The office: Chatter about your job

Well someone managed to break our glass security gate barrier. Knucklehead tried to push open the gate when it requires either input from a reader or a remote command. So now there is a really expensive bit of glass missing from the entry way.

Is the perpetrator's employment also now missing?

They are likely in some deep shit at this point given that is a really expensive mistake. Boon Edam does not make cheap gates.

New job: Everyone is reasonably nice and it's a good food place that doesn't serve undercooked food or have unsanitary practices as far as I can tell. I just have to be patient with myself because I forgot how hard it was learning where everything is, what the routines are (especially for sharp machines), and what everyone's names are. I also keep accidentally putting in numbers/door codes that were for my old job and not my new one.

From time to time, I get asked to write email newsletters. I'm given the information and expected to compose a message in a voice that could conceivably sound like the documentary subject's son.

I was just given the info about the documentary subject's collector's edition DVD sale. You can buy the regular DVD for $20 on Amazon or you can buy a limited edition signed disc with some extra gifts for four and a half times that much from the subject's own store. I was given some bullet points and a press release. Usually, when I write these newsletters, I'm giving news, asking people to share the movie with their friends, or go see it. So I struggled a little bit to just sell them an expensive collector's item in this voice, but I came up with something I could live with.

I sent it to the guy who gave me the assignment for feedback. He said, "it's great, but since we've been asked to help them sell the stuff, we should just send it the way he wrote it, because it gets to the point faster."

Oh, so you wanted me to copy and paste for you.

Dear Trash Pick Up Assholes,

The intercom at the dock entrance is not a toy, magic summoning button, or there for you to amuse yourself with. If your dumb ass shows up off schedule, do not expect me to be waiting patiently just for you to show up. I have shit to get done during my work day that involves not sitting on my ass with thumb up my butt like you.

If you hold down the button so it makes long, drawn out, and noisy screeching sounds without ever letting off of said button, not only will you piss me off but no one can talk to you, you stupid dithering idiots. These are commonplace pieces of equipment at many facilities so you should frankly understand the basics and not need your hands held in their basic and courteous operation. Even small children and privates in the military can grasp their basic function.

When I tell you to not do that again, the correct words that should pass between your miscreant lips, "I am sorry it won't happen again." Your bad manners and inability to communicate your arrival time does not give you leeway to be an asshole. Nor does your assorted self justifying bullshit excuses hold any water with me.

I can and will report your stupid ass for doing stupid shit like this. Other drives can and have been fired for doing it repeatedly. So please use your head for something other than a hat rack and perform a cranial rectal reversal to correct your cranial rectal inversion so we can all go about our days with minimal hassle caused by you.

I do understand it is cold, hot, raining, sunny, dry, snowy, nice day, etc. but unless you tell me when to expect you, you have to suck up the wait time buttercup.

Straighten up, fly right, and don't be an asshole.

edited 11th Feb '18 12:41:35 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Wouldn't it be "extraction", not "inversion"?

Fair point. Fixed.

Oh joy. Suddenly, eight years and two major agreements in, the upstairs want to know how the agreements work exactly, despite the rather obvious fact that everything worked just fine for the last eight years, aside from the EC auditors being assholes once. Now, I'm supposed to explain shit with deadlines of about a day or two, and I don't know half of it, because I just take the data people give me and organize it in a format Brussels wants.

You poor bastard. Hang in there man I hate talking to "upstairs" about as much as the next grunt.

So we have had "FUN" with my site lately. This last weekend we had a drunk wander up to the building at 0200. The fella was clearly intoxicated to one degree or another and you could see it in his sway in the security footage. He frankly justified our locked door policy after trying to gain entry. He tugged the door handle once then slumped himself into a corner by the door and dozed off. Complete with the constant head bobbing and lolling around you expect from the intoxicated. I was briefly worried when said head motion stopped. Thankfully not long after the local cops show up and try to rouse the guy. He is mostly unresponsive. He moves around a bit but not much else. In about 20 minutes they are hauling him away on stretcher. No further info was made available.

Today some smuck decided he needed to be condescending and give me shit about the temporary access badge return process. I get it is a bit of a pain and I expect some grumbling but this guy is just being an ass for the sake of being an ass. Frankly I think the little shit is going over board with this short shit syndrome. Because I am not allowed to dress down the idiots I had to kick it up the chain.

Well today ended with me checking a safety and hazard sheet to make sure myself and several people were not exposed to hazardous material. One of the cleaning crew decided to ignore her team leads instructions and used a cleaning agent meant for wiping down white boards. The stuff stinks to high heaven and is mean to be use din a well ventilated area. That and a little goes a long way.

She didn't use a little, she used a lot. She drenched over several hundred feet of hand rails in this stuff and wiped down the plastic stair edge covers with it. The fumes built up quite rapidly and began making people cough and a bit dizzy.

So I got the team lead up to speed and she had just found out and showed me what she used. So we grab up some water dampened cleaning rags and proceed to wipe the handrails down and propping up the access doors for the stairs on every floor to ventilate the stair shaft which has almost no air circulation at all. She then wiped down the stair corners for good measure. About 15 minutes after we did that I noted the fumes and odor were notably reduced.

So after taking care of that I double check the safety data sheet for hazardous material and it looks like it isn't serious and at most it is a inhaled irritant and would take a large doses with prolonged exposure to do anything nasty. It is water soluble so wiping it down with the rags and then washing off our hands should take care of skin exposure.

So after all that hopefully the fumes and odor have dissipated by the time the first employee shows up at 0500ish in the morning.

I think our "tax season" is coming to an end. Suddenly last week we were slammed with huge orders caused by our customers' customers spending their tax refunds. Today my supervisor was considering letting some of us go early because it was dead.

So I'm doing this "take info from web, put in Excel" thing, and this particular government service has nothing but a form on official government 'net (I know what it is, but I gotta use official government websites for info). I leave a comment on the doc saying "this is a form-only service" and forget about the particular service.
Fast forward to a couple days ago and I see a reply: "This is a form, not a proper service information page, you should go looking for the service's page in the Police's website."
*Face Palm*
What did you think I did, you ignorant external consultant? Find the form and call it a day? I combed the Police's (old, rickety, though not as bad as the Tax Authority's) website very thoroughly before saying it's a form-only service, thank you very much.
*sighs*

Job grumbling.

For a while every weekend I was getting scheduled to close on Saturday night, then open on Sunday morning. Given that some times we didn't actually get out until 2-3 AM on Saturday, coming back at 10 or 11 AM kinda sucked. I brought it up with the scheduler (who's also the store owner), and he said he'd see what he could do.

So now on one night I'm scheduled to 15 minutes before the store closes ("scheduled to" isn't necessarily the same thing as "gets off the clock", mind you; see that 2-3 AM thing above, when the store officially closes at 1 AM), and coming in 15 minutes after the opening driver. Technically that's not "close then open", but using that same logic technically I can't say the owner is a cocksucker because I have no evidence that he actually has sucked dick.

But he totally is a cocksucker.

I like the delivery job in general, but the owner is a cheap scumbag that likes to play fast and loose with "letter of the law" versus "spirit of the law". Unfortunately, I have two traffic tickets and a non-ticketed accident on my three year driving record, so it's unlikely that any other place would hire me to drive for them in the near future.

edited 23rd Apr '18 10:13:24 PM by Nohbody

So big bag of changes at work. The first is we have a new gal at the desk during the day. Thankfully she isn't rude, pushy, or excessively obnoxious like the last one. She seems fairly nice and easy to work with. Which makes my life easier because we share a desk.

They are working on expanding our building which will mean huge changes to how the property as a whole and the building gets accessed. Access control is about to get more chaotic because we are losing access to the primary employee entrance for the expansion. They have added a new parking lot just across a street but the yahoos from Pay Pal next door make that crossing somewhat perilous because they like to speed like idiotic lunatics down a low speed side road. I figure it is only a matter of time before someone gets hurt and things are forcefully changed. It is a good thin though that the new parking spaces are almost ready because when they put the expansion project into full swing we will lose permanent access to 4 rows of parking spaces and temporarily lose for nearly two years access to another 3 rows. We have roughly 10 rows of parking spots so we are losing the majority of spots to the project. This will likely lead to some challenges in watching and controlling the two separate lots. Can hardly wait for the chaos to ensue.

Now the grumbling begins.

So the building is open 7 days a week again. We have a guard on the one day I don't cover and he has it easy but is managing to fuck it up by the numbers. All he has to do is watch the camera feeds, do his foot patrols inside a climate controlled building, and fill out two pieces of paper work, one of which makes sure he gets paid. What does this yahoo do? Skip patrols entirely, fail to fill out paper work, or skip parts of his patrols entirely. We have a system that tracks everywhere we have to go on a patrol plus what the cameras see as he goes by these locations. The system gives me a certain number of references to the points he has swiped in a given time frame. He has notably been back sliding despite not even two weeks back getting warned by one of the office bosses to form up and fly straight.

I wan to smack this guy. He doesn't have any of the inspections I do, doesn't tackle pest control at the low level, low end maintenance, documentation and generation of back ups, write and update SOP's, maintain contacts, and serve as the most immediate contact between client and business. All he has to do is sit his ass in a chair for the better part of an hour then walk around a given patrol round for 10-15 minutes before he can sit again. Then fill out a form that is almost entirely filling in when he does his patrols and the other form is for when he was on shift so he can get paid.

Well, there it is. The first time I've had to turn down a gig because I'm busy with another gig.

If the timing was a little better, it wouldn't be an issue, but I got the offer for this two week job last week, and today while I was working on it, I was offered a one to two day job that needs to be done as soon as possible.

I hate nitpicky managers. One of them insists that I need to be faster and more efficient when literally no one else—customers, other managers, what have you—has anything to say about me being too slow. And some of the problem is that they keep overfilling the brine-filled olive crocks I have to carry back to the refrigerator. Today we sold out of a lot of things and 10 whole minutes got shaved off simply because I didn't have to worry about EMPTYING THE CROCK SO I COULD CLOSE THE FUCKING LID, and/or spilling brine and olives all over the floor. Also, various crates and boxes which I need inevitably end up being used by other people so I have to improvise, which takes five minutes.

I'm not quitting this job, but I'm seriously thinking about sending an email and telling them I physically cannot be any faster unless they consistently stop overfilling crocks and set aside some crates so I don't have to hunt for one.

So, the manager who tells me (and everyone else) to "be more efficient" sent a group email asking if someone would pick up a shift this week. I said, "Yes, if there's one on Wednesday." They reply with "Thanks" but nothing else. The day after, when they sent out the schedule, I saw no shift scheduled for Wednesday. Not being quite so desperately in need of money as I was half a year ago, I didn't bother to confirm since I assumed someone else took it or there wasn't an extra shift on Wednesday, etc.

Cue a call from the supervisor today asking why I haven't come in to work. I sent an email explaining what happened.

This manager constantly makes mistakes when they type up the schedule. I have to wait a few hours after getting my schedule in case there's another one saying "IGNORE THE FIRST EMAIL IT'S THIS ONE REALLY."

I wouldn't mind this so much if this manager didn't constantly criticize people for much smaller mistakes like taking ten minutes longer to close up their station, or wasting paper wrapping up cuts of meat. It's very rudely controlling and moreso when they do it in front of everyone on the crew rather than taking them aside. And when they themselves make the same mistake over and over again it's just adding insult to injury. Everyone at work complains about it.

I wish there were manager evaluations.

Almost sounds like we work at the same place. Our work week starts Wednesday. I get Tuesday off, and schedule says I have Wednesday off too when I checked. Manager changes the schedule Tuesday night, failed to inform anyone, then calls me Wednesday cursing and raving and threatening to discipline or fire me for not showing up.

This is the second time a manager's called to see if I can come in on my day off. Which would normally be fine! But they call at 10:30 and ask me to be there by 11. It takes me an hour just to get to work on time—not to mention brushing my teeth and having breakfast and all that stuff I need to, y'know, function properly.

Again, not desperate now, so this isn't a huge problem. Just annoying.

All right, so the same manager I've been complaining about answered the phone when I called in sick due to food poisoning two days ago. They said (which is one of my red flags) "Oh, but we're going to be busy—" as if that would make me magically recover! I wasn't even able to eat solid food for a day and a half. And it's not just to me, it's to everyone. I was literally taken aside and told, "Don't worry about what Manager says, I've been working here for three years and I got the same criticism you did." That makes it worse, not better. They've gotten much too comfortable if they think they can act so rudely towards everyone.

Lerad: Ugh that is a shitty manager. Someone needs to pull that yahoo aside and dress them down for being an ass.

The fun has begun. The new parking lot is up and running, and they have fenced off a big portion of the property. The employees have three total entrances they are allowed to use vs just one they originally used. Needless to say part of my job just became impossible.

Our company recently got an invitation from one of our business partners to a festival in France, as thanks for selling so much of their product. Two people are going to represent the company.

Guess who is now going to a festival in France without having to pay for it!!! And guess who's extending their trip, because as long as they're in Europe they might as well take advantage of being in fucking Europe!!!

Not me.

It's the manager who I've been complaining about, along with the other person who dealt with the business partner.

I don't care much for France. It's the principle. This manager got basically two vacations in a year and one of them was footed by work. Meanwhile I haven't had a vacation since I got out of college and started working, roughly six years ago.

Edited by Leradny on Jul 20th 2018 at 11:13:32 AM

Nice thing that happened: We were so short-staffed due to vacations and school semesters starting that one of the good managers told everyone to just show up if they wanted overtime, and if they could stay late that would be great too.

Since I picked up the most hours (including a whole shift) said manager gave me a gift card for Starbucks. Working 6 days a week almost drove me crazy but I sure do appreciate free coffee and that big fat paycheck I'll get tomorrow.