Let's bitch about our stupid, annoying co-workers

ouch - good luck, just1n3, but also good job and good timing talking her round re the mailout

I typically do well at annual review time, have consistently gotten an "Excels" rating for 9 consecutive years. Began reading the annual review summary my new boss was sharing with me during the one on one, and it appeared I was well on my way to a 10th. Comments were mostly raves, there was no actual negative feedback or specific area of improvement.

Get to the end, it's the lowest rating I've ever had in 15 years, only the second time I got a "Meets Expectations". I was baffled. I got an "Excels" last year despite doing much less impressive work in 2018. Last year I voluntarily traveled to the Philippines to oversee 12 concurrent training classes, San Juan (on less than a week's notice for an impromptu two week class), voluntarily learned and immediately began teaching a new platform (becoming only the 2nd person licensed to teach it), acquired the access to update internal system materials that had been needed for TEN YEARS but had never been done, and was one of the most prominent participants in the training material redevelopment project.

it was, as is always, bureaucracy. our bosses can't give us direct ratings, it's calibrated at the leadership level, so all bosses in our division present their employee and recommended rating, and leadership either approves or denies it, and they also set caps on how many people can get each rating in each division, so I'm fairly sure they saved the "Excels" for other "more important" roles.

so that was the only chance of me getting any incentive pay which would have been helpful given what's going on. so the message to me is "do the bare minimum from here on out".

OK! will do!

a fairly pointless thing to get worked up over rn but w/e. i'm going to pretend the only reason I got the lower score was for saying "motherfucker" on a hot mic, that's easier to live with.

When I was a manager doing ratings, we were only allowed a minimal number of excels vs meets. Definitely forced us into a position where people doing good work got penalized for no reason other than available budget.

yep same thing here. I can tell having friends in higher places in past years before I switched depts probably played more of a role than I realized.

so I'm wondering how I managed to get the higher rating at all last year, considering I did not get along with the boss that did that review at all, to the point where we had to have meetings to clear the air.

they also set caps on how many people can get each rating in each division

It sucks. I had a colleague quit over the finer details of the review process.

I guess our developers are real real bored sitting at home because they went in on a whim overnight and completely overhauled the layout of one of my essential work apps such that a search function that used to display all information on a single handy screen like so:

Business Name DBA
Street Address
City State Zip Etc.

Now displays everything like this:

Business Name



DBA



Etc.

Forcing everyone to scroll endlessly to find information that we used to be able to see at a quick glance. This is a thing I have to consult dozens, sometimes 100+ times/day, and which has remained the same for years, which allows for a lot of mental shorthand and eliminates a lot of cognitive effort on my part. And my work is already slowed way down, working at home on a tiny laptop screen (down from two big desktop monitors). I'm fuuuuuuuurious.

JESUS CHRIST STOP REPLYING ALL ON EVERY FUCKING EMAIL YOU MORONS

CC: All

After yesterday's fiasco, my class seems fried. I feel bad subjecting them to my braying today.

I've been working with one particular freelance client for 20+ years and something happened today that beats all for unprofessionalism. She hired this livestock photographer to shoot all the year-end award presentations for a nonprofit she runs; the awards section runs 20+ pages in the May issue of her magazine. This goddamn dumbass photographer moved all the pics he shot to his laptop and then overwrote the SD cards with subsequent jobs rather than putting those cards aside; AND he doesn't have any data backup protocol for his laptop. Of course, he lost every fucking thing, including official backdrop photos for 2 or 3 other shows and pasture shots from a couple of ranches. ugghhhh so mad right now

Geez. So does that mean the magazine article is scrubbed?

No, we'll do the award recipients without pictures, and the rest of the section will be as usual (sponsor and donor recognition mostly). But the nonprofit is a junior livestock association, and the parents who bankroll their kids' participation like to see their babies' pictures in the glossy color mag. It's going to hurt signups for 2021 after a year that's already full of lower turnout and cancelled shows. My client went ahead with publishing this issue instead of doing a 1 or 2 issue hiatus based on the photographer's assurances that his computer guys were hard at work getting that data back. If she'd gotten the straight dope from the photographer a month ago and gone with a hiatus, I could have been getting some of that independent contractor unemployment. But what was a 72-page issue last year will probably be 32-40 pages this year, and my billing is tied roughly to issue size.

they pulled me from my 19-day class with another person to have me lead a 3 day on my own. I was afraid this person would lose track of the clock and put us further behind, but she'd taught the class several times before, and I had no choice, so w/e....

she lets me know end of day today where she left off, which is about 6 hours behind, and tomorrow is the last day, with no sense of concern that that leaves next to a zero chance of finishing tomorrow, and we can't extend class, and the time to have raised the alarm to leadership was like 3 days ago.

I had to spend an extra half hour mocking up a schedule that cut several unessential things and gutted the time on others and hope like hell we can meet it, which isn't a given.

thankful I'm taking Friday off.

I've become a more peaceful person in quarantine. Being removed from a situation where some think lying is justifiable or even an art form has done wonders for my self-esteem. Not to mention I'm sleeping better at night now that I don't have to spend time around people who have no sense of boundaries.

I reported a server error in our QC environment on December 17th, 2019. Aka, something that usually took 5 minutes of scanning the error logs in GUI, and resolving whatever issue. Except this time, they claimed the logs were clean. So they told me tell them next time it happened, which was early January, and this time they found something in the logs, and said they were looking into it.

It is now May, and they have nothing to report, even though we've been consistently reporting a QC environment that barely works for six months, which keeps wrecking our training classes. The QA environment also started developing the same problem, basically meaning we don't have a working test environment to use in class for hours/days at a time

what....the....fuck? I about had enough today and said I was tired of getting bitched at by trainees who aren't willing to accept "they're looking into it" day after day for three weeks.

lol i just got a comment on a jira ticket filed in june 2018

'because we're now migrating to a new cms, we will not be devoting resources to address this issue'

fair enough! sometimes if you ignore a problem for long enough, it ceases to matter

haha somebody was psyched to be able to close that ticket with a clear conscience

lol that reminds me of

"hey wanted to see if u r still having issue"

follow ups, hoping you'll say "nah it fixed itself" so they can close the ticket

I'm on the other end of those, and sorry guys, our management and current work doesn't care about that issue until it gets mentioned in a management meeting

:(

Ha yeah I often get rebuffed on feature requests with "well we're likely moving to a new system soon so theres no point".

But like, if you've been saying this since 2015 and NOTHING HAS CHANGED, cmon man.

Also:
"hey wanted to see if u r still having issue"

follow ups, hoping you'll say "nah it fixed itself" so they can close the ticket

I am guilty of this, esp with mobile faults on monday mornings. Did it fix over the weekend? most likely.

My boss laid off almost all staff 2 months ago except for me and two seamstresses who don’t speak a lot of English. After 2 months of being the sole focus of her chaotic energy, I’m losing my mind. The last few years have been less stressful bc I had a coworker who was v interested in buying the business and took the brunt of my boss’ weirdness. I’d forgotten how bad it can get.

Here are some examples of the whiplash I deal with regularly:

“Our strength lies in offering so many colors” ——> “we really need to limit the amount of colors available in a style”

“We offer too many styles, the stores are cluttered” —-> “lets make 20 variations of the same garment instead of just perfecting it the first time”

“We need to get rid of our store in San Francisco, it’s too expensive” ——> “scale of economies!”

“This is the summer palette” —-> “actually lets drop that color” —-> “actually lets bring that color back” —-> “nah get rid of it” —-> “wait maybe you could make more like {shows me a sample that is a fabric nothing like we make, in a color so rich I clearly can’t replicate it considering the dyes I work with}”

My favorite recurring argument is about our store windows:
Me: Windows are free advertising. They need to be more eye catching. Ours are too beige and nothing stands out
Her: it doesn’t matter. Everyone looks at windows. You don’t need to catch attention
Me: we should dye a couple pairs of pants in brighter colors just for the store windows, bc it’ll help with contrast
Her: but then ppl will see the bright colors in the windows and come in to buy them
Me:......
Me:?!?!?
Her: I don’t you to dye pants in bright colors for instore stock bc nobody buys them
Me: *punches self in face*

are you making things to order anyway cos of reduced frequency of trade?
I mean would seem to be overkill to make so much more stuff.
BUt that's presumably what you're saying anyway.
Though if you drop in production does that mean the last few staff are in danger of being fired if tehy're not seen to be active all the time?

interested actually are you getting a lot of walk in trade now? NOt really been around places like clothing shops cos i think most of them are closed here and the only open ones are departments of larger shops.

Our stores are closed till June at least but our online traffic has increased x 10. What’s annoying is that she’s been nagging me to fill the stores for weeks, and I’m like, why?? If I fill the stores now, we run out of undyed stock, she really can’t afford to buy fabric right now, so let’s be judicious until we actually know for sure when the stores are opening.

I normally do online orders as dyed-to-order but we’re doing too much business for that so I’ve pulled a lot of stock from our 3 stores, which she’s also giving me whiplash over - one minute she agrees with me that we should be utilizing the stores’ stock for online sales, the next she’s going on about how the stores need to be ready for opening at any moment.

The last 3 of us a safe unless she loses the business.

Once again, stupid managers enrolled students who didn't meet the minimum criteria to take my class...into my class. The class they should have been enrolled into is one week longer. I can't squeeze 5 days of extra info into a schedule that's already full, so... they're pretty much lost.

The managers know. They are playing dumb.

We pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalty fees per year due to undertrained representatives misprocessing 401(k) transactions.

Clearly the solution to this is to train 5 people who have never used our systems before on 401(k), and cut the hours of the system training from 40 to 8, and to assign me to prepare for this class on a day's notice while I'm simultaneously leading another class and can't work OT.

This won't blow up at all.

We've got an ongoing problem with our coworker that processes all of our invoices and paperwork. She is just constitutionally unable to wait a reasonable amount of time for anything to get reviewed or moved forward, the second it hits her inbox she just HAS to get it out of her court as fast as imaginable. She's efficient, but it also creates unnecessary stress on everyone. It's been a known issue and our boss has talked to her about it before, but it's gotten so much worse while we are working from home. As an example, a consultant emailed her an invoice at 10:14 this morning. She attached the pay requisition form that I need to to sign and sent it to me for review and signature at 10:18. At the time I was on a zoom call for another project. She emailed me at 10:28 asking me if I had a chance to review it yet, again at 10:45 asking if there were problems with it, yet again at 10:55 asking me why I didn't approve it yet and finally CALLED me at 11:05 to ask why it wasn't done yet. It's infuriating.

I am that person, except I never send the emails or call, I just sit on my couch stewing.

Last 2 posts summing up this lockdown shit. Unconscionable drain on people's wellbeing.

I feel like my company's acquiescence to our clients' concerns that the "quality of our customer service will decline" or the "service levels will suffer" is such stupidity. What call center is anybody calling right now where your first impression is "wow, they really are at the top of their game"?

don't see what it's going to help if you throw a bunch of already stressed out people who aren't used to working from home onto the phone with a third of the training they were supposed to get, knowing if they quit they won't get unemployment.

Had to report a data privacy violation for the first time in my career here today because some motherfucking idiot supplied sample documentation for our training materials. instead of properly redacting the materials, or supplying fictitious customer data from a test environment, they submitted actual customer data/applications with their private data only obscured with a REMOVABLE TAG that said "Confidential". anybody can delete these tags, and sometimes they disappear when you scroll fast, making visible the customer's data.

None of us internally on this project are authorized to see customer data from this client, and we've also now just shared it with a third party, basically breaching this customer's privacy.

motherfucking MORONS.

they used Pop-Up tags. all you have to do is click and drag it out of the way, and boom, customer's info exposed.

first higher-up I reported to seemed to not care. why even have a Data Privacy policy in place if we don't care about enforcing it. fuck.

so I told them I will not be doing any more review of these documents and am deleting the ones I inadvertently d/led

i'm sort of impressed how bad people are at social distancing rules. for example, at work there is a small room that lots of people use that has been decreed to be single occupancy to allow for social distancing. there is also an even smaller entry area into this room. so naturally, while the room is occupied, people waiting to use it just stand around in the entry area and take off their masks so they can have a good conversation.

"Hey Neanderthal and Other Dummy, one of our trainers is sick today. Can you both fill in for him and take over?"
"Sure. Other Dummy and I can figure out how to split up."
"Absolutely. Let me know when you want to touch base, Neanderthal."
"Do you know what he's teaching, Other Dummy? Looks like the Core curriculum?"
"Not 100% sure but I think that's correct! Looks like it is core."
"Ok, I got confirmation he's on Day 6 of Core! We can discuss how to split up the clas-"
"oh I can't actually help with the class, Neanderthal. I have meetings all day."
...

"THEN WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU JUST SAY THAT RATHER THAN WASTING 20 MINUTES OF MY TIME?"

oh sure, tell me I'm going to be only 'supervising' this year's Open Enrollment at the Philippines location, then assume that I now have all this extra capacity to lead training classes, load me up with them, then drop the bomb on me at 5 pm last Friday that the person who reports to me can't report to me next week. which now leaves nobody to prep trainers for a class totaling 100 people.

I'ma make them solve it as I don't have the mental energy to play Schedule Tetris rn

more an amusing one, but my co-worker who has worked with me for two years and sees my name on a daily basis prepared a slide for our training today with our pics, and she butchered my last name in the caption underneath so badly it was comical. not a typo or anything, she outright left 3 letters out of it.

tempted to sign my emails this way now.

Trainers during activities are supposed to send their learners login credentials for our test Console, plus a specific replication number for each dummy account, so that everybody can be in the same account at the same time without locking each other out. We send them a template that they can forward as-is, with their only job filling in the blanks next to each replication number with the name of a learner.

One trainer inexplicably sent her own custom email with just the replication numbers and no login data. A few days later, I found out she was giving them wrong instructions. The learners were all supposed to use the same login credentials and password (let's say for example login: ABC123, pw: youandme). and then when they search for a customer's name, they add the three digit replication number on the end.

She had them changing the last three characters of the login to match the replication number. so if the learner's replication number was 105, she had them logging in as ABC105. which of course didn't work.

So I explained to her the mistake she was making two weeks ago, with screenshots, and a detailed explanation. She replies "got it, so sorry about that!", and no further comments. We have about 15 classes and I'm not really in charge of observing them, I just happened to be on her email last time, so since then I haven't given it another thought.

Today, she sends another email, telling us the logins don't work. She's giving them the same wrong instructions again....two weeks later.

How in the....f.......

today, we had a global issue with a tool. boss's boss found it amusing because we were having similar issues a year earlier, so she copied and pasted the issue's summary from an email from last year, with the lead in "<Tool> issue, from last year". The summary she copied had both an identification of the root cause AND instructions for what action we should take. she made zero distinction that this was a c&p from a year old email until more than two hours later.

So naturally, in context, it appeared that she was telling us "this is the solution to your issue, similar to the issue we had last year", and giving us instructions to cascade. so I abandoned calling in to escalate the existing ticket, and merely gave this update to our instructors. even told her I'd done this afterward! no correction.

like why unnecessarily confuse us like that by dumping "just for giggles" nonsense in the middle of a discussion of a technology issue? I guess she realized her mistake as she was not at all mad at me about it, but it's frustrating that she should know better than muddying waters.

to clarify, she copied this summary into a WebEx Team Chat, so of course none of us had any idea she had just copied in the bones of an old email

as a cost cutting measure all the non-production servers are automatically turned off at 6 at night (and start again at, i think 4am - because we have people in GMT+5.5)

does that stop the tester waiting until 5:35 to start asking me questions about servers that are about to die? he's had literally all day...

(6 is too early imo, but i'm happier with 09:30-18:30 than i am with 9-5)

we keep having learners who "log in" to class, then peace out once roll is called, and in big classes it doesn't get caught right away.

earlier this week, I noticed I had this one who literally showed up for an hour and peaced for the day, then showed up for a few hours the second day. This was obvious as I was monitoring the attendee list for her name after she disappeared, messaged her, and also downloaded the roster from MS TEams, which confirms entrance/exit times.

Her manager assured me she was there "because the learner told her she was", so I told her that was impossible for the reasons above, and that she hadn't done any of the assignments (the only person in class who hadn't).

So the student msgs me upset saying "I've been there, how do you not see me?" and I pointed out she hadn't done any assignments and that I had a log of when she left each day. dead silence - she literally thought she was fooling everybody and didn't count on there being assignments that I checked every day.

I'm realizing that I'm terrible at taking attendance over Teams. So far I haven't been calling roll because I have a 50-minute class and 32 students and it takes SO LONG to get them all to unmute and reply. But I think I'll have to because I can't seem to use the "download attendance" feature right; people are always missing from it who I know were in class, and then I can't be fully confident about the people I think were absent.

roll call for a 30+ person class in Teams is hell. after the first day, where I do a full roll to learn voices, ask if I'm saying names right, and ask them if they have a nickname they go by, every day forward, I look at the attendees list and make sure they're connected to phone, and take down who I see, and call on just those I'm missing. Imperfect, but I'm on a crunch usually.

I did see some weird results in Download Attendance the first two times I used it, which is why I can't confidently use it alone to confirm absences. I check the number of attendees, and if it varies at any point, I look to see if anybody new joined or if anybody departed, and only after I've confirmed that and/or called on the person, I use the Download feature to confirm what I already know.

Unfortunately sometimes you find out late if the class is too big, and if I can't stay for sure that the person wasn't there, I don't report it....so people often get away with it anyway just due to the bad teacher:learner ratio, having too many learners. also technically, their managers should be joining training and helping monitor them, but...they just don't.

but then I worry that i'm going to get in trouble for not noticing someone skipped on class, so....my OCD flares up

Yeah, I've been basically trying to just look at my attendance list, the problem is that in the moment I get hyper-focused on running the class, sustaining their interest and keeping the energy high, and I forget to give myself time to actually check who's missing.

yup. I have that problem too.

at some point I just say "you're doing teh best you can", cos if I hyperfocus on attendance, I suddenly get tongue-tied.

I've also noticed my training classes went from being more fun and loose to being rigid simply cos my heart isn't in it right now with all of the problems.

i mean, get the right end result, but.....I don't want to make it boring for anybody, and i kinda am atm, which isn't the norm for me

kind of annoying that on a week I'm teaching a class so I wanted to opt out of reviewing Alpha materials for a course redesign we're doing (due today), I can't because I notice two major errors in five minutes that none of the other 4 reviewers caught (and they're regulation errors which would be really bad if we taught incorrectly).

so now I have to because apparently nobody else is paying close attention.