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Post the podcast. We can review it and send them some pro bono market research.
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Feb 25, 2021 15:44
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Not office work related, but in November I started private tutoring the neighbours' 10 years old kid. She was in an after school academy before, but she had some drama with the kids there picking on her and they decided to move her to private tutoring instead. Family is complicated. Mom works a gazillion hours a day, dad is out of the picture after he drunkenly hit the mom too many times (thanks god!). Kid's with her grandma most of the day, in a house with a lot of people coming and going all day, including her smaller cousins she loves to play with. No private space for studying, does homework in front of the TV. The pedagogic approach suggested for me when I took her in was "if she doesn't do her work you can yell at her until she does". With that in mind I expected to find a kid that was severely behind her level. Thing is, she wasn't. She's very competent in Spanish, can handle Sciences and French just fine if left to herself, struggles with Math and English, but she can do them with help. She's nowhere near a lost case. In Christmas I got a message from her mom, saying we were going to do extra classes for her to pick up English and Math. I said OK. I got her some reinforcement activities, with a calendar so she did a couple exercises every day, and we were going to go over them at class. Guess how many times they sent her my way over the whole three weeks? One. The rest of them were "she's not feeling well" "we are going to have some rest days" and other things. I never got to see any of the exercises I sent her. Now I get a message from mom (who has never ever talked to me physically despite the kid being four houses over) that we need to talk about what the teacher said to her. Which is, kid did a terrible math test, lied to everyone including me about the grade, caused a ball of family drama for lying, and is very probably going to be held back this year  . And I feel terrible about her. She doesn't want to do homework, what 10 years old wants to? Nobody around her has any clue how to guide her besides "yell at her when she's wrong or doesn't feel like working". They can't even set a fixed study schledule for her, or a space (which they do have, it's a big house, it's just easier to watch kid if she's around the TV instead of in her room). And she's failing. Big wow.
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Feb 25, 2021 16:18
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Darkhold posted:I know other people are quoting this it makes me wonder if this was just a design thing for awhile. My first 'real' job was a front desk clerk at a hotel and the software was some old DOS based garbage that did crap like this. I think it's a product of the heyday where computer programmers were seen as these untouchable wizards that you never dared to question. When in reality they knew a language kinda well but had zero other skills. Front/back development is supposed to be in harmony so you don't get poo poo like this!
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Feb 25, 2021 16:31
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Making changes on live without testing. There was an update last night to our records system that broke an entire reporting system that integrates with it. Easily found if they used a test server but no, those cost money and time I guess.
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Feb 25, 2021 17:02
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Marcade posted:Making changes on live without testing. There was an update last night to our records system that broke an entire reporting system that integrates with it. Easily found if they used a test server but no, those cost money and time I guess. Reminds me of my current fun. I've mentioned my software plenty. I have to test all my scripting on the live database, because the only way to get access to the test database is to go directly to the CTO which has never ended well for anyone who has ever tried to talk to him. This includes the IT folks working on the system. Every time they need to access it for something new. The test database doesn't even DO anything, it's not linked to any other system. What damage is someone going to manage to do? I'd rather train new hires on there than on live, for that matter! But no. Immediate test server access on joining the previous department, all non-live environments locked the gently caress down for this one. It's not even like it's a different version of the software, the last version came out in 1999 and nobody has had source access since then! SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 17:06
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Pekinduck posted:Reminds me of something from my old job at a huge company. For some weird bureaucratic reason the manager had to personally go change some tiny thing on an obscure computer system they never otherwise touched. Payroll related I think. Welcome to the old mainframe terminal. Every time I go to a new job, the FIRST thing I do is change the emulator keyboard map so the Enter key is Enter. The second is making it Mod 5 and fiddling with a bunch of ISPF options like SWAPBAR and PFSHOW OFF.
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Feb 25, 2021 17:30
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I have a manager who starts out some kind of topic with not just a confrontational statement, but downright incendiary. If you don't immediately mentally shut down or attempting to hold back a knee-jerk retort "go gently caress yourself!", they then pivot almost immediately into something completely reasonable. For example starting the conversation with "When are you going to stop beating your wife/husband/child?" then following up with "What I'm saying is that I think it would be a good idea if we treated everyone well."
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Feb 25, 2021 17:42
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Cheesus posted:I have a manager who starts out some kind of topic with not just a confrontational statement, but downright incendiary. If you don't immediately mentally shut down or attempting to hold back a knee-jerk retort "go gently caress yourself!", they then pivot almost immediately into something completely reasonable. just give a real example
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Feb 25, 2021 18:08
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Cheesus posted:I have a manager who starts out some kind of topic with not just a confrontational statement, but downright incendiary. If you don't immediately mentally shut down or attempting to hold back a knee-jerk retort "go gently caress yourself!", they then pivot almost immediately into something completely reasonable. Ok, but when DID you stop beating your wife/husband/child?
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Feb 25, 2021 18:22
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Sounds like an effective way to grab attention to me, you child-beating monster.
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Feb 25, 2021 18:26
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ben shapino posted:just give a real example I agree, a real example would be cool.
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Feb 25, 2021 18:29
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All procedures you do in your workday must be documented on the internal wiki. (This is to make you more easily replaceable.) I've got full admin access to it so I've been anonymously editing it for like 2 years now to replace and insert words with food or whatever random bullshit is on my mind that day when there is no work but I have to pretend to work and get super bored. quote:Note that the Exchange corn source servers for the Send farming connector must be able to resolve the smart host tractor in DNS by using this puppy FQDN. Nobody has ever noticed.
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Feb 25, 2021 18:40
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When are you going to start doing your job? How dare you!!??!
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Feb 25, 2021 18:40
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This is a bit more than "dumb poo poo" but my previous workplace was responsible for working on some very major films that bombed. They had taken massive losses on the work they did in order to make a name for themselves, to the point that it ate into the budgets of the next films coming down the line (each film is supposed to have a separate budget, but this was fudged somewhat by having a lot of employees classified under Research and Development, and placing that department in both production balance sheets.) So when the producer for the next film found out he'd have to complete it with half the agreed upon budget, he quit. The new producer was presented with this new budget and told if the work wasn't completed within these constraints, the firm would go under. This was at the same time that the parent company was entering bankruptcy protection. The producer tried very hard to negotiate a way to finish the film with the budget he was provided, but eventually it proved impossible. Then covid hit, further complicating the process, and he committed suicide.
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Feb 25, 2021 18:49
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Maybe producing a film with a company that's about to go bankrupt isn't a great idea
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Feb 25, 2021 18:51
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Another fun way to kill time is to explain that for data security reasons, this array of hard drives needs to be made physically inaccessible before recycling. Then I put on metal or punk and rock out on earbuds while throwing them against the concrete walls of the loading dock as long as I want. Might sneak a quick THC concentrate vape hit before. (They have already been wiped and I'll actually drill through them at the end, not like anyone is going to try to recover though, the data is striped across the array, and nobody in the world gives a poo poo about Cathy's Bakery data). I just do the drilling because it's fun to use power tools and I've convinced them its SOP. Die HDD... Die. Honestly I put more work into creating the illusion of working than I do actually working. But hey, some little man gets to feel he is in charge of people for 8 hours a day and has to pay me for it, so OK, let's do it. Great system.
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Feb 25, 2021 19:00
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AHH F/UGH posted:Maybe producing a film with a company that's about to go bankrupt isn't a great idea Well, it's a part of the film industry where every company that's operating is about 2 months away from bankruptcy, it's just a crapshoot which one will go under which year.
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Feb 25, 2021 19:25
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I had an old guy ask me how to make his hard drives safe before getting rid of his computer. After far too long discussing options he finally let slip he wasn't selling it, he was throwing it away. 'Just hit them with a hammer' never occurred to him.
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Feb 25, 2021 19:28
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Ccs posted:This is a bit more than "dumb poo poo" but my previous workplace was responsible for working on some very major films that bombed. They had taken massive losses on the work they did in order to make a name for themselves, to the point that it ate into the budgets of the next films coming down the line (each film is supposed to have a separate budget, but this was fudged somewhat by having a lot of employees classified under Research and Development, and placing that department in both production balance sheets.) So when the producer for the next film found out he'd have to complete it with half the agreed upon budget, he quit. The new producer was presented with this new budget and told if the work wasn't completed within these constraints, the firm would go under. This was at the same time that the parent company was entering bankruptcy protection. The producer tried very hard to negotiate a way to finish the film with the budget he was provided, but eventually it proved impossible. Then covid hit, further complicating the process, and he committed suicide. 
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Feb 25, 2021 20:02
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Hyrax Attack! posted:We have a podcast team. For internal consumption. For only our dept. Listenership per ep in the low teens, so sometimes they’ll play episodes during meetings to “boost numbers.” This is produced by eight salaried employees. I can't explain why this made me so immediately angry, but it did.
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Feb 25, 2021 20:13
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Famethrowa posted:I can't explain why this made me so immediately angry, but it did. Because the person who tells you there's no money for raises is also using a half million dollars as a vanity project. These are very explicitly bullshit jobs.
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Feb 25, 2021 20:21
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I can’t get any hire approved again this year but marketing has the budget to hire another content producer because someone loves that stuff. It’s the classic why does productive work can who gets praised for work thing. Our CEO constantly goes over the top praising whoever plans (planned) the office parties, but like if we’re hearing about the signing of a million dollar contract, there might be some complaint that it wasn’t two
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Feb 25, 2021 20:25
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I hate that so much credit goes to hotshot self-aggrandizing fuckers who make a name for themselves rolling out a new system or something, but then after we start using it for awhile we realize it's a fuckin' dumpster fire and sucks. Then I spend a year cleaning up - improving processes, streamlining workflow, etc. - but there's never any room for credit for that. It's not flashy, it's not fun, it doesn't get anyone's attention. And, to top it all off, Hotshot Fucklord was promoted two times since then in part because of "what a great job he did rolling out these projects". gently caress.
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Feb 25, 2021 20:34
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That is basic management skills, get your name on the thing, get the project out the door, claim the credit, gently caress off before anyone realises it falls over if month ends on a Sunday. It's like playing the stock markets. Pump and dump and hope you never get caught. The fact that you got the plaudits/money is proof that you are trustworthy.
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Feb 25, 2021 20:49
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Hyrax Attack! posted:We have a podcast team. For internal consumption. For only our dept. Listenership per ep in the low teens, so sometimes they’ll play episodes during meetings to “boost numbers.” This is produced by eight salaried employees. I would walk by with a fart machine every drat day,
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Feb 25, 2021 21:02
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goatface posted:That is basic management skills, get your name on the thing, get the project out the door, claim the credit, gently caress off before anyone realises it falls over if month ends on a Sunday. Yeah . . .  I just hate it, that's all.
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Feb 25, 2021 21:45
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Everyone sane does. It's just unfortunately profitable to be a professional psychopath.
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Feb 25, 2021 21:53
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Probably a good time to bring up Admiral Rickover's Doing a Job speech, his indictment on 'management' as its own discipline. https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm This link contains most of the speech, but funnily enough they removed part of his speech at the start, shown below: quote:Many who teach “Management” in our universities do their students and society a disservice. By focusing on the techniques of “modern management”, they promote the idea that by mastering a few simple principles of how to handle people and situations one can become a universal manager; capable of running any job without having to know much about the work to be managed. Rickover said this in 1981 but I don't think there's much in there that isn't relevant today. I've at least managed to find a job where I am mostly shielded from management bullshit.
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Feb 25, 2021 22:31
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Plucky Brit posted:Probably a good time to bring up Admiral Rickover's Doing a Job speech, his indictment on 'management' as its own discipline. Man, this bullshit right here is one of the reasons I quit working for one of the auto manufacturers. They had the philosophy that "To move up, you must move around." Nobody truly knew what their team did, or how to effectively fight for them. But hey, managers don't need to know what their people do!
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Feb 25, 2021 22:45
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EvilHawk posted:the scrum master is very good at booking meetings and not a lot else (lol that's every scrum master) There's a fatal flaw in Scrum that Scrum Masters need to be extremely good at clearing blockers for the team but anyone with that skillset is too busy to do agile training. Like a few people here my least favourite waste is time sheet entry. In theory we are supposed to enter actual hours but in practice the PMs are KPI's on precisely hitting budget so they insist that everyone enter their forecast hours every week regardless of what they actually did. This at least speeds up entry, until the system fucks up. Earlier this month I had hours that had been rejected due to a project code change but the system wouldn't let me delete or change them. So now my boss and I are getting automated nastygrams about my incomplete hours while I spend three weeks contacting my PM, his administrator, a different PM who owned the project code, their administrator, the help desk, back to my project administrator before someone finally admitted that they could fix the problem. Luckily I forecast high for that project so they can pay for it.
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Feb 25, 2021 22:49
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NapalmWeasel posted:Man, this bullshit right here is one of the reasons I quit working for one of the auto manufacturers. They had the philosophy that "To move up, you must move around." Nobody truly knew what their team did, or how to effectively fight for them. But hey, managers don't need to know what their people do! That's where I'm at, right now. There's no actual promotion track so people in my field are expected to apply for jobs, sometimes being a lateral move, just to see more of the organization. You might get hired as an IT person and end up being a QC manager of an unrelated field. My boss flat-out told me that he doesn't know what my day-to-day looks like, doesn't really care and doesn't know where to find resources to help. Makes it so that I'm not accountable to anyone, for the most part, and I think I could disappear for days on end and no one would notice. I hate it.
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Feb 25, 2021 22:57
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Inzombiac posted:That's where I'm at, right now. I guess I still feel weird feeling the opposite of you on that one - as long as they're still paying me, the less interaction with the rest of a given company the better. I'm not going to be getting some fulfilling career at this point (education requirements have gotten so out of hand that even a degree from a Big 10 school with a great record, plus internship, isn't enough to get you considered for entry level for anything I went to uni for, so I'm effectively in the category of "nonphysical labor just requiring A Degree, or leveraging connections in a place where none of them even matter because all of them were sane enough to get the gently caress out of a dead end city years ago"). Significant health issues preclude going back to the manual labor work that I actually enjoyed at the time. So at this point I'd 100% take "Here's your job, do your work, I'll check in in a month or so and make sure you're still even here". Least stressful work arrangement that I can think of.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:19
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Inzombiac posted:Makes it so that I'm not accountable to anyone, for the most part, and I think I could disappear for days on end and no one would notice. It me
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Feb 25, 2021 23:31
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Plucky Brit posted:Admiral Rickover This might be oddly specific, but anyone who's ever worked in nuclear power/waste in this country is surely fed up with bazillions of Rickover stories from all the Navy sub guys those industries invariably hire into manager positions. I mean, the stories are all entertaining. I guess this is more of a complaint about that hiring practice, because Navy nuke guys are loving weird.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:38
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Inzombiac posted:Makes it so that I'm not accountable to anyone, for the most part, and I think I could disappear for days on end and no one would notice. I just did the napkin math and over my working lifetime during my workday (2 hours real work, 6 hours fake work) I have been paid around $100k to walk around for hours and throw in shell peanuts to crows. Crows love peanuts, and they are safe to eat and intellectually stimulating for them to get open. The crows recognize me, and will come hop and swoop around me when I come outside. I know and have named many of them. There are subtle differences. I know who the mated pairs are, and they are very cute, they nuzzle and groom each other. I know what their particular day time hang out zones are. I know the nightly flight paths and roosting areas. I know way too many things about crows, and am always keeping up on the newest research. This is what are clients of an IT management provider are paying for.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:42
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The Butcher posted:I just did the napkin math and over my working lifetime during my workday (2 hours real work, 6 hours fake work) I have been paid around $100k to walk around for hours and throw in shell peanuts to crows. Living the dream.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:45
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If you had said squirrels instead of crows, I would have told you to go home, Dad, you're drunk. Hell, during a snow storm recently there was a knocking at the patio door from one of the drat squirrels upset that my father hadn't put out more squirrel feed. Marcade fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Feb 25, 2021 |
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Feb 25, 2021 23:45
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One thing I've noticed is people think 'manager' and 'leader' are interchangeable. Leaders know how the job works and can help do the job and generally lead the team to success*. Managers' only job, really, is to do all the bullshit work that would otherwise suck up all the team's time so they can actually do the work. They're glorified umbrellas to protect the team from the rain of bullshit streaming down from above. Assuming I have somewhat competent people under me and I can do those two things my team is going to be successful**. Or you can throw them under the bus at the first sign of trouble, make their lives miserable and leapfrog up the ladder coz gently caress those assholes for being dumb enough to trust you. *or try to. ** LOL
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Feb 26, 2021 00:35
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A sales guy that now works from home due to covid decided a while back that his current Mac is getting old and asked his boss for a new Mac. It got approved and they purchased it and sent it straight to him rather than coming to myself or the other pseudo IT guy to at least configure it for our network, get Umbrella/Webroot on, etc. I honestly didn't even know he had received it, as I told him he'd need to bring it in and he never did, plus I have a million other things to do, so i just forgot all about it. Until yesterday, when he asked for help with his email configuration, but again didn't want to bring it in. Turns out, he's having an issue with the default mail app on MacOS that even Apple support apparently can't really help him with. He sent an email, I told him we use Office 365, just install that and everything will be fine. Now he's getting pissy because I won't help him because apparently the apple mail app is "a critical piece to managing sales" and is a "far more efficient piece of software than Outlook". His boss tends to side with him because "it's critical that he's able to work as fast and efficiently as possible" even though he's sales, in a not very fast paced environment, where the difference in performance is probably a few seconds of time overall. His only real job is to send out quotes, that take days/weeks to sometimes come together. Nothing is sensitive down to the millisecond. It's fine if he prefers Apple but let's reel in the aggrandizing of a lovely mail app. Also they spent $1600 on a Mac Mini that has 8 gigs of ram, when they could have bought a laptop or equivalent PC for a few hundred less that performs better, he's just a Apple r*tard. Somebody fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 01:56
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At my retail job, we once had 4 pallet jacks. Considering we sort all of our weekly incoming product onto pallets, and regularly receive pallets of merchandise, they're pretty loving important. About a year ago one of the jacks started acting up. You pump it and then it just slowly lowers by itself. About 6 months ago the rubber on the wheels started coming off of the other working jacks. Soon we were down to 2, then one single working pallet jack. A few days ago the wheels came apart on our only working jack. Now we have zero. We had reported them over and over again for the past 6 months, nobody wanted to authorize replacements or repairs. Finally we were told to put them in our system for requesting service, only to find out after a week of nothing that "We no longer service pallet jacks." I've even worked out our options. Get new wheels from an online vendor and I'll install them ($80 per). Get new wheels from a professional outfit literally 2 doors down ($90 per). Get new pallet jacks from a well-respected supply company ($350 per). Buy a loving jack from the Menards down the road ($250). Nobody will authorize poo poo. They had to send a floor repair guy out to our store 3 times because our hosed-up wheels kept tearing floor tiles out. God only knows what that cost. The store manager (Who's as frustrated as I am) negotiated to get a loaner from another store in town. Now we have 4 broken pallet jacks and 1 working one, that will soon not be working because it's doing the work of 4. Soon I'll have 5 broken ones.
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Feb 26, 2021 02:01
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