My basic point was "why haven't I heard about this before now?" (Note: this is also partially my fault...when he pointed out what was wrong I did have a "why didn't I see that earlier" moment. I'd basically been making his job harder for the past couple of weeks and I did feel like an asshole about it a little bit. I was just mad that the news had taken this long to come to my door).

Into this conversation walked another employee...call him Joe. Joe likes to cause drama and start trouble, and that's exactly what he did here. Right at the point where I was about to say to Bob "look you're right, I'm sorry, let's noodle out a better method here", Joe starts ragging on my work performance in the general sense, telling me that I'm lazy and I don't give a shit, that this whole mess is my fault because I don't pay attention, blah blah blah.

Note: Joe is a new hire, I've been there over five years - and he's trying to talk down to me the way a foreman would. So, already a little unbalanced because of the me/Bob interaction I let him have a piece of my mind like only a construction worker knows how to. This does not go good places.

Right as we're getting to the "oh you wanna make something out of this" phase of an argument/potential fistfight my boss walks into the shop. Predictably he wants to know just what the hell is going on. He finds out...by way of Joe, who A: tries to make the mess my fault and B: insinuates that I'm not a good worker (e.g. "The problem here is that some people haven't been paying enough attention"...never mind the fact that he was the one who screwed the thing up that I didn't catch.) I lose it and give him my very best "fuck you and your college-boy passive aggressive bullshit" routine.

My boss takes one look at this shit-show and spends five minutes ripping us all a new orifice for wasting company time and money, yelling at each other when one of us should have brought the matter to him. Honestly, he was right. That was one ass-chewing I did have coming (seeing as I was part of said shit-show), but still...fuck Joe, and fuck this day. Imma drink whiskey now.

(Note: Joe got the worst of it for trying to make a team screwup one guy's fault. Much as that would have been cool, it doesn't help me much considering I gotta work with the guy tomorrow.)

edited 17th Dec '14 6:34:59 PM by drunkscriblerian

Boy that is a cluster fuck there mate. If Bob noticed a pattern he should have stood up and said something. He is in charge its his job to communicate with everyone. Joe needs to shut the fuck up as he is clearly a ham handed ass hat who sounds like he, "steps on his own dick" as the saying goes, a lot. While you could have possibly noticed something as well Bob should have been on the ball back when it wasn't an issue yet.

@Tuefel: You've hit on why my boss was so hacked off at us; somebody should have said something long before things got as pear-shaped as they became. Again, we wasted a combined hour of labor time yelling about whose fault it was...which was time enough to fix the fuckup that had occurred.

And yes, Joe is a ham-handed asshat. I haven't come that close to getting into a fight at work in a long time. Fortunately my boss seems to know who the instigator in all this is.

Fortunately Bob and I worked it out later...I apologized for making his job harder, told him he can come to me with stuff like that if it happens. He and I hammered out some ways we can make situations like this one not occur.

Still, just sorta...steamed. I mean, team fuckups happen, but when somebody takes a team mistake and tries to pin it on you, yeah you get upset like I'm upset.

I do. I have been on the shit end of that stick before. Which was kinda funny given what my boss himself had told us at the start of the contract. Order of blame starts with cleaning crews, then guards, then temps, then general employees.

@Tuefel: Been there too, not a fun place to end up. Also, blame is bullshit spelled differently. :D

Anyway, I'm hoping the fallout from the incident I described leads to better communication between team members. I already talked it out with Bob about how he and I can better coordinate needs...again, most of the reason things got so screwed up was people not talking to each other when they should have been. Hopefully the rest of the team can noodle this out and stop being so silly. And still, fuck Joe. That guy's an asshole inside of a douchebag.

(Note: I'm really drunk right now, so I hope my posts are making sense...)

Sounds like you got your shit squared away after finding the snarl. Good to go. As for Joe. Yeah fuck him. You can't fix stupid. Also for being drunk your posts are pretty good.

Ah, miscommunication at work.

I remember this one part time job I had back in my country, involving editing and translation. Everybody was scared of boss, so nobody said anything about this really one problem that could fuck everything up, and...well...Let's say that I can't work there anymore. Nobody can, actually.

Now that I'm back home and have about a month of breaks, I'm thinking about getting a part time job, involving proofreading graduate papers. One of few perks of being an English major, I guess.

Oh joy it was my turn as the football again.

So someone from the client asked me for contact info. He wanted two specific peoples contact info. Ironically one of the people he wanted was my field supervisor. So instead of asking him for the other bit of contact info I had to do it.

Since I did not have that info readily available on my end as I never contact this person ever and if I do things have gone very badly somewhere I had to route through my field supervisor.

He then told me the primary contract person who is the boss the guy asking me this info has all the info but would also give them the contact info for our other important contact as well.

For whatever reason this was not good enough for the client and he had to have the info now. I got yelled at for this. So I call my boss and he yells at me.

After a round of verbal wrangling I get the info and send it in.

I got yelled at twice for no god damn reason over something these jack asses could have handled between them instead of turning me into their personal football.

I am a wee bit miffed at being yelled at twice in the same night for such petty bullshit.

It was slow all day and I was really hoping to leave early because I have a big animation project for my mom's blog that needs to get published tonight. At quarter til 10, I was finally told to get ready to cash out for the night. Then we got crushed. The closing manager didn't send me on any more orders, but I did have to help in the kitchen for an extra twenty minutes.

So I'm doing a part time job as an English tutor.

It's hilarious to see a kid confusing "persuade" with "execute", therby resulting in a sentence like "I executed my baby brother with a bar of chocolate."

Fun time. Fun time.

Sounds like a future special operations grunt in the making...

If he had that amount of persistence, lessons would be so much easier.

Once when I was in seventh or eighth grade I think, I went on a mission trip to Chicago. On a couple of the days we were there, we helped in classrooms at a school where most of the kids had Spanish as their first language.

One of those days I was sent to an ESL first-grade class, where I was asked to have the kids come to me one at a time and read a story to me for English practice. I was a really terrible person to assign this to, because I wasn't correcting pronunciation at all. About half the class would read "Mr. Fig went 'jump, jump, jump!" as "Meester Feeg went 'huump, huump, huump!", and I said nothing.

It's a holiday season, so I don't have to go to tutoring for a while. But from next monday, my "job" resumes.

Urrrrgggghhhhhhh.......

Yep, I, too, will be going back to work on Monday, after two weeks off.

I wish I had a job that took holiday time off. Or nights and weekends. My pizza place closed early on Christmas Eve and shut down on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, and that's probably it the whole year.

It occurred to me during my latest job search that opthalmology would be a pretty comfortable job, but I don't have any skills for it.