id also hope that useless work emails and micromanagement will be kept to a minimum because of her dyselxia
id also hope that useless work emails and micromanagement will be kept to a minimum because of her dyselxia
Our public sector is toast. Crippled by culture war stuff and subject to endless pay freezes at a time when there's a run on private sector wages. In five years it will just be the furniture and truly principled people left.Originally Posted by Don
Lewis with the inclusive pronoun usage, you love to see it.
I hope Panda is ok with my new LinkedIn pic.
The railway was the best of both worlds but now we are being ironically merged into Great British Railways by the same mob who binned off British Rail.
And the government do outsource a ton of work to third parties. Let's be honest, though. Anyone working in the DWP at the minute is probably being flogged to death with the post-pandemic workloads.
Job for life.
'Great British Railways', dearie me. Being great is like being a lady, etc.
I’ve been attending some workshops over Zoom spread over a few weeks. Todays the third one and it has a different presenter to normal and my god he’s BORING.
The previous two workshops were engaging and interactive, with lots of breakout rooms and group discussion. This is just this man talking about boring shite, boasting about how he swims five days a week and doing his best to shoehorn his football team (I won’t say who, he seems quite prolific in his field, writes for the guardian etc) into every bloody slide.
Also when did presentations/slideshows become a SLIDE DECK? Everyone who wants to be seen as important seems to call them that now.
I'm a twit
Another office appearance dodged. Come at me @Don.
Unsurprisingly, we call them decks.
Rather have some bore going on and on than having to do fucking breakout rooms and group discussion.
I'm close to nodding off. Plus it's stuff I want to actually know about, but it's hard to stay focused.
I'm a twit
I'm on the ropes. Was meant to be going in tomorrow but some cunt has roped me into attending a more formal matter which means I now additionally have to be suited up and travelling a little extra on the tube too.
Obvs correct.
Nod off then. I am sure there will be some pamphlet with all the information in the end.
it's 100x better now.
The boss (as in, 'the boss' from the other thread, not my actual boss) just called and asked me to phone one of our Spanish customers 'for a chat, just to see if he's happy'. Then he said 'Right, it's 10 now, I'll call back at 12 once you've done it and see what he had to say'.
I honestly can't think of a more stressful task even in theory.
I fundamentally do not understand how he cannot speak a lick of Spanish despite having lived in Spain as the area's sales representative for however many decades.
How the hell was he doing his job before?
I assume by doing what every cretinous Brit abroad does. Shouting loudly, slowly and with liberal use of vague hand gestures.
Whilst stuffing ham, egg and chips into their face.
Don't be silly, Mahow, foreigners have their Foreign Muck and don't deserve beautiful British cuisine.
He doesn't live there full time, he has a place there and goes back and forth. It's still impressive, though. What he does is just bowls into places and does the Schteve McClaren thing. "Meelk. I would like - a - some - meelk, yes?" and eventually the message gets through.
Short of that he just has an army of Spanish-speaking Brits who do things for him. I once had to phone his builder for him.
Is it one of those counter-intuitive things where it's actually in his interest (from a business perspective) not to speak the language?
In that he can use 'lost in translation' to his advantage? Maybe, I don't know, he isn't capable of having a single thought last more than 10 seconds so if that's the case I doubt it's by design.
In a semi-related strategy, I once managed to get a bint that had been ducking all forms of contact to call me by getting our agreement wrong. It was as simple as putting "per week" instead of "per month", but it got her straight on the phone within minutes.
I do this semi-regularly on purpose now and it's like magic. There's probably a Psychology Dissertation to be written on why it works. I suspect they think they are SEIZING THE POWER and jump before looking.
Started a new job this week. I found out today that the company e-mail runs on a server that only works with Internet Explorer and not just any version, it has to be 9 or older. Meanwhile you can't install older IE versions in Windows 10, so I found out I had to add the website to the browser's compatibility settings. Just pure paranoia.
Tantalising stuff.
What kind of bullshit business is that?
It's the regulatory authority for energy, and, as with all things connected (however loosely) to the greek government, they update systems at a snail's pace. Presumably they are moving to Outlook soon™.
I feel like I may have to admit defeat with my long-term strategy at my current place, and start tentatively looking for jobs.
I finally got out of my very entry-level div bank job after ~5 years this time last year, and on paper it felt like the perfect fit. International development charity about 10 minutes walk from my house, so a perfect combination of my loony left do-gooder outlook and my laziness. The spec was looking for someone with "a financial background" and "customer service experience", and while the job itself was obviously admin-bitch, I figured it was a foot in the door, then I could be fucking class and skills at data entry and talking to old people donating money over the phone and that, and then apply for jobs where I have to actually use my brain.
I spoke to my mate about it, and he summed up the situation perfectly (having been in the same boat at another place) - at some places you just get the stench of admin on you, and that's that. The office as a whole is largely filled with very drive to waitrose on sunday to pick up the observer with radio 4 on type lefties, but my team is like middle-aged women who talk about how fat [insert someone on loose women] is getting or whatever. When I was in more blue-collary jobs I felt like I was occasionally seen as someone exactly like the former with some amount of suspicion, but here i'm deffo seen as closer to the latter. When my boss's boss's boss heard I'd been to uni she expressed genuine surprise, twat. The problem is that I'm a contrary dickhead and when I'm surrounded by those snobby guardianista twats, my instinct is to lean into my dubious working class lager and footy side, or if I'm being more forgiving to myself, it's just that they're massive wankers.
Either way you look at it, they deffo don't consider me one of them, and I think my absolute best case scenario is that I get to be a senior admin supervisor when my immediate superior retires in 10 years, assuming the whole department hasn't been outsourced to agency temps, robots and some offshore call centre by then.
'I don't care if it was a joke. I don't want to hear any "dead baby" comments in my office, thank you.'
'its not your office its the charitys office'
'What was that?'
'yeah... sorry yeah okay'
*goes back to his desk and tells everyone he 'just had a right go at her'
Move and get into sales. It's a results business and no one gives a fuck who you are if you get the numbers on the board. If I can do it so can you. In fact you're probably far better suited.
Don't go into sales. Learn to code.
There's an old boy in my department who is pretty much useless now, not his fault, he had a stroke years ago and was never the same. However he is not suited for the home working model as he can't really work without supervision. For instance there is no point emailing him as he will never pick it up. He was off on full pay (the best bit being he was parachuted in from another grade so is on more than anyone else) during the mandatory office closures and has just gone back in. We used to use desktops but they have all been binned off for hot desking, this afternoon he texts his line manager saying 'my laptop has ran out of battery, can I go home?'
It's telling that of the last 3 posts I'm most inclined to follow Lofty's career path. I'll take a stroke over a whistle-stop tour of Southern Europe with an overweight Chris Finch or shouting at misplaced brackets in a Northern Ireland basement flat.
I'd also take a stroke over my current job, mind.
My office moved down here from London in either 2011 or 2013, and there are still people on London weighting because they moved with it. Their settlement was that they could keep it until payrises caught everybody else up, but they never have, so they still earn about a grand more than the others.
We've got people on all sorts of grade in this office. Ex-civil service, people on terms they had two-acquisitions back, etc. Not sure how much of a difference it makes, especially as most of the proper old guard are part-timers.
It's kicking off at the moment as there is a suggestion a driver has transferred in for medical reasons, meaning they will be on 20k more than everyone else despite being the most junior person in the team. Used to be a well beaten path, get driving on big money then get medically restricted on an easy job like standing on the ticket barrier whilst retaining your salary. Don't have to work the barrier first thing in the morning or last thing at night like you do on the train.
It's very hard to know what people are on in our place as it's a deep secret to not talk about salary. Plus it is not comparable to other parts of the business where the same corporate title is rewarded better than others.
First week in Germany wrapped up and we got a nice "oh something has gone wrong" in the previous job coming out. Might be serious enough to lose someone their job. Be quite a disaster if it ends up being me 🥲
I feel like that happens every time I switch jobs.
First banking job: This one was definitely on me. I was told the dangers of scanning cheques in twice because it throws the count off. I never got good at scanning so I inevitably buggered it up. I went home my usual time whilst they worked til 1am to sort it. I was working two jobs at the time so packed in sharpish.
Second banking job: Leave because they sacked all the agency staff and make a few permanent guys redundant. They move the operations to Leeds. Leeds are shite so the agents are called back in for another six weeks. After leaving that second stint, the lad I sat next to had been committing fraud on company time to settle his gambling debts.
Third banking job: I'm already heading to the current job and a customer had been hassling me about a product they thought they applied for. The form didn't get to us so I can't offer those terms. So they're going to withdraw their kid's money when they hit 16 anyway. Turns out withdrawing on the maturity date (the kid's birthday) only penalises them a day's interest. So I said, "Fine, we'll not penalise you any interest." just to stop them calling back. One day's interest might not even register. If it does and they kick off about it, I'm on the other side of the building working for a different part of the business.
And at this job we always heard stories of paperwork going missing either at the scanning place or in transit. I spent one afternoon this week doing QA and almost all the errors I found came from one person. We allow a handful of errors a month before a manager intervenes. This one managed 15 in a couple of days.
We've just had a major communication break down between different teams and because it impacts the US, they're baying for blood and want to blame someone. One of those where you try and keep your head down and hope for the best.
The master plan of lolling my way to an early retirement has hit a bump in the road. Passed up for an interview for a job I was odds on to secure. My rep may not recover.
Quite right too, you dosser.
Tazson "The Manlet King" Fury.
I had everything lined up to take Friday off this week in order to get my front door fixed, but I have now had to delay it to next week as I can't get the day off because my colleague has just booked it off instead. The reason? He needs Friday off as he has tickets to the O2 to see 'What's Love Got To Do With It?', a Tina Turner tribute act.
So I still have a boarded up front door, but at least he gets to hear some 5/10 dressing up act relay hits such as River Deep, Mountain High, and that one that goes da da da da the best, the best, the best, the best of yo-ou.
It's a pity he wasn't going to see a tribute act for The Doors but you can't win 'em all.
There’s a new (started in July but keeps saying she’s new, not sure how long she’ll drag it out but will keep you all updated) woman at work who lives in London so is committed to working 100% remotely and cannot attend any in-person meetings or “away days.” She’s emailed me today calling me a breadth of fresh air.
It was going so well too.
I'm a twit
Tina Turner is ace, so I'd say he has priority.
I'm sure Tina Turner is wonderful, but he's not seeing Tina Turner.
Yes, but he called dibs and the company rules are pretty clear on that.
A printed out photo is going around the office. The photo depicts our senior engineer, a few years ago during a work trip to Yenisei in Siberia (maybe I get the good gigs after all). He's dressed in warm clothing and standing on a bridge over a frozen river. Someone has added on a speech bubble with comic sans that has him saying: "It's minus 20 degrees here - just a normal Siberian summer's day!!!"
Now apparently this is the funniest gag that's ever been done. The Russian was in stitches. The Arab took a photocopy and has pinned it up next to his desk. Everyone else is clutching their sides laughing. Have I missed something?
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