Dumb shit your work does: for some reason in the Diablo font.

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Dumb shit your work does: for some reason in the Diablo font.

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Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

My department/company has apparently been mismanaged for years, but it�s actually pretty good since I started in September, i began on the same day as the new VP for our department after not having one for 5+ years. I went to lunch with the guy and he described a bunch of truly stupid poo poo about the way the executives thought of our team.

As of like 6 months ago, they needed to get approval from the CEO to order like a $30 headset lol

# ¿ Jan 30, 2021 15:06

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:09

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

hot cocoa on the couch posted:

My current job is actually pretty great, not much to complain about, aside from the workload/pace being a bit frantic at times but management is generally understanding and supportive of us. I have worked a few engineering jobs now though and I have to ask, does ANYONE in engineering/manufacturing use good ERP software? They all seem like they were written by some loving university student who just discovered Access. Why is enterprise software always so bad? I don't get it

I think ERP software tries to just do so much, and every companies implementation needs to be so insanely customized that they�re all just bloated pieces of poo poo. Plus the devs probably underspend and overplan the engineering, they probably have to spend more on resources for implementation than they do on dev. Idk, but they are all extremely bad.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2021 19:55

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Lol �I love my banks mobile app�

# ¿ Jan 31, 2021 22:56

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

We use Webex teams for chat and my group is the only one in the company who has IM, which I absolutely love, not getting daily requests over IM from someone who thought to look me up in the chat system.

My shithead new coworker has a weird hard on for Jabber and has been pushing to deploy it company wide. I will never, ever open up jabber if they go through with it, I�ll uninstall it every morning if I need to.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 00:17

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

i'm the most senior employee at my company, largely because of turnover in the industry, and i hate job hunting and i get paid pretty well. we have three products, i'm the only person who has ever seen the old product in action and one of two people who knows how the middle product works. everyone else of our many employees works on developing or selling the new product, which has a healthy and growing market share. a decent amount of our yearly revenue comes from recurring licensing on the older two products, which are entirely my responsibility to support. the total revenue from these zombie fees more than covers my salary

our time tracking software has many categories for new product development, but only one category for legacy product support. the legacy products also have their own ticketing system, of which i am the only user, and most of the tickets which are opened are automated notifications to long dormant email addresses, which i close immediately. about two in five tickets are actual product questions, nearly all of the time questions with easy answers. so my ticket closure metrics are fantastic. because it appears from the outside that i am working very diligently holding down the rear guard of legacy revenue by myself like some kind of magical hero, nearly everyone in the company leaves me alone. seriously, when people ask me to get on a call to explain some obscure feature or to book a training session, they approach me like they've just climbed a mountain to speak to an ancient monk who only speaks in obscure riddles of perfect wisdom. i'm not even middle aged, its wild the level of reverence my coworkers have for me like i'm some kind of greybeard who invented telephones or some poo poo

i've also inherited a large number of oddball responsibilities due to my long tenure, including the actual physical hardware of our remaining server stack which isn't yet moved to the cloud, for reasons. we have an offshore devops guy who is my work buddy, and he gets paid in american dollars and not local currency, so he's very happy and not wanting to rock the boat. i wire up the hardware in the small office the company rented on the edge of town because it is cheap during covid times. the office is also used sometimes to pretend to clients our all-virtual firm has a physical presence, and most of the VPs have vanity offices so they can say to their spouses "i need to head to the office" and they sit in the quiet of a half vacant office park. otherwise the site is only used for our in-house servers, and my devops pal manages these servers remotely. this arrangement suits the both of us just fine because it seems more complicated than it really is. because it is a pile of blinking boxes and cables, clearly it is only to be touched by the qualified thing-knower, me

some time ago, the CEO messages me with an urgent problem. one of our critical build servers is nonresponsive. if my schedule isn't too busy, could i drive out there immediately and check on it? well, my schedule is completely open, so i tell the CEO i'm setting all other tasks aside and treating this as my highest priority. i drive out there and pass through security - who is surprised to see anyone other than the c-suite who use the office as a place to flee their home offices - and i check on the box. it got hung up during an automatic update, and someone needs to press F1 to continue. with all my skill and might, i press F1. the server boots, and i verify it booted and is on the network, and i text the CEO personally to let him know the problem is now resolved, and the core dev team can now continue their work

for this feat of monumental heroism and prowess, i get a companywide attaboy email and a personal shoutout at our next all hands meeting

technically i am still the PBX admin, but nobody uses the phone tree anymore. back when it was in common use, in the Before Times when people made calls, i would flex my power by threatening (jokingly) to give people annoying hold music so that the people they put on hold would be angrier when finally picked up

anyway,
http://conferencecall.biz/

Lol

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 13:46

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Prism Mirror Lens posted:

Doesn�t Netflix do the �fire the bottom x%� thing? Or they used to?

I think Amazon corporate employees did too. And even worse, IIRC all of the employees did weekly polls where they rated their direct coworkers. Obviously it resulted in tons of traumatic drama, backstabbing, and just nastiness for everybody

# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 14:37

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

titty_baby_ posted:

I always feel anxious before our weekly check in meetings because I'm worried ill be scrutinized too closely for how I've been spending my time while working remote. Its never been an issue before but hey, tell my brain that

lol I get the same feeling. I definitely get at least the same amount of work done since I�ve been WFH. But instead of wasting time in the ways you do it at the office, I watch TV or whatever so it feels weird.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 16:55

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

I think it�s reasonable to expect people in an office to have some level of approachability. Like if someone has a work related question and someone meets them with a glare for daring to ask, that can be bad for the environment. Obviously, that�s not what that coworkers problem with you was lol. That type of thing is loving bullshit.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 19:50

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Zarin posted:

Where I'm at, retention applies to everything.

However, the "if the email was so important, why didn't you file it" is pretty bullshit imo. I don't have time to painstakingly file every single email; I might be lucky if it gets into a folder at all, to be honest. There's a search function for a reason. I don't know how often people have asked me "oh do you remember that thing about ______________, I think it's happening again" and I can just search my email and see if I have some info about that topic. Sometimes all I've got is "Hmm, I have a record of that thing happening, and it looks like I got run around a bunch before someone finally connected me with Bo Jangles; I think he was the one that took care of it." Without that, we would have to start back at square 1 and do the whole Bureaucratic Runaround again. Yeah, in hindsight, that email to Bo Jangles was important, but in the moment it didn't seem so (because we thought we had taken care of the issue permanently).

This is especially true of stuff that doesn't happen very often. Annual processes are bad enough to find documentation for; one-off stuff that only seems to happen once every few years are even worse.

Absolutely agreed lol. Half the poo poo I search my inbox for at the time don�t seem like something I�d even need to save or throw into a network share. That sort of attitude is why people start to hate IT.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2021 23:05

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Sanctum posted:

In 2018 my company rolled out new fleets to 3 of our operations. The operation contracted to fuel United planes got several million worth of fueling equipment but the director didn't want to put new rolling stairs out despite my insistence they were necessary as the new equipment couldn't go underwing for fueling 737's. I showed the director a picture of one of the mangled stairs we had out there and, upon seeing it, he told me to remove it from the ramp immediately as it was clearly unsafe. So I ordered some folding A-frame ladders and put those out as a temporary replacement. Next thing I know the shop manager was ordering more folding ladders and telling maintenance to weld ladder racks onto equipment. Guys, that ain't right. Imagine someone on a windy, rainy day hauling a big hose up to the wing of an airplane on a wobbly ladder for minimum wage.

_{~not the same~}

Failure to provide safe equipment results in workers doing stupid things and breaking things (including themselves.) A year later that United operation, supplied with only ladders, had 2500% more nozzle rebuilds than every other fueling fleet, both new and old, combined. Again, with a brand new fleet. The nozzles are designed to last a lifetime, unless people are regularly dropping them from heights FOR SOME REASON. Rebuild kits cost $1000-$2000 and then there's labor, downtime, considerable fines for fuel spills, cleanup, hazardous waste disposal, penalties for delaying a flight, etc. A total cost of a lot more than some goddamn stairs. I tried to make the argument that the folding ladders aren't OSHA compliant, you must maintain 3 points of contact when climbing a ladder and that's not possible when holding a heavy nozzle connected to a huge hose. The director insisted folding ladders were compliant and pretended that 3 points of contact was not required because he did not see a difference between climbing a ladder and climbing a stand with stairs and guardrail.

_{Two nozzles requiring rebuilds. Can you spot the difference between general wear and equipment abuse?}

So the director cracks down on unusually high maintenance costs and sends the general manager to our shop to lay out new guidelines for reducing expenses. Clearly the problem here is maintenance spending too much on parts, so he put restrictions on that. After that things started falling apart pretty quickly. In 2019 we lost half of the United gates. United contracted them to a different company. The new company put 2 stair frames on every gate, a small rigid frame and a larger adjustable stairs both with hand rails. Gee, now why didn't we think of that?

You just love to see it

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 03:57

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

AHH F/UGH posted:

Are people literally just unplugging from the plane and then and dropping them because they�re too lazy to carry them down the ladders or something, or are they actually butterfingers and they slip and drop accidentally

Like this is America so I would imagine they just toss poo poo into the ground because that�s par for the course of how little Americans care about doing thing right and care about their work but that�s just egregious.

It�s because it�s extremely unsafe to try to shimmy down the ladder holding that massive hose that looks heavy as poo poo and nobody wants to die or get permanently disabled for the sake of the moron boss, so when you start climbing down and feel like you might lose your grip on the ladder, youd drop the hose.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 11:59

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

DrBouvenstein posted:

This is the answer to you people whining about not getting to keep your five year old email chains about where to get lunch.

Export to a PST. Problem solved. You can then import it back into Outlook and browse, search, etc... in it as if it was your active inbox, and it's immune from retention policies.

A few months ago I get paged in the middle of the night for Exchange failing for a different customer. Because no one there ever loving deleted anything, and no polices were set up, everyone had MASSIVE mailboxes and the Exchange database (cause it was set up improperly with just a single database) hit the 1 TB limit.

Cause no one ever deleted anything, it brought down their entire email system. Well, temporarily, at any rate, it wasn't THAT bad, had to create a new DB and move a couple mailboxes to get it back up and running, but my point is, delete at least SOME of your emails? Please?

Yeah. I mean I work In infrastructure too, and I�m totally fine with just a straight up limit on mailbox size, at least when I�m approaching that I can just dump stuff into an archive, and I delete as much email as possible. But retention policies based on time piss me off because you forget about it or end up creating a new archive every 30 days

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 16:01

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

AHH F/UGH posted:

Missed a phone call because I was taking a poo poo. They end up calling newest department member next for help. Newest department member, naturally, has no clue what to do despite working in our group for a year and a half, and calls me up and asks me how to do literally the most basic task that our department does. This is like a Taco Bell employee needing help on how to make a regular taco, or a painter needing help opening a paint can. It�s truly baffling how this person is just apparently completely fine doing absolutely nothing and learning nothing and never trying to learn how to do our job, or if they are shown once, the next time they are somehow forced to do it, do it so much time will have passed that they forgot.

Like god drat just loving grab a department support email and say in the slack group that you�ll respond to it or something. Learn how to do your job and ride the loving bike. You have been shown these things so many times, just do the god drat job. Our department is very all-hands-on-deck and we all have to be capable of doing everything but this person is totally invisible. Why in the hell did HR hire this person and put them in the most technical department in the company when they know nothing about technology? Christ

Is this the person who said the mobile banking app on their phone is their favorite technology

# ¿ Feb 13, 2021 20:08

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

I still think about how nice it was to break into my field with no relevant experience because someone gave me a chance. But then again I already basically knew the poo poo I needed to know and demonstrated that in the interviews, and worked my rear end off to absorb all the knowledge needed when I started. Finding yourself in a good job for the first time since a grocery store should be huge motivation to learn to swim, so I don�t get that at all.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2021 23:00

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

I�ve had a few office jobs now and all of them can be frustrating and have problems, but some of the poo poo people posted here is just heinous. Like the stuff you know happens, but unless you experience it, it doesn�t quite seem real. Like I would think I�d make myself find something else if I ended up in an environment like that, but job hunting sucks so badly that people will put up with an incredible amount of abuse for a very long time. I�m sure I�d be one of those people.

I�m really lucky my direct coworkers and supervisors are for the most part reasonable people who look out for their employees

# ¿ Feb 14, 2021 21:22

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Maggie Fletcher posted:

Thanks, me too! Had to look up that artist and it's a pretty apt visual description!

This post is about the goatse mans anus

# ¿ Feb 15, 2021 01:40

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Code Jockey posted:

six loving months holy poo poo

My experience in IT stateside, the second you give notice you're gone, they might pay you for two weeks more or whatever but due to security concerns, your access gets pulled immediately and out you go.

My first job in the Seattle area was for a tiny web host which primarily focused on spinning up websites using our framework for tiny businesses. There were a small number of people in the office, and I was the only engineer (the prior one had just left and the president of the company had been doing code maintenance in the interim). There was an art department consisting of a husband and wife and another woman, there was a sales / marketing guy, the president, and me.

The president was the most openly sexist, and most incredibly stupid individual I have ever met. It's still mind boggling to me. He treated the women in the office blatantly differently and talked to them with open condescension, and just said the absolute dumbest things all day long. I've largely blocked it out, so I don't remember specific things, but holy poo poo this guy. I remember the entire team walked out one day in protest of how he treated us, the husband of the art team popped his head in my office and basically said yeah, we're walking out, this poo poo sucks and I said alright I'll come too, why not. I forget what exactly happened after, but I didn't last much longer after that. That was a fun day out though, it was super nice that day and we all went and got Taco Del Mar and laughed at how awful that place was.

I was thankful initially, because he let me move into a small apartment he owned while I got relocated to the area, which I moved out of shortly before I quit. When I gave my notice, he lost his poo poo, going off on me about how I didn't appreciate what he did for me with the apartment, how this was a great opportunity and I didn't respect it, I took advantage of him, etc. He stormed out of the office and was gone the rest of the day, but before he left, he disabled my active directory account. He ended up having to reinstate it after his tantrum, though, because there was still stuff he wanted me to finish before I left lol

One thing I always was curious about was how the company was funded. He cut deals for sites / hosting for his buddies all the time, and for new clients. The husband from art team and the marketing guy both kept telling him he'd actually make money if he charged people money for the service but he insisted that it was better business practice to make all these connections and get his name out there first. There was money coming in from someone, like from the sounds of things one older gentleman was financing the entire company. None of us were making a ton of money, but we were in a nice building in Bellevue, and that poo poo wasn't cheap. I always wondered if the president of the company had dirt on that guy, or something. It just didn't make sense to me.

The website is long dead, but I used to be amused that my name was in the HTML source of the home page, in some old Javascript comments I wrote for it. It stayed up until the site died - I would've assumed, knowing him, he would've searched for and scrubbed any reference to me out.

He also, at one point, bought a brand new Dodge Charger, back when those were first coming out. He was incredibly proud of it, and thought it made him look cool and like a serious businessman, or... something, when he'd take clients to lunches or other meetings.

e. and here's one for my brothers and sisters who do programming / database work: the site configuration records were stored primarily in a single table, in an Access database backend. Think that's bad in itself? Each column in this table contained multiple parameters separated by linebreaks and commas. So a single column might contain something like:

WebsiteTitle=My Dumb Website,
BackgroundColor=#ffffff,
BackgroundImage=hello.jpg,
SomeFeatureAEnabled=true,
SomeFeatureBEnabled=false,
ContactEmail=hurr@duh.org

... all of that in a single DB column, which we'd then need to read, break apart, parse into the right variables, and hope to god it didn't blow up. Multiple columns like this for each site. That still haunts me. I do not know why they did this, but the idiot president was really proud of this platform. Classic ASP sitting on top of Access with data structured like that.

The website did a database pull to ... determine stuff like formatting parameters? And multiple parameters were stored in a single entry? Lol

E: I know you basically explained exactly what my post says but I�m busy collecting my eyebrows off of the wall behind me where they landed when I read that.

Tetramin fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Feb 15, 2021

# ¿ Feb 15, 2021 06:03

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

He said 2000 since March 13th

# ¿ Feb 17, 2021 05:23

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Code Jockey posted:

This conversation reminds me of when the term "time theft" was making the rounds in the past, and what a ridiculous concept that was

I literally could not care less what my engineers are doing as long as they are delivering work on time and they're happy and not stressing to death. As long as you are committing to a reasonable amount of work, and you are hitting the delivery dates we promised the business, I am happy.

My helljob was definitely more of a "why do the engineers have 10 minutes left at the end of the week, you need to give them more to do", or at least that's what the director used to scold me for. I never put that on my guys, and we continued making people happy and being the only not-utterly-burned-out team in that place. Plus there just wasn't more to do, anyway. I'm sure if I'd told the director that, he would've told me to go talk to the department heads and get ideas for new projects from them, which they would be gung-ho about for a week or so then utterly abandon because, shockingly, a bright idea you have one day with 20 mins of discussion as requirements / specifications doesn't always work out in the long term! But who cares that you just sunk six figures worth of development time / effort into it, it's not like our time is valuable or anything.

e. Also, speaking of firewalls, back when my buddy was IT manager, I briefly ran a torrent server inside of a VM on my desktop. Before he came along, the previous IT administrator - who was the absolute definition of "this is the only power this dude has in his life, so he's going to milk it for all its worth and be a complete jackass" type of IT admin - had blocked Youtube, music streaming and other "wastes of bandwidth" because apparently we had a tiny connection that people were maxing out by... streaming music, I guess. I dunno if he was either full of poo poo or they massively upgraded the pipeline when my buddy joined, but that torrent box was real fast, and no one ever complained.

I�m a network admin and my work hired a new one so I wasn�t the only one, and I hate him for a lot of reasons.

This post above is one of them.

All of our IT runs out of our corporate HQ with a gig fiber circuit. One of our client device people opened a ticket because his computer disconnected from wifi just to make sure there weren�t any problems, the issue happened once that day and never again.

The new guy who is more of a Cisco phone guy, almost no �networking� knowledge declares himself bandwidth cop and spent the entire week all of his time staring at the bandwidth usage at this location. He would @everybody in the group chat asking what this 20mb/s of traffic was and how we need to fix this non existent problem.

He then went ahead and limited each device to 5mb/s tops(on a gig circuit which we never came close to maxing out) without telling anybody, so the client device guy goes to start imaging like 5 computers, and idiot new guy put that 5mb/s cap on all traffic including local traffic and not just the traffic that leaves the building which made those PCs take Like 14 hours to install windows from their local deployment server and absolutely REFUSED to admit that he had screwed up and that local traffic was the cause of �all of our problems�.

I ended up just undoing all of his poo poo, but he has now spent the last 3 total weeks bandwidth copping every single one of our 200ish circuits, just randomly staring at traffic meters for no reason.

Like I absolutely do not mind someone not having much networking knowledge, hell I�m happy to dump our phone related projects on him and to help him learn. But he is determined to be a prodigy genius network janitor and is extremely forceful about being wrong at all times and refuses to listen.

Sorry for the boring story but I can�t stand this guy and the quoted post made me think all about it again.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2021 01:30

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Queen Victorian posted:

Did your work like run this guy/his resume by you or let you meet him before they hired him? Or was it just �here is your new colleague have fun�?

This happened at my old job - new guy added to team, which was not consulted about having this new guy added to it or introduced to said new guy before he started and he ended up being a hot-headed prick. Long story short I no longer work there.

Nah they didn�t run him by me at all, but I was pretty new to the company at the time, only been there for a few weeks and the current one was moving to a new job in like a week, so they basically wanted a body. Given the situation I don�t really hate them for it, he clearly bluffed about his familiarity with networking, and he still does to this day and refuses to learn.

Even though I can�t stand him, being able to dump the VOIP poo poo to him makes my day a lot less annoying, if he were willing to learn and not an jackass it�d be a pretty good situation.

Like, if he�s wrong about something and someone explains why, he doesn�t even hear what the person said, and plainly says his idea again without even rephrasing it. His brain just blocks it out. Even in chat messages, if he messages me a question, I give him the answer and he doesn�t like it, he asks it 2 or 3 more times in a row. There have been several occasions where on the last one I screenshot my last 4 messages and hyper zoom it in and send him that lol

Tetramin fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Feb 18, 2021

# ¿ Feb 18, 2021 22:43

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

InternetJunky posted:

I just started a new project a few months ago and we're in the phase of the project were 80% of my working day is spent in phone-in meetings, both internal and external. I've noticed a recurring pattern on the calls now, and ever since I did I have started to get irrationally angry whenever the specific event unfolds.

Person A: "No no, that won't work because it will break this system. Isn't that right Person B?"
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person A: "Person B, you're on mute we can't hear you."
<silence for 10 seconds>
Person B: "Oh sorry everyone, I was talking on mute."
<Everyone chuckles>

It happens almost once per call. People keep laughing every time it happens. I don't find it funny. How hard is it to check if you're on mute?

drat people who didn�t grow up as gamers so muting/unmuting is second nature. I�ve never accidentally been in the wrong mute state. :c00lbutt:

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 15:08

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

titty_baby_ posted:

When we started we had T and F meetings. My boss has only made about half of them this year and the meetings are mostly me and our coordinator who both just have questions for our boss. No one else in the department shows up. Today I was the only person in the meeting.

We also have to fill out forms detailing how we spent our time during the day. The forms were for ICS people initially to help report time that FEMA would cover, but for unknown reasons they had all remote workers fill them out. We would turn ours in to our coordinator, who apparently turned her in to...herself?

I stopped doing them a few weeks ago because I mostly just gently caress around and coming up with lies to fill my time was stressful, and no one else was doing them anyway. The coordinator hasn't said anything to me and doesn't seem to care anymore.

Just a month or two ago I heard my boss asking my coworkers how they felt about when they used to have to do time accounting like that and obviously everyone was like �it loving sucked�. But we got a new VP not too long before that, and he seems pretty chill and laid back, but that made me wonder if he�s considering implementing that.

I get my stuff done correctly and on time, but my attention gets pulled in 15 different directions all day long so actually accounting for the hours worked on what would make me kill myself. Plus lying about the significant amount of time I�m just dinkin around

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 18:14

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Whipstickagostop posted:

Our finance manager was this really quiet, very religious guy who mainly kept to himself. Would eat lunch in his car, but would be friendly enough if you forced a conversation with him.

He suprised everyone by turning up to the unofficial Xmas party one year. Proceeded to get peer-pressured into keeping up drink for drink with the two idiots in the accounts department - one of which was a typical "football lad" (read: functional alcoholic) who could put away some beer.

He basically turned into a complete feral animal - ripped his shirt off when they sat down to eat, kept trying to bite the sales girls sitting near him, dropped one of the older ladies while trying to carry her without asking.
The sales girls had to ask the doorstaff at the bar they went to afterward not to let him in as he was getting super-handsy with them.

They found him outside an hour or so later covered in puke with police standing over him. His wife turned up to collect him, and we never saw him again.

Lol that guy must�ve been a recovering alcoholic or something

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 23:04

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

BitBasher posted:

This takes me back to tech support long, long ago. Me and two other people (Call them Jason and Frank) worked for an outsourcer that handled all the tech support calls for Sony VAIO computers west of the Mississippi from 10pm to like 5AM PST. This was so long ago that the new computers we were supporting were the VAIO 310/330 if memory serves. This was 1995-1997, somewhere in there.

When I say that we were the support, that is not an exaggeration. We three were literally the support for the West half of the country with Austin, if memory serves, supporting the East half of the country with who knows how many people there. Me Jason and I passed the time by serial networking two of the machines that weren't being used that shift and playing Total Annihilation versus for hours, or running MAME. Frank on the other hand, pretty much kept to himself. There as no management of any time, because they didn't want to pay a manager to work over 2 people most of the time, so when someone demanded to speak to a manager you would just put them on hold and pass the call to the other dude who would then pretend to be a manager, which worked surprisingly well.

This was fine until one day when Frank left about an hour before I did. An actual manager showed up, went to print something, and found a bout a ream of paper in the printer with porn banner ads on it. Not actual full images of porn, but the horizontal banner ads, maybe an inch high and 4 inches wide each with teeny tiny naked people on them. Thousands of them. Hundreds of pages. I was asked if I knew anything about this, and I said I did not, but it wasn't hard to find the culprit because frank's login was on the bottom of literally every one of the hundreds of pages. Since there are only three people on graveyard I tried hard to talk them down from firing Frank outright because I had no desire to work a shift alone in an empty building. I was successful.

The next shift I asked Frank WTF and asked him to maybe not print out hundreds of pages of tiny porn banner ads. He thanked me, sheepishly apologized and we worked the rest of our shift.

That next morning, Frank left, managers came in, and when I looked across the sea of cubicles I could see one staring at the printer with confusion. I walked past on the way out to glance over and see another couple inches thick stack of porn banner ads that frank had, left in the printer. Again. Never saw Frank again.

Lmfao that is baffling

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 00:12

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

BitBasher posted:

I honestly don't have any idea, that was what confused me too. Real porn wasn't was prevalent as it is now, there was no Pornhub and similar. Hell, actual BBS's still were in operation you could download nudes from over a dial up if you had one. That said it could definitely be found. Back then if you were on a skeevy site looking for smut sometimes links would send you to just a nigh infinitely scrolling page of those banner ads that existed just to generate hits for the images I assume. Just pure ad spam scrolling and scrolling hundreds of banner ads for dozens and dozens of pages in a browser. When that happened you sighed and got annoyed, hit the back button on your browser and tried again looking for the real images.

Frank wasn't curating a collection from what I saw at all. He would land on a page of these banner ads and just mash the Print button. He was literally printing out the poo poo that people would try to avoid when landing on that page. I have no idea either. The actual nakedness was often postage stamp sized.

It couldn't have been a specific selection. I'm not exaggerating volume. It was so much it was a cast of probably having to get up and add more paper for the jobs to finish printing. The two stacks he left in the printer were north of an inch or inch and a half thick each. He brought a backpack to work, so I have no idea how many pages he actually left with. In my head he was leaving work with a phone book thick collection of tiny banner ads.

It should be noted that Frank looked exactly as I would have expected him to. He was basically Jason Alexander with a beard, even with a balding pattern and about 5 foot 7. He was friendly enough and would go off on topis if you started a conversation but he mainly kept to himself. While me and Jason sat together on the north end of the call center he used a corner alone about 40 yards away to work from each night. For all I know he could have been punching his hog on the clock, I never once had a reason to walk over there for 6 hours of my shift, and I would just stand up and yell if he needed to be a supervisor.

One time when we were like 14 my buddy showed me the printed piece of paper he�d bring into the bathroom to Jack off to since he only had a family computer, and it was a bunch of like SA avatar sized titties lmao

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 23:20

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Oxxidation posted:

the owner of the laboratory i worked at was the founder's son, who took over when the founder died several years ago. one of his first big initiatives was throwing out all the office furniture and replacing it with IKEA because his ex-wife "wanted to go shopping." he had all the walls painted with primer and never followed up on the next coat, so the place became hospital-blinding. his daughter bought a guinea pig and decided she didn't want to look after it so he kept it in the office instead, under the conference room table, in the dark, for years, never feeding or cleaning it (me and the company's HR rep did what we could to keep it alive), until several months ago when it developed a blowfly infestation that spread throughout the whole company - fat, buzzing flies everywhere, bloated with blood from eating this animal alive - and then it was finally carried out and never seen again. he would launch into random bouts of unprovoked, hysterical laughter, and since main office was right next to his own that meant hearing his joker-cackle several times a day. any attempt to confront him or address concerns was usually met with him doing that same laugh in the employee's face and walking back to his office

the rest of the company worked around him for the most part but i guess he saw the plague times as an opportunity to consolidate his power, though that didn't stop him from openly denying COVID was real until well into the summer. he started off the lockdown by firing two of my best coworkers, one of whom was on maternity leave and had a four-hour commute, and joking about it. he eliminated WFH. he cut vacation. he tried to cut sick time until he found out it was illegal. he ripped down our sample storage and threw all the storage boxes into the conference room, which he routinely locked so we couldn't access the samples. he promised impossible lead times on testing and turned what was once a fairly standard 12-hour opening day into a 24-hour testing sweatshop. he rearranged the technicians' lab spaces without their knowledge or permission. he tore out a bathroom sink and replaced it with a new, non-functional one that was so large it made the toilet inaccessible, and then moved the paper tower roll to the opposite wall, beneath the massive sink. every week there was a new absurdist nightmare coming down the pipeline

last month he told me to make an edit to one of my lab reports that would have potentially allowed the client to use the data on samples other than the ones we'd tested - we had documented precedent against doing this, and it was a risky market for the end user, but his response was "i'm the boss, do it or get out and find a new job." at this time he hadn't shaved or changed his clothes in three weeks

and that is why i'm job-hunting in COVID times

Lmao good lord that guy needs to learn what it�s like to get punched in the face. But I�m trying to imagine a bathroom with a sink so big you can�t get to the toilet and I�m coming up empty. How big was this fuckin sink??

# ¿ Feb 22, 2021 01:24

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

I just got an email a few minutes ago from a store manager over in loving South Dakota demanding I come on site to plug in an Ethernet cable because he�s worried if I walk him through it on the phone he will �take down the system�. I�ve been telling him hell no I�m not coming out there(I�m in minneapolis) but that I�m happy to tell somebody what to do. And yes of course he cc�d my boss and VP on an email that has no content in the body, the subject line: �when can you come in�

# ¿ Feb 22, 2021 02:32

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

I have a feeling my works just gonna keep the �work from home or in the office whenever you want� going forward which is pretty bad rear end. At least, there�s been no pressure even tho they�re lightening other things up. I still go in once a week or so cause i usually have to ship stuff or grab things sent to me and it�s nice being like the only person in there and dipping out after like two hours.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 22:52

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Nothing like sitting down with the boss to eat some cheez it�s. Why do I stay here? The little thins like that.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 00:15

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

ilmucche posted:

Open plan non-assigned hotdesking is bullshit. I worked in an office that had like 50% of the desks needed, so each team would get desks and assign them. It was assumed enough people would be out of office that stragglers could find a place.

As a someone who hated my job already and is terrified of people I loved scrounging around the office for a half hour each day asking people if the empty desk next to them was up for grabs, only for joe random to show up at 930 to get angry and yell at me for taking their desk.

Hot desking at any job that isn�t like, a call center is obscene.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2021 00:02

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Slumpy posted:

I used to work at the only good MSP I've ever heard of, it was legit a good experience for how bad of a rap they get.

All of a sudden, it did a total 180 in literally a month. Let go some good workers, others quit, they announced a merger that "isn't like a typical merger, nothing will change". Knew it was bullshit, poo poo changed. We didn't get raises so we "don't have to let anyone go". They then immediately replaced all the seasoned good people with fresh IT guys who don't know poo poo and then hired 10+ brand new people, some who have lower job titles than me and get paid more than my manager.

I've hopped off that wreck, got a 20K raise and 23+ days PTO and transitioned into Internal IT all in one go. I would've actually stayed otherwise.

I started my career by working in a support role for a software company and learned a ton, but after that I�ve been internal for the last few jobs.

Part of me thinks I should get a gig with an MSP just to strengthen my skills, but I�m not wanting to go back to what basically amounts to customer support and dealing with grades on my work from customers. I feel like I skipped a step in my development. At the same time, I can talk the talk and am knowledgeable about poo poo so I�ll be able to get most gigs I want, but I�ll be figuring poo poo out as I go if I�m suddenly in a new environment.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2021 00:10

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

God I hate how people in charge slash the time estimates they get from the people doing the actual work.

I work in corporate for a retail company and one of our stores is moving locations, the new store was supposed to be up and running tomorrow. I was down there to set some poo poo up 3 weeks ago and did my stuff, but they don�t even have a fuckin certificate of occupancy yet and the entire front of the building doesn�t exist, it�s just draped with tarps. Our low voltage electrician hasn�t been able to terminate his cables because there aren�t any walls. It�s basically a huge empty space. I�m on weekly calls and the general contractor is like �yup were all good! My guys are working nights and weekends!� While I know for a fact that the entire crew dips out after lunch most days. I don�t care about any of that but I�ve just been laughing every week as they say this. My coworker was supposed to head down with the store set up team this last Friday, and the contractor calls them up about 30 minutes before they�re all gonna head down there to finally fess up. Like what�s the point in just letting stuff get to the point of no return to actually admit that wait no we can�t do it.

I also just found out this week that we are opening up a brand new store, and there is a hard open date of 5/1. There�s just absolutely no chance. Apparently the mall they�re putting it in has it in the contract that the store needs to be open on that day or else the other stores in the building get to renegotiate their own rental contracts or something. poo poo is not gonna happen in time and it�s a failure from day one.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2021 00:30

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

SkyeAuroline posted:

You're looking at it from the wrong direction - acknowledging what a person can do and then assuming the outcome from that.
These managers have an outcome in mind, and as far as they're concerned, if you set an outcome then it forces workers to keep up with it.
This is the same manager, in my case, that brought me into his office for "some other questions" and quickly derailed it into making me watch some "self-help" "motivational speaker" going on about how the only way to ever be successful is if you want to succeed more than you want to eat or breathe, and some story about nearly drowning someone to make them prove they wanted to keep going. Weird loving poo poo but this dude is genuinely convinced the only thing that keeps his goals from happening is that people aren't pushed hard enough.
I can do short bursts at the speeds he wants, but I'm already burnt out on this job for reasons that maybe belong more in E/N than here; I'm not loving pushing myself 8 hours a day, especially not with an employer-inflicted RSI they're loving around on doing anything about, to make 0 bonus and 0 recognition. We don't even have an "employee of the month" program any more so I won't even get the $25 gift card pittance or whatever bullshit it was before it was shut down.

New job time. You don�t owe them loving poo poo. Quit.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2021 00:48

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

SkyeAuroline posted:

That's easy to say from the outside. I've been actively searching since well before I took my position back. Turns out that "paying over twice minimum w/ reasonable hours" isn't duplicated elsewhere without masters' degrees I don't have (yeah, job market is that hosed), and relocating far enough to get a new job market takes money I don't have and will continue to not have as long as I'm in the middle of ongoing medical hell. The positions that will take me and pay enough to make rent (in a low-end apartment complex that I can't cut rent any further from without ending up in a cockroach den) & live my fairly spartan life... don't exist here. Moving to where those positions do exist would require me to manage something like an 80% pay increase to continue to cover, again, low-end-without-literal-slum rent. At least for now I'm getting paid enough to survive while I keep looking, and while they're not actively helping me, my manager is at least willing to work the schedule with me to make access to medical appointments possible in a manner that no previous employer has been willing to do. Good ol' American "tie healthcare and the money to afford it to employment, then put people in precarious situations where they need it".

Semi-rural red states. Not even once. Lot of resentment for my parents moving back here from the coast (Navy family) before I was born. Lot of opportunities that don't exist without the money to get out and the connections to land somewhere safely.

Of course, it is easy to say that from the outside indeed. I�ve dealt with awful work environments before and it�s hard as hell to just jump ship. I just hope you can find a way to not let it weigh on you. It sounds like you�re putting up with some awful people and hopefully the situation can change soon.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2021 01:39

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Outrail posted:

My favourites interview questions just turn the standard bullshit back on them. It's a good reminder that you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you and lets you know if you're just filling a hole or they really want you there. .

Why did my successor leave this position?

Why do you think I'd be a good fit for the organization?

Where do you see me in 5 years if I'm successful? (if they can't answer this or say 'doing the same job' it's a good sign to run away or assume you'll need an exit strategy in next 3 years)

Out of the last 5 people to have my position, how many quit?

What do you expect me to accomplish in the next 12 months? In the next 5 years?

Yeah I have some variations of these questions I usually ask and I don�t think I�ve gotten an acceptable answer to the ones related to growth from any job I�ve had since I started using them lol. If the interview is really thick with annoying useless bullshit suck my dick questions I ask increasing amounts of bullshit questions back to them. I got rejected after 4 interviews on my last job hunt because some VP was walking by the conference room I was being interviewed in and started throwing that stupid poo poo at me lol. The hiring manager totally wanted to bring me on board but I think I pissed of the �executive�.

Dude literally just poked his head in and asked if this was an interview and took a seat lol

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 00:22

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Son of Rodney posted:

Deffo a thing in Germany but might be on its way out. Stuff like birth date, family status (single/married) and hobbies are also common. I was quite surprised to learn that many jobs outside of Germany don't expect stuff like pictures, age, and all that. I'd love for that to become standard here, I even heard about some places not wanting gender, heritage or even names and it's sound so much better.

Yeah, I�ve heard of some companies where HR doesn�t disclose even a name of a candidate to the hiring manager before any interviews, just their qualifications. seems like a pretty good idea to me. I wonder what % of Americans will just toss a resume from somebody named Muhammad right into the trash without thinking about it. Probably more than I�d like to think.

I had no idea there are places that expect a drat head shot on your resume, I would probably use Tobias Funke.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 03:18

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Barudak posted:

I'm not a source on this but my experience is it doesn't even work to get problematic people to loving cover their tracks better.

Oh hey Bill, you do that training on sexual harrassment? Sure did you stud, now come here and give me a hug

Yeah it�s ridiculous to pretend like people are gonna abandoned their shittiness after being forced to sit through a few hours of bullshit. Like people proposing additional training to fix cops love of killing non whites, what�s the point other than throwing your hands up and saying you tried.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 05:18

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Inzombiac posted:

Not my current job but I applied for a case advocate job for the IRS (essentially a person that works with people who are struggling to pay their taxes by trying to secure extra money/grants for them, a decently noble cause) and at the end of the very brief application process it automatically tells me that I'm not qualified.

Fine but I applied for a job with them three years ago where the posting also covered a supervisory position. They said I wasn't qualified for the entry-level job but was for the supervisor role (???) but they never followed up.
Not exactly sure what to believe.

Government work is great if you can get it and your priority is stability over pay. I don't make even an average wage for my city but I've never been without work, my hours don't get cut and because my work is not tied to making the numbers in a financial graph go up, my bosses are totally cool with me having down time.

Yeah the tracking systems are fuckin weird. My current job is a Senior level job title. But when I was hunting I applied for the non senior version of my same title at the same company. Few months later I got a rejection email but I saw there was now a posting for a Sr, applied to that one for shits and got the job.

Might�ve just been a case of �the candidates were getting dont quite have what we want, so let�s cancel the non sr posting and remake it� and mine was lovely enough to be rejected early on but good enough to get the job when they really needed me.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 01:55

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

Fried Watermelon posted:

My boss will reject anyone with a foreign name, say he can't understand them on the phone when he calls, and that they are just applying because unemployment makes you apply to jobs.

Also pays minimum wage and complains it's too much money

Lol that�s pretty loving terrible.

When I was in high school I had a boss lady who any time she heard a name that�s any more foreign than John Johnson she�d go �hmmmmm where�s THAT from??�

# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 20:01

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 00:09

Tetramin: Apr 1, 2006; I'ma buck you up.

I work as a network guy for a retail company that is opening a new store on an extremely loving aggressive timeline, and our internet partner can�t get a circuit in the building for us in time. We need a live network by this Sunday because all the store set up people show up on Monday, so I set up one of our devices with a SIM card to at least give them something.

Problem is, my coworker who I�ve bitched about here before strung me along for like two months saying he�d complete some of the tasks and they got dumped on me this week. I completed those, but with the increased workload I completely loving forgot to ship the 4g unit to the store until today. Now I�ve got like 4 different people pinging me about this and I�m just like poo poo I dropped the ball. And my car loving broke down today so I�m trying to juggle all of this and give my boss the info she is asking for without being near my laptop and praying UPS can get my package down there tomorrow. I paid for Saturday shipping and they told me it should be there tomorrow but right now the tracking says Monday.

I�ve been basically catatonic and ignoring my chat messages for about an hour now and so loving stressed lol. I cover for a guy and gently caress up a very simple task of my own which will really really make me look bad. I wanna die.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2021 23:51

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Dumb shit your work does: for some reason in the Diablo font.

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