Never seen it.
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Never seen it.
Good news from the big boss this morning. The milk deliveries have been cancelled and from now on we will be using powdered milk for our tea and coffee.
Is powdered milk a bit grim?
It sounds like it'd be a bit grim.
It has no cooling properties unlike milk so it's very grim.
Straight from fresh to powdered with no UHT stop in between? Brutal. Unless you were already consigned to UHT, which probably makes the move less of a blow.
Very Margaret Thatcher. They'll be coming for the Bitcoin Miners next.
Straight from fresh to powdered. Apparently it's not a cost thing, he dislikes the aesthetic of having milk containers around.
I always find this sort of thing remarkable from any boss. What does it achieve other than making them hate you? 'No, Smithers, make them drink the shittest milk on the market'.
Powdered milk? Fucking hell. :D
I assume you'll be reinstating actual milk when you're running the show Jim? So on the plus side they've set you up for an instant win with the troops.
Aren't you keeping milk in a fridge? Why are containers lying around?
"I TOLD YOU TO GET RID OF THOSE MILK CARTONS! YOU'RE FIRED!"
If it's genuinely not a cost-cutting measure he's just not fessing up to them lol.
You going to take in your own milk in a disposable plastic bottle or water bottle?
Or just accept it out of spite.
Total dick move though, literally a I dont give a shit about your welfare scenario but I suppose most public roles wouldnt provide that stuff (teachers, council etc) just annoying you had it and lost it.
We sure he's not just trying to save his cretinous staff from themselves? Bad enough killing the fucking planet but at least do it for the sake of a porridge, not to ruin a cup of tea.
Knew it wouldn't be long before a black tea earl grey and lemon wanker rolled in.
My guy came in with the lemon too. Verified don :cool:
Powdered milk, I had it once while visiting an ancient relative and it was quite terrible. Our work still supplies tea, coffee, milk and different flavours of cordial (diluting juice to the knuckle draggers).
All the eastern European shops here have random imported UHT milk brands. I understand being homesick and the way British immigrants in Spain stick to Carling and fry ups, but some fella from Lodz eschewing full fat or semi-skimmed and insisting on getting the Laciate mleko from the Polski Sklep must be a symptom of some sort of brain injury.
S for Seething. :harold:
"Oh, but she used Netflix for N."
Fuck off, you gammon.
No but seriously, linkage.
I actually prefer the long life milk to fresh.
First day back and this :face:
That's just proof he's a wrongun.
Terrible time of year to be forced into prostitution.
:D
Tbf as I just open my hatch and pour down my coffee in 10 seconds most mornings, switching to skimmed or just making happy shopper instant cooled down with tap water would probably be a sensible calorie and money save, but I prefer to hold onto the dream of waking up more than 30 minutes before I leave the house and luxuriously savouring my morning coffee.
I've tried all sorts of morning routines involving better coffee, but ultimately (at least in an office job requiring a relentless daily 8.30 start on site and unpredictable SW London traffic) have accepted that an extra half hour's sleep trumps them all. As such the move to powdered milk hits even harder.
About a year ago, my boss and a colleague (both middle aged women without much grasp of technology) went to another charity and were shown this demo of this scanner software , which theoretically makes processing cheque donations faster and more accurate.
They paid 30k for it, and it slowly dawned on them that it's basically not fit for purpose for our forms, cus ours have far more variance, whereas the other charity used largely uniform ones, so the scanning fields work regardless of the form. A distinction that wasn't picked up before they dropped thirty grand on it, cus you know, it's like if your mum went to have a look.
I was in a different mini department so only knew in vague details of the situation, but it's now my remit to use this software and it's absolutely fucking useless. They had a previous system that was ten times more efficient, but obviously we're being made to use this piece of shit , because my boss doesn't want to get a bollocking for buying snake oil. The only plus side is that I've figured out a way to make it a lot more efficient and less shit in the two weeks I've been using it, but it begs the question of what the fuck my mate was doing when he was on that process for 9 months (which must have included about ten hours or so of Teams calls with the technician from the software company).
At least after the best part of a decade in full time employment, I finally have a non-bullshit answer for those "give an example of a time you have thought outside the box/improved something in your job" competency questions when I apply for a job somewhere else.
Do these time-saving, money-saving mega contraptions ever actually work?
Over the last year we have changed from using work mobile phones for calls, to using a headset connected to the computer. It's shit. Terrible lag, robotic voices, constantly cutting out. Shit.
We've also changed our payment system so that people have to type their card details into their phone rather than just fucking reading them to me. That's horseshit too. It takes about 2 minutes just to connect to the fucking thing, which is a long time to listen to sighing, huffing and repeated "is it ready?" questions.
Just leave things alone.
See? Told you I was old.
I think they can, but from experience the way companies decide to go with them is based largely on dopey managers having a budget to spend and getting charmed by some salesperson, without any proper consideration of the practical implementation. The managers usually don't have any understanding of the processes they're supposed to oversee (and yeah fair enough, you're paid to manage, not to do the actual donkey work), but you'd think it might help to, you know, consult the people who actually do the stuff.
Those sorts of changes are just managers trying to do something to justify their jobs.
We actually have the opposite issue at our spot where a former employee who wasn't great at the job but was an excel whizz made a program to make life easier. He foolishly did it all with company computers on company time so despite him losing the battle to adopt it officially (and him get paid for it) the program still exists and is used by us today. He has since gone to a consultancy company and made a super duper official version that he keeps trying to sell us for £50k (presumably to licence it for 12 months) but the resistance from our old hand managers is strong.
The boss (the boss) has been back to see one of the customers we visited on the Spanish road trip (Antonio, our biggest customer). Apparently they've had a massive bust-up which resulted in the Spaniard's Dutch sales rep waving his papers in the air and shouting. The boss then rang me and said 'That Dutchman is a cunt' before ringing off again immediately.
I have had some interesting realisations from this whole sequence of events. The British, as a race, are all about commerce and expansion. It's how we built an empire and it's how we're still pretty relevant in the world. Our ambition is essentially limitless. If we do £100,000 a year with this guy, our culture absolutely demands that next year we strain to expand that to £125,000. Growth, for us, is everything - we are not happy with standing still. In short, we are indeed a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon said. It is not enough just to do business; we must do more business than previously. When we go for job interviews, we don't get asked about how efficiently we did our jobs; we get asked about whether and how we increased sales, expanded horizons, broke into new markets. Last year the boss did £2 million; this year the Big Boss has demanded that he absolutely must do £2.25 million or else why is he even bothering.
For Antonio, in the hills of Almeria, doing more business is not a good idea. In fact, it's an idea he hates, because he is Spanish and rather than living in this culture of constant expansion he lives in a culture where stability is just excellent, thank you. His business turns over a certain amount. It knows how to do that amount of business and has the people who can maintain it. When the English come to him demanding expansion, he is naturally uncomfortable. He ignores emails. He brushes off phone calls. The boss tries to manipulate him into saying he'll do an extra £50,000 next year; Antonio bristles and says he'll do £20,000, but really he means he doesn't want to expand at all. His son and sister work for him. Money comes in. Their lives are fine. Why take risks? Por qué complicar la vida?
About 50% of my job at the moment is trying to bridge this cultural divide, explaining to the boss why Antonio won't expand, and simultaneously explaining to Antonio why he absolutely must expand. It's basically an impossible task.
That's it. When performance review time comes, you cannot just say "things are running fine, so I let them be." They have to say "I implemented x and transformed y" and so on. I see it with provosts/deans all the time. Useless initiative after useless initiative just so they can put them on their cvs and jump to an even higher paying job elsewhere.
This sort of attitude is why I'll never be a millionaire but I think I'm broadly with Antonio. I know fine well there is a point in my line of work where the extra money that would come with promotion is going to come with extra responsibility and hassle that I simply can't be arsed with and if I had a business that was keeping me comfortable I doubt I'd have the drive to be going "Well how much work would I need to put in to make an extra 10%?"
Traitor.