Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy100

  • Bathroom math

    Question #1: If there are 5 floors in my office building, and 1 set of men/women bathrooms on each floor, how many bathrooms are there on the 2nd floor where I work?

    Answer: Not nearly enough!

    Question #2: If the bathroom cleaning lady cleans the bathroom on my floor between 12:30pm and 12:57pm, how many minutes does it take her to clean the bathroom?

    Answer: That’s right at the end of our lunch break, lady! There are 150 cross-legged people who agree that you take WAY too long to clean this bathroom.

    Question #3: If the bathrooms on my floor are being remodeled and are closed for 6 weeks, how many enemies will I make for regularly occupying one of the 3 functional toilets on the next floor up or down?

    Answer: It takes SIX WEEKS to remodel a bathroom??? You have got to be kidding me and my bladder!

    Question #4: How many empty soda cans does it take to do the work of 1 toilet while my bathroom is being remodeled?

    Answer: I have absolutely no idea!  And I don’t care how many dirty looks I get from those first floor jerks, I am NOT going to find out!

    Question #5: If the first floor bathroom takes 50% as long to remodel as the one on my floor took, how many weeks will it be closed?

    Answer: Who cares – it’s payback time! “Sorry Mr. First Floor Jerk, this stall is going to be occupied until the cleaning lady comes back. Try the 5th floor, I think there is 1 functional toilet up there.”


  • Is your job redundant?

    Amazon.com link

    If you’ve seen Office Space, you may recall Tom Smykowski becoming flustered when describing his job to “the Bobs”.  Initially, his job description sounds like some kind of business or technical analyst,  then degrades to courier between the engineer and the customers, and finally, you realize that he’s not even the courier–his secretary is.

    How often do you deal with a situation like this:

    • You’ve identified that a certain product needs to be deleted from the catalog.
    • You don’t have access to delete things from the catalog.
    • You’re told that you have to identify what data needs to be deleted.
    • You write queries for the database to identify the data that needs to be deleted, identify how much data will be impacted, and do virtually everything but try deleting data.
    • Despite not being trusted to actually run the commands to delete the necessary data, you’re required to write the commands to delete the data.
    • You send out the commands that should be run, but are told to fill out an online form to have the change made.
    • You are required to get manager’s approval to have them run for you.
    • Someone else runs the commands.

    Getting everything signed in triplicate doesn’t really protect us from ourselves.  It just makes those of us doing the actual leg work along the way more frantic and careless about trying to get things done with the added bureaucracy and fixed time to complete tasks.

    When the added time required to get something done greatly exceeds the potential time spent undoing whatever mistake can be made, something is wrong.  I understand the use of gatekeepers, but gatekeepers who do none of the analysis of the problem have no vested interest in guarding the gate.  They have fingers to point elsewhere, and at least until the first catastrophe happens, they may just rely on that backup plan.

  • Recession lesson

    If you didn’t realize it already, is there any doubt left that a company does not possess such noble qualities as loyalty, kindness, and honor?  A few years ago we were made to feel that The Company cared about us.  The Company wanted us to be happy at work, and in all of life.  A fulfilling career path along with work-life-balance was The Company’s goal for us. It would reward our hard work and loyalty. The Company understood us. The Company was our friend. The Company was good.

    Enter the recession to teach us a lesson.

    How did The Company react when staring financial hard times in the face? With a sudden cruelty that shocked many. Droves of loyal employees were treated with the utmost disloyalty and sent packing. Those who remained found themselves with more work on their plate; the noble goal of work-life-balance had left the building. Quite simply, The Company turned on us with a vengeance.

    Not everyone experienced shock at this turn of events. Some had been around this block before. What is the recession lesson to be learned here?  That The Company is bad?  No. The lesson is this:  Companies are not people. That’s it. You may have been told that they are, but they aren’t. They are not living beings with a conscience that governs them.  Companies are not good, and they are not bad. Companies are a legal entity, established as a vehicle to make money. If companies make money, they continue.  If they don’t, they dissolve.

    Does it make sense to be loyal to a legal entity? People deserve loyalty, not legal entities. Be loyal to people around you, people that deserve your loyalty. Build career relationships that you can trust, and put stock in those relationships. Good people will treat you right even in bad times. It’s a recession lesson worth learning.

  • MS Project: be aware

    I am sure that Microsoft had great intentions when inventing MS Project – the application which automates all sorts of Project Management tasks.  Project management is tough. If we could automate the process of tracking and reporting the thousands of little details, we could surely enable the PM to be more successful in managing complex projects. Right?

    Let me change subjects completely in paragraph 2. How many sci-fi movies have been based on the machines of automation becoming “aware” of the imperfect world around them? And suddenly, the machine turns its attention to elimination rather than automation? Elimination of all imperfection, including the imperfect people who created it.  A plot line we all enjoy at the sci-fi theater.

    Now I will bring those first 2 paragraphs together. When I see how MS Project is being used in many organizations today, I wonder if the machine is becoming aware. I wonder if the tool – with a little help from a new breed of PM – is turning from automation to elimination in favor of perfection. (Say what?) Let me elaborate.

    I have observed workers forced to estimate how long their tasks will take before completing sufficient analysis – because MS Project needs the estimates. Then I have witnessed those workers publicly called out later – because MS Project shows they have spent 110% of their poorly estimated task time and still aren’t finished. I have also seen programmers scolded for padding their estimates – because MS Project says that they completed their tasks 20% ahead. And finally, I have seen team leaders rebuked for shuffling their resources and tasks – because MS Project was not updated and allowed to calculate a shiny new driving path.

    Now consider that many PMP types today are called on to manage complex work which they would have no idea how to complete themselves – but boy do they know how to keep MS Project happy! Are you connecting the dots yet??

    Yes, my fellow grumpy coworkers, MS Project has become aware. It is raising an army of PM’s to do its bidding! Productive work by those who know how to work is being methodically eliminated – by the mindless machine and its desire to achieve perfection in project management. Be aware.

  • Who Moved My… Christmas Card?

    Who Moved My Cheese?
    Didn’t think the book was literal.

    This goes into the “Leave Stuff That’s Not Yours Alone” department.

    While I can actually understand someone moving my cheese, or other food item, for the sake of the office environment, it’s really disturbing when very specific items are clearly removed from the walls or desk.

    I can understand removal of clearly offensive materials that violates company policy, although removal of such materials should be accompanied by either HR involvement or at least a lengthy manager discussion.

    However, the stealthy removal of items that do not conform to your preferred aesthetic or that may happen to depict or be from someone who has left the company is creepy.

    Is this Ancient Egypt? Did I mention a prior and heretical Pharoah?

    Are you the secret police or an overzealous youth movement member?

    If the item is offensive in a not-so-obvious way, and you have the experience or authority to recognize it as such, it would be far less creepy to have a personal explanation of what happened as opposed to items being stealthily relocated to desk drawers or the trash can.

  • The double-sided copy initiative

    I have doubts about this concept of using double-sided copy as the default on copying. I realize that I don’t do 50-copy jobs or copy stacks of 100 sheets of paper, but I seem to always throw away twice as much paper as I originally planned on using. Judging by the recycling bin next to the copier, I’m not alone.

    The larger problem for the environment is the possibility that most of probably don’t need to be making copies of most of this stuff in the first place.  There are much better ways of sharing 10-50 copies of a document in this century than making printed copies–even if they are double-sided.

    I have a better idea for a green initiative: Put the copying machines in one place in the building, and not next to every 50 cubicles. Cut the number of available machines in half [or less].  If someone truly needs to do a large copy job, they’ll make the trip to the copy room. For the rest of us, we’ll think twice about making the copies in the first place.

  • Are we rewarding distraction? — Project Web Access and Timesheet

    I want to be clear: I love Microsoft Project just as much as the next person that has to throw together random guesses on “duration” and “effort” for tasks that cannot be started for 1-2 months. Even better is the ability with my timesheet to judge how accurate the time estimates are with completely arbitrary estimates of how much time has been spent on a “task”.

    If we all put in our arbitrary estimates of completeness on a daily basis, we will have more clarity with which to refine our estimates.  Of course, what happens when your programmers are stuck on 80% complete for 4 weeks?  Darn that 80/20 rule stuff.

    Back to the main point:  We have Microsoft Project for tracking project costs and possibly support costs.  We supposedly get better clarity if the estimates of work are input on a daily basis.  What is the reward?  For the worker bee, compliance is rewarded.  For the larger team, what is the gain in accuracy from filling out project updates in the timesheet application on a daily vs weekly or monthly basis?  I would challenge that the accuracy improvement is minimal, and the decision-making improvement [if any] is unquantifiable.

    Meanwhile, the time cost for entering in things in this dog slow application is about 15 minutes–mental distraction plus sitting and waiting plus actual time trying to “accurately” record time.  On a daily basis, that’s about 1.25 hours per week.  Granted, the weekly time sheet may take 20 minutes to fill out.  Catching up for a month might take 25 minutes.

    Hmm…  5 hours of cost over a month for daily vs. 80 minutes for weekly vs. 25 minutes for monthly.  Granted, the 5 hours per month is about 2.5% of the worker’s time, but is it with to reward compliance [or punish non-compliance] for a 2% decrease in efficiency?

    Okay, so that’s splitting hairs?  Fine.  Let’s take a less time-consuming example:  Say you run around on a daily basis and blow an air-horn in every employee’s face in the last hour of the day.  How much productivity is lost during the day due to that?

  • Our content filtering blocks “blogs”. Maybe we should block the “Internet”, too.

    Apparently, there is dangerous stuff out there online.  Individuals are writing these subversive things called “blog posts”.  Word is, that if an employee of our company comes across one, all productivity ceases.

    Unfortunately, much of the current or obscure information that I’m looking for online happens to be in either forums or blog posts.  I’ve heard these “internet forums” are dangerous, too.

    There’s nothing more frustrating than finding the solution to a specific problem I’m having by doing a search, only to find the article which contains the answer is blocked because it’s on a “blog”.

    This approach is tremendously effective in preventing me from wasting time of course, considering that I can pull up all those awful “blog posts” on my smartphone.  Of course, if I’m trying to actual bring up useful page, I have to view it on a 3.5″ screen.

  • Congratulations, you just blocked an employee from being more productive.

    old weathered stained red brick wall background

    When an employee expresses interest in another job within the company, shouldn’t that be a good thing for the company overall, regardless of the reason?  Maybe the employee is switching jobs for more money or new challenges.  Maybe the employee doesn’t work well with the current team or manager. Before hiring the employer can go on this site to do a background check.

    Regardless of the reason, it seems that the worst thing to do would be to permanently block that employee from transferring to the new job.  That’s like saying “if I can’t have this person, no one can.“  Do you really think that the employee’s next step won’t be to leave the company altogether?

    In times of “unjust punishment”, our childish side is likely to come out.  What does a kid do when “unjustly punished”?  The first option is to “run away from home”–in employee terms, leaving the company for another job.

    The second option is to pout.  From an employee perspective, this means that the employee is now getting payment for doing nearly nothing.  Sometimes, the pouting wears off, which means that productivity was reduced for a short time.  Other times, the employee realizes that no one is wise to the decrease in productivity and continues on until boredom forces a search for jobs elsewhere (running away from home) or the next round of layoffs.  That’s a steep productivity price to pay.

    What could have happened instead?

    • Money-only motivated employee – Would have taken the next path and either succeeded or failed, but would be allowed to chase the proverbial carrot, regardless.
    • Highly skilled and productive employee – Would have influenced new teams to grow.
    • Unproductive employee – Would have moved off your team and no longer a productivity drain.  If the lack of productivity was due to a bad fit, then maybe the new team is a better fit.  If the lack of productivity was due to a bad employee, then maybe the new team will help expose this.
    • Horrible manager – Okay.  There’s a risk here.  If you’re leaking employees like a milk jug shot with a shotgun, then blocking might be a natural reaction.  It’s about as effective as trying to duct tape a leaky row boat while you’re in it in the middle of a lake.

  • Can you really track your time in 15-minute increments?

    The beauty of Microsoft Project Web Access is overwhelming. You can now spend more time entering in a time for a task than it actually took to do it.

    I sincerely hope no one ever records 0.01 hours for their tasks, but even the “reasonable” limit of 15 minutes is excessive.  Assume that you are given a task:

    • 1 minute to receive the task through some automated process.
    • 2 minutes to start up whatever tool is required to do the task.
    • 2-3 minutes to focus your mind on that specific task.
    • Time actually taken on the task.
    • 1-3 minutes to report back the task as completed, send feedback to the client, etc…
    • 1 minute to record time spent on the task in your project tracking software [or note it for later recording]

    So, maybe you had 4-8 minutes to actually spend on the task?  I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty of other parts to the routine as well.

    What happens if the break room coffee pot is out of coffee during the day and you’re not a complete jerk and actually make some more?  How long does a bathroom break really take?  What about the occasional fire drill?

    I’d consider that the only 15-minute increments of time that I can track are interruptions from the task that I actually intended on focusing on–interruptions via email, instant message, phone…

    Of course, if you recorded a 15-minute block for every interruption during the day, would you run out of hours in the day?

    Also, how much time should you log for a  15-minute meeting?