Tag: work

Dear X,
Regard­ing your com­ment dur­ing our recent phone con­ver­sa­tion.
In this con­ver­sa­tion I said some­thing like:
“I must have missed the update.”
And you replied with:
“That hap­pens a lot at [my depart­ment].”
I find your com­ment to be extreme­ly unpro­fes­sion­al, and more than that, to be unnec­es­sary and unciv­il.
The whole point of send­ing out the final con­fir­ma­tion is as a dou­ble check, last chance error cor­rec­tion process.
The issue of the wrong room hav­ing been list­ed was very minor and cor­rect­ed com­plete­ly with­in the space of the short phone con­ver­sa­tion.
Why was it nec­es­sary to take such a cheap shot at me per­son­al­ly and [my depart­ment] as a whole?
Your com­ment was inflam­ma­to­ry, and divi­sive.
Do you suf­fer the self-delu­sion that you and your depart­ment have nev­er made any errors?
Please refrain from such bul­ly­ing tac­tics in future.
Kind regards.

Why, I mean, real­ly, real­ly, WHY?
Why does every­one always ever leave any sort of tech relat­ed advice or ques­tion until the dead­line to ask?
Today’s exam­ple @ 4:45pm the boss want­ed help tak­ing a word file home to work on. But then she tells me she can’t get email at home, and her com­put­er is 10 years old, so no USB, no DVD, but she is sure it can do CD. All I have to do is teach her how to burn a CD. Which she has nev­er done with her work com­put­er, and I’ve nev­er done with her work com­put­er. Plus, we don’t have any blank CD’s. And so all this is my fault, because she needs to fin­ish this report tonight, because her boss wants it tomor­row.
Com­pare to me. I almost nev­er work on work stuff from home. But I’ve test­ed the set­up. I know I can email, sync, USB, CD and DVD a file to myself if I ever want­ed to. I have actu­al­ly gone to the trou­ble of mak­ing sure this all works. Hell, I can even log into my work com­put­er from home if I had to.
Blah, I’ve had enough, time to go home and not care.

Why is it the boss notices when your late back from lunch, but nev­er when your back ear­ly?

Back when I was work­ing at NB we had these forms we had to fill in and read out our answers at the week­ly tele-con­fer­ence meet­ing with the upper man­age­ment types. I think the idea was to let the upper lev­el guys delude them­selves into think­ing they were play­ing an active part in the run­ning of the com­pa­ny, while at the same time milk­ing any ideas out of the staff for free rather than pay expen­sive con­sul­tants for ideas on how to improve things.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “The evil Next Byte”

I just recent­ly heard that one of the casu­al staff I worked with at Next Byte has been ‘let go’, with­out warn­ing or rea­son. Now I realise that casu­al staff have no legal pro­tec­tion and need not be giv­en more than 4 hours notice, but it is still a rude and unkind way to con­duct busi­ness. For­tu­nate­ly for a lot of com­pa­nies there is no law that says “be nice to each oth­er”. The clos­est we have would be things like the the sec­ond com­mand­ment “Thou shalt love thy neigh­bour as thy­self”, or the edict of Bill and Ted “Be excel­lent to each oth­er and par­ty on dudes!”
It is pos­si­ble that I am in some small way respon­si­ble for this too, and per­haps I should have know bet­ter. For it seems this staff mem­ber may well have been fired for com­ments post­ed on this site. Yet anoth­er under­hand­ed maneu­ver. I can’t say for sure either way, but the scary thing is I can not rule it out of pos­si­bil­i­ty.
When I was sent home, I spent a good deal of time look­ing into my legal posi­tion, and could eas­i­ly have tak­en action with regards to unfair dis­missal, under­pay for 8 months, poor work place con­di­tions, oh&s, and a num­ber of oth­er options too. But in the end it came down to not want­i­ng to have to spend anoth­er 8 months deal­ing with peo­ple that could be so unkind. If I just want­ed mon­ey I’d be bet­ter off sell­ing info to the com­pe­ti­tion, or the sup­pli­er even.

Well, so today I add yet anoth­er new expe­ri­ence to my ‘real world’ sales job life, get­ting fired for some­thing that was­n’t my fault.
Lucky me.

Well, I’ve been doing the new job on my own now for two days. And all I can real­ly say is that I haven’t stuffed any­thing up big yet. Which is good i guess.
The guys at the new store all seem nice, and I’m get­ting along well with them.
I’m very aware that some of them I’ll need to be more force­ful with over the next few weeks. Which is going to be a chal­lenge for me I know. See how it goes.
The gen­er­al com­ment is that I’m doing a bet­ter job that the pre­vi­ous guy, which I find hard to believe.
Over all the new job is a lit­tle more mon­ey (but still not a good wage), a lot more work (so i’m gonna have to be more force­ful about tak­ing breaks), a lot less per­son­al space (so no web surf­ing, or even writ­ing on my blog from work), an ear­li­er start to the day (need to leave the house at 7:00 am), get off on time (no more stay­ing back to 6–7pm), a lot more respon­si­bil­i­ty (if I don’t do my job oth­er peo­ple can’t do theirs). So I’m still unde­cid­ed if this is a good thing for me or not.
Time will tell, it always does. Until then I’m keep­ing out look­ing for a new job.

Okay, so yes­ter­day the region­al man­ag­er rocks in and wants to have a pri­vate word with me. I frown, he says its noth­ing scary. We chat.
He offers me a new job, a ‘bet­ter’ job, more pay, not hav­ing to deal with the cus­tomers, not hav­ing to wor­ry about com­mis­sion tar­gets, prob­a­bly more work, more stress… and a trans­fer to the city store. Over­all a good thing.
I think.
Watch this space and I’ll keep you all updat­ed to my new life as “Storeper­son”.