Topic: The 'Let's Bitch About Our Jobs' thread. (Read 213832 times)

Clear_Runway · « **Reply #675 on:** March 01, 2010, 04:22:15 PM »

Quote from: pbsaurus on March 01, 2010, 02:05:44 PM

Hate Mr. Pink

why?

pbsaurus · « **Reply #676 on:** March 01, 2010, 07:55:16 PM »

Stupid

Min · « **Reply #677 on:** March 01, 2010, 11:57:59 PM »

explains.

xolik · « **Reply #678 on:** March 02, 2010, 02:36:39 AM »

Quote from: Wunderkind on February 28, 2010, 08:18:06 AM

In a hurry + knife = bad

I was in a hurry and had a knife. Shit happens.

Hey, that worked for O.J.!

Wunderkind · « **Reply #679 on:** March 25, 2010, 08:54:36 PM »

So, I almost punched another waitress in the face tonight.

I'm not the most charismatic person in the world. I've been told that if I'm not smiling I have a "Medusa" stare that can turn people to stone. I get harped on a lot for it, especially in a job where my looks and personality is what I'm selling for money.

A table complemented me to my manager, saying they wanted me to waited on them every time they came. The other waitress overheard and mumbled, "Well at least somebody likes her."

The thing that pissed me off is that I make more money at the end of the night then her and I have more regulars than she does (three at least that only come in on Monday morning because they know for sure I'll be there).
Just because I don't walk around with my tits hanging out of my shirt and my ass bouncing out of my jeans and generally acting like a whore, she thinks I'm not as good of waitress as she is. Also, I don't discuss with her how much I made each night, so she automatically assumes it wasn't as much as her.

I wanted to knock her in the teeth, but then I remembered I'm supposed to be nice to the retarded kids.

12AX7 · « **Reply #680 on:** March 25, 2010, 09:35:06 PM »

I turn to stone
When you are gone
I turn to stone
Turn to stone
When you comin' home
I can't go on

Demosthenes · « **Reply #681 on:** March 26, 2010, 08:47:18 AM »

Quote from: Wunderkind on March 25, 2010, 08:54:36 PM

So, I almost punched another waitress in the face tonight.

I'm not the most charismatic person in the world. I've been told that if I'm not smiling I have a "Medusa" stare that can turn people to stone. I get harped on a lot for it, especially in a job where my looks and personality is what I'm selling for money.

A table complemented me to my manager, saying they wanted me to waited on them every time they came. The other waitress overheard and mumbled, "Well at least somebody likes her."

The thing that pissed me off is that I make more money at the end of the night then her and I have more regulars than she does (three at least that only come in on Monday morning because they know for sure I'll be there).
Just because I don't walk around with my tits hanging out of my shirt and my ass bouncing out of my jeans and generally acting like a whore, she thinks I'm not as good of waitress as she is. Also, I don't discuss with her how much I made each night, so she automatically assumes it wasn't as much as her.

I wanted to knock her in the teeth, but then I remembered I'm supposed to be nice to the retarded kids.

Feel the hate burning through you. Let it flooooooowwwwwwwww

Joe Sixpack · « **Reply #682 on:** March 26, 2010, 09:57:17 AM »

Maybe you should try the tit-hanging thing. Sort of meet her halfway?

Wunderkind · « **Reply #683 on:** March 26, 2010, 10:32:42 AM »

I work to make money. If I'm already making more money by not doing so, why would I start? It's sounds self defeating.

Demosthenes · « **Reply #684 on:** March 30, 2010, 12:36:08 PM »

I wrote this up as a Facebook note this morning. I figured a number of you people here who aren't friends with me on Facebook might also appreciate it. I'm talking to you, xolik.

The Sarcastic Jerk's Guide To Managing Technical People

Step One: Be vague about expectations.

Technical people HATE it when they know what's expected of them. Instead, they prefer to stumble about in the dark, shinning themselves on sharp corners. Everyone loves surprises at work, especially technical people.

"You gonna reboot that server? You know, the one I didn't even allude to needing a reboot for some vague reason today? No? WHY NOT?".

Step Two: Be disorganized.

Nothing annoys technical people more than someone who has all his ducks in a row. Make sure you don't have any idea what's going on from day to day. If you keep lists of things to do, get rid of them. That way, EVERYTHING's a complete emergency when it finally falls to pieces and rears its ugly head.

"What do you mean you can't be there this afternoon to shake hands with some new client you've never heard of? What? You're on-site with some other client? Who told you to go THERE? Huh? I did? When?"

Step Three: Never, ever lead by example.

Make your underlings work long hours as a result of your blurry expectations and disorganization. Criticize them for not being on top of what needs to be done on a day-to-day basis because they're always rushing around chasing shadows. Then roll in around 9:00 am each morning like usual and complain that nothing seems to get done around here.

"We need to talk about finding a better way to prioritize issues for our clients. You've been dropping the ball a lot lately. Whoops, gotta go, I think I scheduled a meeting with some other client at the same time as our Weekly Managed Services meeting this week."

Step Four: Give conflicting instructions

Man, I HATE it when the things I'm told to do make sense. It's much better to be left scratching one's head and guessing at which part of one's instructions one should actually follow. Better still is being criticized for misinterpreting those instructions and doing exactly the wrong thing, or just plain not doing something that didn't make any coherent sense.

"I told you that I was going to be setting up DNS for this client. So WHY DIDN'T YOU DO IT?"

Step Five: Make employees do stuff for work at their own expense

If they have to drive somewhere, like to a client's site, for example, make sure they use their OWN car, and don't reimburse them for mileage on any kind of timely schedule. Be sure that if they're on-call, they have to use their personal cell phones for it, and don't compensate them for them using it for purely work purposes. Refuse to buy them usable equipment at work, so they have to buy their own mouses, headsets, or other things they need to do their job.

"Oh, you want a headset for the hours you spend on the phone doing tech support? Well, you can buy one yourself if you want, but the company won't pay for it."

Step Six: Never take responsibility

Technical people enjoy being blamed for every problem that arises. This is especially true for problems that were caused by managerial decisions to allocate resources in other areas. A technical person will never be truly happy unless you make sure that he knows that his lack of prescience is the reason for all outages, downtime and other problems in the workplace.

"You know your work on that new client deployment that I interrupted last week to send you on some goofy workstation support issue for a client who barely even pays their bill? That deployment didn't go very well. You need to focus more on projects like that."

Step Seven: Always do the very bare minimum when it comes to equipment

Most technical people dislike having servers that aren't overloaded and extremely outdated. Make sure if you have critical virtual hosts they're on Pentium 4 processors with about half the RAM and disk space they actually need to handle the load that's placed on them. That way your employees can constantly babysit them because of their constant hardware-related crashes and process failure notifications. This applies to workstations too. General rule of thumb: always be certain that technical peoples' workstations are no newer than 5 years old. They love making do with completely inadequate hardware!

"So the only domain controller on our internal network is a 10 year old server that used to be an underpowered workstation for our receptionist. You can make that do for a while longer right? Oh yeah, BTW, I can't log into the network this morning."

Step Eight: Keep them in the dark

Face it, if you go out of your way to keep technical people informed of what's going on, they'll just think you're showing off. It's always better to surprise them with information, and then act like they were expected to already be aware of it. They'll thank you for that!

"Why hasn't ABC Company been getting patches on their servers? What do you mean 'who is ABC Company?' They've been a client of ours for two months!"

Step Nine: Don't listen to them.

Just because they're experts in their field doesn't mean they know what they're doing. Trust your gut. Even if you don't understand any of what your technical employees do at your company, taking their advice on technical matters is poor leadership. Instead, tell THEM how things should be done. That's what a REAL manager does!

"Make sure Internet Explorer is the default browser for all users for this client. And make everyone is a local Windows admin and disable the Windows firewall on all their workstations. BTW, you spend wayyyyyy too much time over there cleaning up spyware. Don't you know what you're doing?"

Step Ten: Express complete and utter shock and surprise when things don't go well

If you're doing your job as manager, everything should be going PERFECTLY. The only way to express that acknowledgement of perfection is to be totally flabbergasted when stuff doesn't happen as expected.

"Holy crap! Our clients are REALLY mad at us today! We sure have a lot of work to do if we're-- hey... why'd you just leave that letter of resignation on my desk? Where are you going? HELLO?"

xolik · « **Reply #685 on:** March 30, 2010, 12:43:27 PM »

Quote from: Demosthenes on March 30, 2010, 12:36:08 PM

InformationServicesPlaybook.txt

Are you sure we don't work together, but in different buildings or something? This is right on the money!

Demosthenes · « **Reply #686 on:** March 30, 2010, 12:46:22 PM »

Pretty sure. I'm the only technical employee at this company.

And while the quotes in italics are paraphrased (most of them), they're all things I've heard here.

xolik · « **Reply #687 on:** March 30, 2010, 12:56:44 PM »

Quote

"We need to talk about finding a better way to prioritize issues for our clients. You've been dropping the ball a lot lately. Whoops, gotta go, I think I scheduled a meeting with some other client at the same time as our Weekly Managed Services meeting this week."

My version:

"We need to talk about finding a better way to prioritize issues for our clients. You've been dropping the ball a lot lately. Whoops, gotta go, time for my workout and then I'm leaving to go play golf. You need to be here tomorrow by 6:30am. I should be in by 7:00 but we both know I won't actually stroll in until right before lunch and yes, you won't be able to leave until you tell me EVERYTHING you've done. I promise *fingers crossed behind back* that I won't rephrase each question over and over again until I get the answer I want to hear."

xolik · « **Reply #688 on:** March 31, 2010, 10:33:22 AM »

You futhermuckers said at the onset you didn't want to pay to have your servers backed up, so don't come whining to me when you deleted a critical stored proc and need it recovered. All that money you saved by not paying the backup fee was just wasted in OT to remake your procs. WASN'T THAT WORTH IT?

Demosthenes · « **Reply #689 on:** March 31, 2010, 11:18:47 AM »

To the guy who just called me with a problem with his laptop: Don't you think it would have been useful to tell me that you were offsite BEFORE I wasted 30 minutes trying to troubleshoot your office network to figure out why I couldn't RDP directly to your laptop?

xolik · « **Reply #690 on:** April 14, 2010, 12:14:29 PM »

Yeah, go ahead an leave a non-site employed contractor all alone in the datacenter. I can't possibly see any security risks in that.

ivan · « **Reply #691 on:** April 14, 2010, 01:38:06 PM »

Ok, I did it your way. Now I'll do it my way. So that it, you know, works.

Demosthenes · « **Reply #692 on:** April 14, 2010, 02:46:48 PM »

So, apparently our department meeting yesterday morning was so important that you put it off all day yesterday, blew it off twice this morning, and are currently blowing it off this afternoon.

Gotcha.

Demosthenes · « **Reply #693 on:** April 14, 2010, 03:39:47 PM »

TASK: Need to migrate a virtualized Exchange Server (whose uptime is extremely sensitive) to a different hard drive on the host server

DIFFICULTY: You have to coordinate with a guy who never responds to emails and almost never returns your calls.

GO!

Wunderkind · « **Reply #694 on:** April 14, 2010, 04:23:14 PM »

Do you know where he lives/works?

Demosthenes · « **Reply #695 on:** April 14, 2010, 05:02:41 PM »

I do. But if I go there, he wins.

Demosthenes · « **Reply #696 on:** April 14, 2010, 05:03:22 PM »

Also: Dear person who just called me.

Don't call me at 5:00 asking me how to reinstall Microsoft Office on your computer. I won't be much help.

pbsaurus · « **Reply #697 on:** April 14, 2010, 07:26:40 PM »

Bosses make horrible travel partners. Generalization or tautology. I'm leaning towards the later.

Chris · « **Reply #698 on:** April 15, 2010, 12:19:56 AM »

I wish work ended at 5 pm...

Demosthenes · « **Reply #699 on:** April 15, 2010, 08:23:21 AM »

Quote from: Chris on April 15, 2010, 12:19:56 AM

I wish work ended at 5 pm...

Sometimes it does, when you don't work for McDonald's.

BTW, that wasn't a burn, Chris. Just an observation.

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Author Topic: The 'Let's Bitch About Our Jobs' thread. (Read 213832 times)

12AX7