Our CEO came to visit us. It was fun. Some people couldn’t make it because they were out on vacation.
Our department manager announced with less than a week’s notice that he’ll visit us after our CEO, for no specific reason, the weeks around the Easter weekend (Friday and Monday are public holidays so 4 days weekend). For the occasion he asked everyone in the team to cancel vacations approved months ago.
All department employees individually politely declined to cancel their personal plans or approved vacations and involved HR. HR wasn’t aware of the manager’s decision.
He’ll be alone at the office for 2/9 visit days 😂
Ha!
Very stupid of the CEO to come during a known holiday period.
Department Manager not CEO
Pardon me. Department manager.
I was able to file a grievance against a person everyone hates. It’s a slam dunk grievance, I even have evidence from their Instagram.
Everyone that I’ve told about it has been over the moon that someone gets to put them in their place finally.
Monday morning we have our big meeting regarding it, and I’m going to straight up fuck their ass up. I hope they quit. Seriously, they are such assholes to everyone. No one has a nice thing to say about them.
Let us know how it goes!
Oh, it’s a massive win. All of my leaderships support me 100% on this. The person in civil service (basically the person that adjudicates these things)called me after I filed the grievance, mad as hell that they would have ever thought to do such a thing in the first place. And they said they were taking it to our president so they could get approval to punish this person appropriately. It’s a huge slam dunk.
Omg I had this opportunity against a higher up who is a really fucking awful person but I opted to go for an informal complaint because I panicked that they would tell them who put the complaint in. the higher up really likes me and had no idea that I’d complain about what they were doing - they also would’ve talked absolute shit about me and tried to destroy my reputation if they found out, considering I’m very early into my career it wasn’t a choice I was willing to make. I wish I had been brave cause now it’s all said and done I can really see how hard HR actually wanted that person gone (much harder to do without the formal complaint).
Good luck to you!
HR wants crappy employees gone as much as you do, likely more, as they deal with them for every issue, you might only see some. Iceberg perspective. File the damn complaint and let us purge for your and everyone’s sake! (Unless you work in sketch org with compromised or biased HR).
Source, am HR.
Thanks that makes me feel better about the HR folks I spoke to. I work in an actually very safe organization in terms of this type of stuff but it’s also unionized so the paperwork seemed extremely overwhelming at the time and I didn’t really feel supported by the union at all, plus the fact that a formal report would mean my name would no longer be confidential. Unfortunately, I think it’s too late to do all that formal stuff anyway but I think I gave them enough to do a bit of damage as from what I’ve been told they’re still pursuing as much as they can. I just wish I hadn’t had to have been the one to speak up because our boss actually witnessed everything and had the same evidence as me and said fuck all. The whole leadership is a fucking mess honestly but I did find comfort in the HR folks that helped me out at least.
Not really drama but my boss accidentally told me one of my coworkers is pregnant before she was going to tell me (it was because he was telling me about stuff I was going to have to take over while she’s on maternity),
So now I feel like an overinflated balloon filled with wanting to congratulate her but not being able to because she hasn’t told me yet and I just can’t because I fokkin’ love babies and not being able to get my excitement out over it just makes me antsy.
For a split second, I read that as if you called her an overinflated balloon. I was very relieved.
Honestly I haven’t seen her in person so IDK how far along she actually is other than the general time frame of her due date
But I personally think of allegories like balloon or soccer ball as a fun way to describe the baby bump once it’s fully baked bun time.
It’s a baby, babies love to play, especially with rolly stuff and floaty stuff!
My former job lost 8 people including me in the last year due to holding onto outdated processes and not being open to the workers requests. My former had a big brain drain and is only being held up nowadays by the leader, someone you can’t give any tickets but easy things (like enabling user rights by klicking one option) and another guy who is doing practically everything, even beyond his tasks. He too is currently looking for another job and I also hear from at least two other people who are fed up with top management. We’re talking about a company with only about 30 people when I startet two years ago and who only got 2 new people during that time.
I’m just sitting here, observing from afar and enjoying my new employee giving me the certificates I want. I dunno, but perhaps it is essential to listen to their employees to perhaps avoid them abandon ship…?
The lead engineer at a site I work on from time to time is on a 3 on 3 off rotation (weeks) on an offshore oil rig.
It turns out he was having to miss some of his trips because he had to ‘look after his ailing father’.
It turns out he was spending this time working another lead engineer job, for the same oil company but in a different country.
He got away with it for months until some issue came up and he had to call into the office and they noticed his number was from another country, Saudi Arabia.
Haven’t been back to that site in a while so I don’t know what happened to him but he’s certainly not working there any more.He’s probably making way more in Saudi anyway.
cutest girl at work asked me if i knew what poppers were, then supplied the explanation after i said yes. unfortunately i was/am too stupid to advance the ball further, and we both left the job shortly after due to a terrible regime change
if you still have her contact details, keep being in touch. ask her for a date if things go well, good luck.
What are poppers?
My boss occasionally goes and picks up supplies and he’s supposed to get compensated for gas money. They give you a flat rate based on the distance there and back, and his bike has good fuel efficiency so he makes a few easy bucks for each trip.
One day management told him he wasn’t allowed to do that anymore (can’t remember the reason), and management told him it was the higher-up’s decision, not theirs. So he decides to email our division manager to basically ask if management was lying…
He accidentally CC’d the entire district lmao. We think it’s because the DM’s emails are usually for the whole district and he just clicked through one of those emails to find her email address. Management called him into the office the next day lol.
Well, they shouldn’t fire him, it’s hard enough to find that level of stupidity to promote above everyone else’s heads.
Straight to CEO for that guy
Seems kinda shitty to deny him. There is a government calculated mileage rate that should just be the default rate (somewhere around $0.50-$0.60 per mile) since it’s supposed to cover gas, maintenance, and every other expense it takes to operate a vehicle on the road.
As an alternative, imagine someone with a vehicle that gets 5MPG asking to be paid more than the set rate. I’m sure management would reject that as well.
It wasn’t that they were gonna just stop paying him, they were saying they were gonna do it themselves from now on so they didn’t have to lose that money (our store is in a pretty rough spot)
Full ass sized crowbar in main plumbing pipe of new apartment building.
Contractors changed during covid, multiple project managers quit. Construction started and stopped at least twice.
Only the beginning of that buildings fuckery.
Cat v cables don’t feed where they say, coax cabling inconsistent per apartment. Carpet is less than a quarter inch thick and frays in apts where no one has lived as it is too thin and was stretched to fit.
Building has shifted on foundation causing a crack from top floor down to first.
Unterminated wires hang loose in at least 2 common areas.
Price of a fucking Hyundai required to move in.
My business just had two meeting recently, one was about “the seriousness of unionization”, and the second was regarding a potential shift change because they are unable to fill 20+ positions and people keep leaving.
I would like to preface the seriousness of this with some historical facts about the business: they on average used to pay $12-$15 over competitors (now equal to or even less than), they used to offer pensions (Not any more), they used to have a call list of over 200 applicants (for decades) of whom they could call up and offer a job and those people would quit and jump on board (they can’t hire from anywhere in the country or Puerto Rico with relocation bonuses included). And the average length of a workers term was 28 years (now just under 5).
It’s Lowe’s isn’t it
Very much not Lowes’s, though I doubt people would travel 1-2 states over to work at Lowe’s
Walking from one end of Lowe’s to the other is like going to a different state to take a 15 minute break
Sounds like it’s time to unionize!
NGL, seems like its getting close! Probably spring of 2025 is gonna be the make or break for this place
Our hiring manager just flat out sucks at his job, rarely ever see him interviewing people and I know of several coworkers who have dropped their friends resumes on his desk and he never follows up with these recommendations. One of his main jobs is to keep in contact with our student co-ops and let them know their start dates after each semester, he doesn’t reach out to them and actually dodges their calls. Now here is the real shocker, he is untouchable because he is the former owners son.
So, I noticed the past few months he’s been interviewing a lot more than the past few years, pretty obvious because he gives a building tour after each interview. I was talking to my secretary about it and she told me he got a real ass chewing because current ownership found out, after the fact, that his request to work from home ALL OF DECEMBER was actually a request to work from my vacation house in Florida, dudes barely older than I am and he just lives life on easy mode.
Edit: Hope you see this, Fuck you Kyle!
Maybe don’t let Kyle live in your vacation house?
Genuine question, did it really matter whether he was in his normal house or holiday home? Unless it was a timezone issue or something?
The house vibrates like a cheap motel bed. Can’t get anything done there.
I’d say it depends on the circumstances and in these circumstances, it should matter. Working from home when you’re needed in-person because you have a sick family member is one thing, but doing it because you want to party on Daytona Beach is another.
Were they doing the work they were meant to do during work hours?
Working remotely shouldn’t be treated as a privilege.
I’d assume not since the majority of their comment is talking about how this person was dodging calls and not interviewing anyone.
Fucking Kyles
Our startup is failing internally. The product idea keeps changing, projects get switched rapidly, the engineering team got an ass beating by the CEO in an all team meeting for being ‘too slow’ (which was out of line by him) despite trying their best to keep up. We had an amazing chance to be one of the first companies doing what we do, and we’ve just whiffed it. On top of this no one has had pay reviews, some for multiple years. And we’re trying to hire a new position and all the candidates drop out when they see what a shit show everything is. I’ve spoken off the record to half of the team (it’s a small company) and all of them are absolutely over it, looking for other work, doing the bare minimum. I was hired a few years ago as a customer person, but we barely have customers and they’re pressuring me to instead do aggressive consulting and sales stuff. I hate it, but the paychecks keep cashing and I hate job hunting.
I was part of a startup that started rebranding for no fucking reason once. It sucked.
In another case I was hired to consult for a small startup with horrible unclean code and tech debt. We were asked to make our recommendations about architecture to reduce that tech debt. One of our recommendations was “The CEO is no longer allowed to sell features that don’t yet exist”.
Like 90% of dev work was happening in response to the CEO hanging up the phone and saying “We just landed X company … as long as we can build them X”
I stg this is what is happening!! The CEO will ‘land’ a huge deal and suddenly the team is now building some random freight TMS integration and we’re being told there is a lot of demand for it. Then the deal never actually closes, the dev work slows and switches back to other things, and he moves on to the next shiny object. Meanwhile I’m having to custom code an API to script solution for fucking Google Sheets because that is somehow not important enough to finish. He just closed a deal and handed it to me for implementation, and there are no guidelines anywhere on what was actually sold. He promises vague outcomes, names a price, and if they’re actually ballsy enough to go for it, I get to figure out what specifically they are asking for, and a way to shoehorn it into our half built architecture.
I had a project that dragged out a bit and because I was so focused on getting it done my work slipped in other areas.
I have a ‘position description’ meeting with HR on Monday about ‘a new direction the business is going in’ so I’m probably going to get the axe
I’m sorry friend. I hear you about being spread too thin at times.
Those I share a space with typically conflict with each other, it’s not like school where they would go at me, so I tend to not be in the know. The only exception is one tried getting back at the others by using me as a bargaining chip. As in he kept me at his house for 2 days.
I mean, I was all, ok juicy work drama, juicy work drama. Then I got to the last sentence, I think that goes beyond work drama.
I checked out at “it’s not like school” but you got me to go back and read, yikes
That moment when I’m disqualified from a venting question for going over the meter.
It’s actually a pretty serious problem. It’s not so much that you’re disqualified, as that you’re ineffective at being heard.
This is a serious problem. Have you considered listening to great speeches, or rap, or poetry?
Not in particular, no. In what way are you suggesting I’d use that?
Listen to lots and lots of them. Absorb their patterns, to adopt those patterns, to improve your own communication.
Oh, that. I’ve tried that with other things. I’m finding it difficult, perhaps it’s my mind going a different way.
Wat
You two said it was “beyond work drama” and came across like it was unfitting as a result. Are we only expected to describe events that go below a certain glass ceiling of conflict?
came across like it was unfitting as a result.
That was all you. We neither said nor implied any such thing.
The first comment you replied to contrasted things that seemed “beyond work drama” with the “juicy work drama” they were looking for.
As in he kept me at his house for 2 days.
Would you care to elaborate?
That’s basically it. I was the closest thing that could be used against the others, which was out of spite. Only was solved due to passerbies who knew something was going on and where.
…we’re you kidnapped or something?
Yes
Do you sometimes feel like people don’t take you seriously, even when you say very serious things?
Often, but in what way does that connect?
I feel my mind turning off, turning to teflon, when I read your comment. It made me wonder whether others have that experience too.
Here’s something interesting: social scientists have found that humans’ eyebrows dance when they talk to each other. The eyebrow dance is normally not consciously perceived, but it is synchronized between two individuals when they speak to one another.
What’s more is the eyebrow dance is literally a dance, not a conversation, specifically in the way it is timed. It is perfectly in sync, not offset as you’d expect a back-and-forth response pattern to be.
When this eyebrow dance synchronization is inhibited, for example by covering the speaker’s eyebrows, that speaker has an incredibly hard time getting information across.
This is a long-documented phenomenon in human culture: that people can be standing there conveying information and others can be hearing it but not picking it up.
Like one person can be saying “Our car crashed! My brother is badly hurt and he needs an ambulance! Can I use your phone?” and for various reasons another person can just stand there not processing any of it.
So really what I’m trying to say is that human communication is finicky and relies on maintenance of non-obvious parallel channels, and people can get cut off from others when those channels break down.
From reading your writing, and seeing how others respond, it makes me think there might be some channel based on word sequencing that’s not being adhered to.
I know from experience how much it sucks to be cut off and unseen, so I thought I’d point out for you that while I recognize what you’re saying is important, it doesn’t land in my feelings for some reason, and it feels related to how things are worded.
Wait, you were held against your will in a house by a coworker??
Yes
Please tell me you’re the office cat or something.
If only
I’m really bad at keeping secrets, and I’m a manager who’s supposed to hold on to everyone’s dirty laundry.
I know a person at work who’s going to be getting fired as soon as we’re less busy, he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.
One of my employees is a chronic alcoholic and goes to AA. He drinks on the job, and I can smell the alcohol strongly on his breath. When he comes back from break, it’s even stronger. It’s a strange situation because I can’t quite confront him about it since I don’t have a way to prove it despite it being obvious. I probably can, but I am just worried about protecting my ass.
Girl at my work who had been flirting with me decided things went too far and she only wanted to stay at casual flirting. She 180’s one day, turns another one of the guys I’m cool with against me and acts terrified of me. Because I’m management and the boss of those two, it’s messy. She doesn’t even know she has the power in the situation, I have a lot more at stake and am held to much higher standards so I’m the one who should be terrified. However I am pretty popular with everyone at work, and she’s likely scared of that power dynamic as well, but I’ve never mentioned her to really anyone and would even get fired for retaliation if I were to do so. In reality I just try to avoid any sort of interaction with them as much as possible and do not really acknowledge them unless strictly work related.
My co-manager is married and she is desperately thirsty for another manager, always calling him “her desire” and gets excited around me when she sees him. It had caused her relationship issues in the past with her husband because of it. I don’t say anything, I think it’s okay to still find others attractive as long as you don’t act on it, she’s just a bit too excited but it’s not my business lol.
In the end, the most valuable lesson I’ve learned about being management is covering your ass. Always make sure your bases are covered and you’re protecting yourself, or shit will hit you much harder since you have much higher expectations since bosses are usually mediators and leaders as well.
he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.
seems like the first step to improving is being given information on how you’re doing, and the second is being mentored/trained?
That sadly only goes so far. There needs to be an inate ability there as well. They need to be aware of what they’re doing, otherwise they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong. They also have to have a good attitude and actually try to learn. Attendence and basic time management is a big one as well.
These are things that are all controllable by the person, there’s not much excuse. These are things you really can’t train, it’s on them to meet standards here.
If someone is failing in all these areas, then they just might not be a good fit for the job. There’s a competitive market of people looking to get their job.
You’re getting downvoted but as the person who trains all the new people at my job, you can tell when someone either “gets it” or they don’t and no matter how much hand holding you do, the situation isn’t going to improve.
Sure, but you should still have a conversation to set expectations with that individual beforehand.
If you hire someone who’s incompetent, allow them to believe they’re performing well, and then fire them when it’s easy for you—well, that would just make you an asshole.
It sounds like in both our situations, all these steps were handled by different people. They said they’re a manager but it doesn’t sound like the decision to fire the guy was theirs.
If you know someone you are the line manager for is drinking heavily don’t you have a duty of care towards them? It’s a health and safety issue if nothing else
The issue is that unless I have a way to objectively prove, I am throwing out accusations. We don’t have a breathalyzer at my work.
