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

otm

people dont look at windows LMAO jfc

One of my UK colleagues has twice now asked me what "RVA" stands for. It is INSANELY well known and common an acronym in telecommunications ("recorded voice annoucement") and this guy being Level 3 for a fucking mobile phone call centre should KNOW THIS SHIT. he always asks me to "dumb down" responses from the phone networks that say things like "site tower degragded performance repair ETA bla date". LIke what else does he think that means GAHHH

a student entered a live training class in MS Teams today where people were actively talking and presenting and typed "I heard class is cancelled today, is that true?"

bit like walking into a McDonald's that's serving customers and saying "I heard you all are closed right now, is that true?"

Xps that’s the thing though - I’m not even suggesting creative solutions, I’m suggesting the most basic things that EVERY other remotely successful business does! I’ve gotta post a photo here one day so you can see how truly bad our windows look. I’m surprised anyone goes into the stores at all.

Tonight my boss texts me a picture she took of her computer screen, showing a listing on our website. This is the following exchange:
Her: did u take this photo
Me: no
Her: who put it up
Me: Susan [a former coworkers mum who did all the transition work when we had to change platforms]
Her: how do people buy it

*now I’m confused*

Me: what do you mean?
Her: Well it is saying you can buy the shirts
I wondered how?
Me: by hitting “add to cart”???
Her: you knew about the photos. I guess that’s what meant
Me: I still don’t understand
Her: I googled [our business] and all these odd shirts came up
I was surprised

*still confused but feeling a sense of dawning understanding and horror and what she’s getting at*

Me: that’s our website
Her: Ok so it links to our website
I didn’t realize that would happen!
Technology!!
I didn’t think google went into our website!!
Me: It goes into every website ever
Her: news to me!!

I mean Jesus Christ the website was right there in the url. But this is the same person who also asked what our “web address” is when she actually meant “email” (she has repeatedly called it our “web address”) and wants to start promoting our business on Twitter (?!??!??!!) even though I’ve been telling her for a year that we need to be focusing on Instagram

please never leave this job, as long as she is willing to keep blindly funding it for years and occasionally thinking "what is... shop?" before making a noise like a stepped-on balloon, we will cherish the content

She has by some miracle had this same business for close to 40 yrs

I mentioned this on the careers advice thread but I'm getting made redundant soon. It has been an absolute disaster.

- our branch is at risk of closure but if it doesn't close then my job role is being eliminated anyway in restructuring, for a replacement position which is 1/3 less salary.

- so if we stay open I'm meant to finish in the middle of December. But if the branch is closing then all of us are finishing at... some point in the future, that could be any time between December and March, yet to be decided. So we pointed out that if I get made redundant, there would still be a need to hire a replacement for what could be as little as four weeks, which obviously makes no sense. It took two weeks for Head Office to realise that yes this might be an issue and put a pause on the redundancy process.

- meanwhile despite knowing I'm getting made redundant at some point imminently, I can't really start applying for new jobs in good faith because I don't know when my last day would be yet, and if I leave before I'm redundant I lose out on the payment, which is significant enough to not be worth abandoning.

- if the branch stays open for now, it could still end up closing in a year or two years. So if you take a new contract on reduced pay then 12 weeks later you're made redundant, you've thrown away a considerable chunk of a redundancy pay-out as your payoff is worked out on the past three months of earnings. This isn't just our branch but every branch. So as you would expect, anyone eligible for redundancy is taking it because it's too big a gamble to risk losing out on several thousand pounds.

- our H.O has obviously been banking on people panicking and taking a lesser contract, not realising that all the people they're "restructuring" have long service and are all eligible for a good payoff, while knowing there's no future in retail.

- so this week I had to have a ridiculous conversation with a grandboss three levels up who wanted to know why I wasn't applying for the new position. "Given the choice between leaving with a good payout, or staying in a job being paid a third less, I think it's quite obvious why." The seniors are spooked now they've realised they've basically forced out their most experienced, expert staff and are going to have to replace them with people who won't have the knowledge, and with the new contracts they won't get any level of committment from them either.

The whole thing has been a fucking nightmare. It's stressful enough being made redundant without having the people making you redundant clearly have no planning or foresight.

(I mean if you think that post is confusing... try living through it and trying to plan your immediate future)

sincere sorry for your situation, delighted "eat shit" to your bosses

Guy briefing us today has an assistant to work the magic next slide button in PowerPoint (coz it's so fucking hard to click and speak) and instead of saying "next slide please" is going with "okaaayyy Richie FLASH FORWARD noooowww!"

Still no updates other than "redundant, at some point in the future" but in the meantime:

- Head Office wants us to go digital and has sent a new Samsung tablet to every branch. The apps include a checklist for what needs done every day. Which is ridiculous because as a manager you're paid to know what to do every day and take it upon yourself to get it done so if you're needing this app then... what are you being paid for?

- the majority of people in our branches are not tech-savvy as it is. The apps themselves do not make anything easier - they've missed loads of stuff out that needs done every day and every week and bundled up multiple major tasks into one small bullet point. The app has clearly been made with no input or feedback from anyone who might actually use it.

- we've been asked to plan our holiday requests for 2021. We don't even know if we will be jobs in January.

- obviously there are no Xmas nights out happening. And given that there's at least 300 people facing redundancy, Head Office thought the best they could do was send us cupcakes via courier. Rather than pay us the money we would normally get for an Xmas night out, which is only usually twenty quid but that's still more than a lukewarm cupcake. They had the audacity to ask us to post pictures of us on our internal social media with our teams enjoying the cupcakes. It is taking all my energy to not post "this tastes almost as good as job security."

that type of shit infuriates me, and it's why I find the show Superstore cathartic, as they lampoon that empty management shit. where they show appreciation in an empty way that actually harms you more than helps (you would have preferred the quid, you got a crappy cupcake, and management demanded you show your appreciation).

I learned when I was a manager that when people are stressed and fearful of their future, empty shows of appreciation are insulting and it comes across as you trying to squash an issue cos you don't want to deal with it.

who the hell asks for someone to plan their entire year's PTO days in December in a REGULAR year, much less a pandemic year, much less in a year where nobody knows how long they'll be employed?

sorry you're having to deal with that bullshit boxed :(

in the uk at least, giving people more money has tax implications which is why bonuses are often paid in vouchers.

because we didn't agree a payrise yet this year (or something) we've all been given an extra day's holiday, to go with the other 21 i haven't taken so far this year because where would i go?

Yeah twenty quid in a voucher would be magic, I could get a litre of decent vodka and pretend everything else isn't happening

I mean twenty quid in your pocket isn't going to change your life but it's going to pay for a little luxury you didn't have before, something nice like a taxi home one night instead of the bus or a decent bottle of wine or something similar you wouldn't normally do.

I learned when I was a manager that when designing systems to be used by other workers, what made them good systems, was having input from the workers that they would actually use them and the new systems would be an improvement

or as the writers of process would call it, user-centered design

Otm

Every branch is going to have idiosyncratic methods and store-specific actions etc. I can see why they might think it helps to standardise processes. The problem is that the standard they've used is not a standard that anyone can or would work with. As you say, no user-centred design!

Soo...IT is tired of getting tickets regarding VoIP phone config. They gave us a troubleshooting guide and told us to use it and stop sending people to them.

The thing is tiny and addresses precisely ONE problem, one that isn't any of the three most frequently reported issues.

and the solution is literally "make sure they typed their login right, have them reinstall the program" for that one issue.

Turns out the most common issue can't be solved by anybody BUT IT - and they've been blaming us for not doing our jobs as the reason for the uptick. Sent them 10 tickets today after i found that out.

if IT is tired of tickets they should make it so the problems stop happening

Also, there are always going to be instances and workers that don't mesh well with whatever system you have to do any given thing ... and any good system has to have a plan in place for dealing with those, what I call "The Mikey Problem" so named because of a former co-worker who would never turn in his timesheet on time and things would always be slightly inaccurate

here watch my talk

hahahah your slides are cool! ... I had no idea you could get a ".fyi"

they've been rolling out new TLDs as a moneymaking scheme for ICANN for some years now.

https://haha.business

basically enterprise software is good when it centralizes drudgery for the drudgery experts to deal with and bad when it piles on new drudgery for edge workers to cope with

I know so little about this stuff -- like, I isolated the world of Capitalist tech and all its jargon from my brain, in the way you suggest a programmer isolates the annoying parts of code that would be a pain to edit or delete -- now, I'm like -- this is fascinating, but probably because I have blocked it out for like, decades.

like the systems I have "designed" are like ... how to operate an arts space effectively and efficiently and on a shoestring budget, or, how to accurately account for money in a chaotic small business or non-profit

how to organize a large number of small objects so that nothing gets lost or damaged ... dumb stuff basically

Programming is the same cognitive task as those examples really, programming is only harder because everything is completely imaginary and capable of taking on an infinite variety of forms in service of the same end

The small objects are Data and the organization system is Business Rules.

In my current line of work, (one of them at least), I can see how this logic (that of your presentation) plays out in code regulating buildings and physical space ... some of it is actually contradictory, and the more that gets written and put in different places, the more time consuming and annoying it is to revise / analyze with the goal of revision

my current "annoying co-worker" was previously a systems engineer/programmer and the way you explain stuff here, helps me understand the way he thinks a lot

hah

he looks at me funny when I print out things and make notes on actual pieces of paper and compare the data/notes on paper to the data on the screen

this is a guy that OCR's all the PDF's

I’m writing some thoughts down on paper as we speak so we’re not all like that

I don't doubt it. This guy is just "difficult" ... like, a half dozen people who at one point have worked with him will either apologize on his behalf that he is so annoying, or express surprise that I have not quit out of frustration yet.

I don't doubt it. This guy is just "difficult" ... like, a half dozen people who at one point have worked with him will either apologize on his behalf that he is so annoying, or express surprise that I have not quit out of frustration yet.

I had to get two people to download something that IT forgot to install on her machine. Pulled first aside, used MS Teams to call her, had her share screen, took control - like, 2 minutes tops. I've done this throughout the last two weeks - every time, it goes off without a hitch.

Other person, who is never paying attention and seems like computers are alien to her, she shares her screen, I click to Request Control, and I can see on her screen that the option to Allow me control has popped up. she keeps letting it expire, insisting she can't see it, even as I tell her exactly where it is on her screen. aafter TEN MINUTES, I gave up, fairly angry, as it was clear she was not going to get it.

I could never do IT support. hats off to those who do.

11 days into training, after showing them multiple times how to email and how to check calendar in Outlook, and after actually sending them invites to MS Teams meetings for almost two weeks and having them accept and join these meetings, once again 10% of the class freaked out when their manager sent them invites to a touchbase today, because they couldn't 'find' the invite. they accept the invite in email and then complain it 'disappeared from their email', or it's not on their calendar because they never accepted it via email.

I know Outlook isn't the easiest but you were using it just fine two days ago!

one just emailed us to let us know Teams and Outlook wasn't working for them, two minutes after msging my partner on Teams, and the email went through which means Outlook was obv working

I can’t figure out who the people you training are. Are these people employed somewhere getting upgraded skills? Seniors with their first computer? Ho-ly cow I consider myself a patient computer trainer (I’m a dev) but this stuff seems like such a trial...

they're people ranging from early 20s - 60s, who are going to be using computers all day every day to take calls for benefits-related customers (health, pension, 401k). technical skills is supposed to be a pre-requisite for hire, and the last class I taught, they were very sharp, but this one....I'm kind of afraid for some of them.

I actually had to pass a WINDOWS 95 test when I got hired (and it was 2004, so it made little sense).

Hah, awesome! Fair. Some of my senior coworkers who are devs also go through moments where I’m describing something I can see on the screen they’re sharing and it’s clear they can’t see it in the slightest. So frustrating.

we will be seniors some day (presumably) ... so ....

my co-workers are all older than me -- two by only a couple years (both used to work in tech), the other two are in their 60s (at least) and they occasionally have old people computer problems like "I can't see the button ... maybe I have it zoomed in too far?"

ffm, I hear that. I feel like I have done that to peers and it comes down to whether you have had to design user interfaces, because you spot things quicker

my developer coworkers had problems with Microsoft Teams because the UI genuinely is bad, there is one part in the sharing bit where you can pick a document to share, but the text is the same as the descriptive text in the same area and it doesn’t seem like an action button or link? like, you should not have “Files” as a description and “Pick file” look identical

so my branch is confirmed as closing down. This means all of us and not just myself are getting made redundant. We do not have a timescale or action plan yet - which is fair enough, given the unpredictability of how the UK Gov't are rolling out lockdowns.

But I didn't find out through a phone call with my boss or even an email. I found out because Head Office posted an announcement on Yammer and I got a notification on my phone about a large comment thread underneath it. I had to phone my own manager to ask if she had seen the news. She had only been told ten mins before the announcement was made on Yammer and had been explicitly asked not to tell us just yet as without a timeline etc it would have caused more questions than answers. Apparently the post went up before every affected branch manager had even been told, not to mention the staff working in the stores who it also affects. A logistical nightmare - imagine if your pal who works in another branch heard you were losing your job before you did and texted to ask if you were ok and that's how you found out?