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”.