Those I share a space with typically conflict with each other, it’s not like school where they would go at me, so I tend to not be in the know. The only exception is one tried getting back at the others by using me as a bargaining chip. As in he kept me at his house for 2 days.
As in he kept me at his house for 2 days.
Would you care to elaborate?
That’s basically it. I was the closest thing that could be used against the others, which was out of spite. Only was solved due to passerbies who knew something was going on and where.
…we’re you kidnapped or something?
Yes
Do you sometimes feel like people don’t take you seriously, even when you say very serious things?
Often, but in what way does that connect?
I feel my mind turning off, turning to teflon, when I read your comment. It made me wonder whether others have that experience too.
Here’s something interesting: social scientists have found that humans’ eyebrows dance when they talk to each other. The eyebrow dance is normally not consciously perceived, but it is synchronized between two individuals when they speak to one another.
What’s more is the eyebrow dance is literally a dance, not a conversation, specifically in the way it is timed. It is perfectly in sync, not offset as you’d expect a back-and-forth response pattern to be.
When this eyebrow dance synchronization is inhibited, for example by covering the speaker’s eyebrows, that speaker has an incredibly hard time getting information across.
This is a long-documented phenomenon in human culture: that people can be standing there conveying information and others can be hearing it but not picking it up.
Like one person can be saying “Our car crashed! My brother is badly hurt and he needs an ambulance! Can I use your phone?” and for various reasons another person can just stand there not processing any of it.
So really what I’m trying to say is that human communication is finicky and relies on maintenance of non-obvious parallel channels, and people can get cut off from others when those channels break down.
From reading your writing, and seeing how others respond, it makes me think there might be some channel based on word sequencing that’s not being adhered to.
I know from experience how much it sucks to be cut off and unseen, so I thought I’d point out for you that while I recognize what you’re saying is important, it doesn’t land in my feelings for some reason, and it feels related to how things are worded.
Wait, you were held against your will in a house by a coworker??
Yes
Please tell me you’re the office cat or something.
I mean, I was all, ok juicy work drama, juicy work drama. Then I got to the last sentence, I think that goes beyond work drama.
I checked out at “it’s not like school” but you got me to go back and read, yikes
That moment when I’m disqualified from a venting question for going over the meter.
Wat
You two said it was “beyond work drama” and came across like it was unfitting as a result. Are we only expected to describe events that go below a certain glass ceiling of conflict?
came across like it was unfitting as a result.
That was all you. We neither said nor implied any such thing.
The first comment you replied to contrasted things that seemed “beyond work drama” with the “juicy work drama” they were looking for.
It’s actually a pretty serious problem. It’s not so much that you’re disqualified, as that you’re ineffective at being heard.
This is a serious problem. Have you considered listening to great speeches, or rap, or poetry?
Not in particular, no. In what way are you suggesting I’d use that?
Listen to lots and lots of them. Absorb their patterns, to adopt those patterns, to improve your own communication.
One of the doctors I once worked with bought one of the clerks breast implants. She looks like Kim Kardashian and wore a French maid costume to our work Halloween party and got so plastered she vomited half the night, and proceeded to show me her new breasts lol. He got placed on administrative leave for that when it became known, and then was basically encouraged to leave a fairly prestigious practice for something much smaller.
This one is about my old org. It’s a small firm that keeps bleeding clients. The COO was someone who basically was an empty shirt who loved meetings. All the tech people agreed that he didn’t do anything to advance the company.
When I found out they let him go, I was shocked and considered it a good thing. Then I found out that the CEO didn’t give him any feedback and that the COO had even checked in to see how things were going and was told he was doing a good job. He never got an opportunity to improve his performance and got let go with no warning. That’s a shitty thing to do to a person, even if he was doing a bad job.
That one of the key people who knows how our technology works, how to improve it, and how much of a failure the current “upgrade” really is (engineering forced this “upgrade” without talking to those of us who know) will be handing in their resignation to join the competition in a matter of days.
I’ve already drafted the resignation letter.
My coworker resents me because I spend more time with his friends than he does because I have more in common with them. So he just ignores me blatantly all day even though we share an office. It’s awkward as fuck but I just go about my business. He’s got mental health issues at the core so I can’t imagine what he’s going through
One of the people in our org has enough status that two major software vendors are spending considerable resources (we have an Enterprise contract, so it’s not out of the goodness of their hearts) chasing down a stupid bug that makes a common tool not work correctly. That’s about as specific as I’m willing to be.
I’m really bad at keeping secrets, and I’m a manager who’s supposed to hold on to everyone’s dirty laundry.
I know a person at work who’s going to be getting fired as soon as we’re less busy, he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.
One of my employees is a chronic alcoholic and goes to AA. He drinks on the job, and I can smell the alcohol strongly on his breath. When he comes back from break, it’s even stronger. It’s a strange situation because I can’t quite confront him about it since I don’t have a way to prove it despite it being obvious. I probably can, but I am just worried about protecting my ass.
Girl at my work who had been flirting with me decided things went too far and she only wanted to stay at casual flirting. She 180’s one day, turns another one of the guys I’m cool with against me and acts terrified of me. Because I’m management and the boss of those two, it’s messy. She doesn’t even know she has the power in the situation, I have a lot more at stake and am held to much higher standards so I’m the one who should be terrified. However I am pretty popular with everyone at work, and she’s likely scared of that power dynamic as well, but I’ve never mentioned her to really anyone and would even get fired for retaliation if I were to do so. In reality I just try to avoid any sort of interaction with them as much as possible and do not really acknowledge them unless strictly work related.
My co-manager is married and she is desperately thirsty for another manager, always calling him “her desire” and gets excited around me when she sees him. It had caused her relationship issues in the past with her husband because of it. I don’t say anything, I think it’s okay to still find others attractive as long as you don’t act on it, she’s just a bit too excited but it’s not my business lol.
In the end, the most valuable lesson I’ve learned about being management is covering your ass. Always make sure your bases are covered and you’re protecting yourself, or shit will hit you much harder since you have much higher expectations since bosses are usually mediators and leaders as well.
he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.
seems like the first step to improving is being given information on how you’re doing, and the second is being mentored/trained?
That sadly only goes so far. There needs to be an inate ability there as well. They need to be aware of what they’re doing, otherwise they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong. They also have to have a good attitude and actually try to learn. Attendence and basic time management is a big one as well.
These are things that are all controllable by the person, there’s not much excuse. These are things you really can’t train, it’s on them to meet standards here.
If someone is failing in all these areas, then they just might not be a good fit for the job. There’s a competitive market of people looking to get their job.
You’re getting downvoted but as the person who trains all the new people at my job, you can tell when someone either “gets it” or they don’t and no matter how much hand holding you do, the situation isn’t going to improve.
Sure, but you should still have a conversation to set expectations with that individual beforehand.
If you hire someone who’s incompetent, allow them to believe they’re performing well, and then fire them when it’s easy for you—well, that would just make you an asshole.
If you know someone you are the line manager for is drinking heavily don’t you have a duty of care towards them? It’s a health and safety issue if nothing else
The issue is that unless I have a way to objectively prove, I am throwing out accusations. We don’t have a breathalyzer at my work.
My boss occasionally goes and picks up supplies and he’s supposed to get compensated for gas money. They give you a flat rate based on the distance there and back, and his bike has good fuel efficiency so he makes a few easy bucks for each trip.
One day management told him he wasn’t allowed to do that anymore (can’t remember the reason), and management told him it was the higher-up’s decision, not theirs. So he decides to email our division manager to basically ask if management was lying…
He accidentally CC’d the entire district lmao. We think it’s because the DM’s emails are usually for the whole district and he just clicked through one of those emails to find her email address. Management called him into the office the next day lol.
Seems kinda shitty to deny him. There is a government calculated mileage rate that should just be the default rate (somewhere around $0.50-$0.60 per mile) since it’s supposed to cover gas, maintenance, and every other expense it takes to operate a vehicle on the road.
As an alternative, imagine someone with a vehicle that gets 5MPG asking to be paid more than the set rate. I’m sure management would reject that as well.
Well, they shouldn’t fire him, it’s hard enough to find that level of stupidity to promote above everyone else’s heads.
Straight to CEO for that guy
I work in an office with two extremely racist people. One is black, the other is white.
I want to be clear, both of them are always polite about it, but they’ve said things in the past that are very clearly not okay.
Anyways the most recent drama is that our IT guy died. None of us knew anything about him beyond his name (nobody even knew he was married), but one of them is mad that the company didn’t send out his widow’s contact info, because they assume his widow is black and as a black woman, will need community support. The other is mad that the first wouldn’t have supported the widow if the IT guy was white/Asian/Klingon/whatever.
Meanwhile I’m trying not to tell either how horrible they’re being. At least one is supporting a widow I guess.
Our startup is failing internally. The product idea keeps changing, projects get switched rapidly, the engineering team got an ass beating by the CEO in an all team meeting for being ‘too slow’ (which was out of line by him) despite trying their best to keep up. We had an amazing chance to be one of the first companies doing what we do, and we’ve just whiffed it. On top of this no one has had pay reviews, some for multiple years. And we’re trying to hire a new position and all the candidates drop out when they see what a shit show everything is. I’ve spoken off the record to half of the team (it’s a small company) and all of them are absolutely over it, looking for other work, doing the bare minimum. I was hired a few years ago as a customer person, but we barely have customers and they’re pressuring me to instead do aggressive consulting and sales stuff. I hate it, but the paychecks keep cashing and I hate job hunting.
I was part of a startup that started rebranding for no fucking reason once. It sucked.
In another case I was hired to consult for a small startup with horrible unclean code and tech debt. We were asked to make our recommendations about architecture to reduce that tech debt. One of our recommendations was “The CEO is no longer allowed to sell features that don’t yet exist”.
Like 90% of dev work was happening in response to the CEO hanging up the phone and saying “We just landed X company … as long as we can build them X”
I stg this is what is happening!! The CEO will ‘land’ a huge deal and suddenly the team is now building some random freight TMS integration and we’re being told there is a lot of demand for it. Then the deal never actually closes, the dev work slows and switches back to other things, and he moves on to the next shiny object. Meanwhile I’m having to custom code an API to script solution for fucking Google Sheets because that is somehow not important enough to finish. He just closed a deal and handed it to me for implementation, and there are no guidelines anywhere on what was actually sold. He promises vague outcomes, names a price, and if they’re actually ballsy enough to go for it, I get to figure out what specifically they are asking for, and a way to shoehorn it into our half built architecture.
My business just had two meeting recently, one was about “the seriousness of unionization”, and the second was regarding a potential shift change because they are unable to fill 20+ positions and people keep leaving.
I would like to preface the seriousness of this with some historical facts about the business: they on average used to pay $12-$15 over competitors (now equal to or even less than), they used to offer pensions (Not any more), they used to have a call list of over 200 applicants (for decades) of whom they could call up and offer a job and those people would quit and jump on board (they can’t hire from anywhere in the country or Puerto Rico with relocation bonuses included). And the average length of a workers term was 28 years (now just under 5).
Sounds like it’s time to unionize!
NGL, seems like its getting close! Probably spring of 2025 is gonna be the make or break for this place
It’s Lowe’s isn’t it
Very much not Lowes’s, though I doubt people would travel 1-2 states over to work at Lowe’s
Walking from one end of Lowe’s to the other is like going to a different state to take a 15 minute break
The lead engineer at a site I work on from time to time is on a 3 on 3 off rotation (weeks) on an offshore oil rig.
It turns out he was having to miss some of his trips because he had to ‘look after his ailing father’.
It turns out he was spending this time working another lead engineer job, for the same oil company but in a different country.
He got away with it for months until some issue came up and he had to call into the office and they noticed his number was from another country, Saudi Arabia.
Haven’t been back to that site in a while so I don’t know what happened to him but he’s certainly not working there any more.He’s probably making way more in Saudi anyway.
Our CEO came to visit us. It was fun. Some people couldn’t make it because they were out on vacation.
Our department manager announced with less than a week’s notice that he’ll visit us, for no specific reason, the weeks around the Easter weekend (Friday and Monday are public holidays so 4 days weekend). For the occasion he asked everyone in the team to cancel vacations approved months ago.
All department employees individually politely declined to cancel their personal plans or approved vacations and involved HR. HR wasn’t aware of the manager’s decision.
He’ll be alone at the office for 2/9 visit days 😂
Ha!
Very stupid of the CEO to come during a known holiday period.
Department Manager not CEO
Pardon me. Department manager.
I was able to file a grievance against a person everyone hates. It’s a slam dunk grievance, I even have evidence from their Instagram.
Everyone that I’ve told about it has been over the moon that someone gets to put them in their place finally.
Monday morning we have our big meeting regarding it, and I’m going to straight up fuck their ass up. I hope they quit. Seriously, they are such assholes to everyone. No one has a nice thing to say about them.
Omg I had this opportunity against a higher up who is a really fucking awful person but I opted to go for an informal complaint because I panicked that they would tell them who put the complaint in. the higher up really likes me and had no idea that I’d complain about what they were doing - they also would’ve talked absolute shit about me and tried to destroy my reputation if they found out, considering I’m very early into my career it wasn’t a choice I was willing to make. I wish I had been brave cause now it’s all said and done I can really see how hard HR actually wanted that person gone (much harder to do without the formal complaint).
Good luck to you!
HR wants crappy employees home as much as you do, likely more, as they deal with them for every issue, you might only see some. Iceberg perspective. File the damn complaint and let us purge for your and everyone’s sake! (Unless you work in sketch org with compromised or biased HR).
Source, am HR.
Thanks that makes me feel better about the HR folks I spoke to. I work in an actually very safe organization in terms of this type of stuff but it’s also unionized so the paperwork seemed extremely overwhelming at the time and I didn’t really feel supported by the union at all, plus the fact that a formal report would mean my name would no longer be confidential. Unfortunately, I think it’s too late to do all that formal stuff anyway but I think I gave them enough to do a bit of damage as from what I’ve been told they’re still pursuing as much as they can. I just wish I hadn’t had to have been the one to speak up because our boss actually witnessed everything and had the same evidence as me and said fuck all. The whole leadership is a fucking mess honestly but I did find comfort in the HR folks that helped me out at least.
Let us know how it goes!
Oh, it’s a massive win. All of my leaderships support me 100% on this. The person in civil service (basically the person that adjudicates these things)called me after I filed the grievance, mad as hell that they would have ever thought to do such a thing in the first place. And they said they were taking it to our president so they could get approval to punish this person appropriately. It’s a huge slam dunk.
