Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy103

  • Signs you picked the wrong startup to work for

    • you build a website with WordPress or Blogger that used default templates and you’re all of sudden the lead designer.
    • the CEO of the company still uses a Quixnet or other MLM program email address.
    • the CEO is selling the premeasured coffee packets for brewing coffee.
    • the prototype website was built by one of the VC’s nephews in WYSIWYG website builder.
    • the total of all virtual goods sold last year does not equal how much you’re supposed get paid for your next paycheck.
    • your company depends on outsourced designers and web developers, yet the last three web design firms have “ripped the company off”.
    • your CEO wants to create the next Facebook/Twitter, but has never used the sites themselves.
    • part of your business strategy is sell professional services packages for less than the hourly rate of the subcontractors you’re using.
    • this business strategy seems to repeat elsewhere as a buy high, sell low strategy.
    • you’re becoming suspicious that the primary revenue source of the company is the employees themselves.
    • business direction change frequency depends on how often the CEO’s favorite blog posts articles.

  • The iPhone Method of Better Meetings

    I’m not a huge fan of people checking their email during meetings, but I have to admit to doing it or worse. However, there are two sides to the smartphone inattention problem during meetings: people’s OCD or lack of etiquette and the lack of value or engagement of the meeting presentation.

    I propose two solutions:

    For small/serial meetings, the smartphone should never be responded to inside the meeting room. Ask those who use their phone in the meeting room to leave the meeting for 5 minutes on the first offense and expel the person from the meeting on the second offense. The lack of engagement of the distracted person wastes everyone’s time, including that of the person who is absorbed in the phone. This also serves to remove non-contributors from meetings and gets the attention of those who actually need to contribute.

    For larger meetings, the minute more than 1/3rd of the audience pulls out their smartphones, that should be a two minute warning to end the presentation. If that many people aren’t paying attention, what’s the point of continuing the presentation to that audience? Either the audience is a bad fit or the presentation is.

  • Hand Sanitizer Does Not Take the Place of Soap and Water

    I’m really starting to dread the day the hand sanitizer dispensers went in.

    Somehow, many people are under the impression that the hand sanitizer *cleans* your hands.

    If you’ve been baking brownies, you can’t clean any batter off with hand sanitizer.  You’ll just end up with brownies that have been disinfected on the surface.

    If you don’t believe me, ask an academic:  “Hand sanitizers no substitute for soap and water.”

  • Haiku on Following Through

    If you say you can,
    Why do you not follow through?
    You’ve wasted my time.

  • No, I will not join your downline.

    I’m not even sure these nutritional “supplements” are non-lethal, much less effective.  How do I know that these vitamins, or whatever they are, aren’t going to show up in a drug test later?

    I also have to ask:  What kind of compensation structure is involved that makes this multi-level marketing network marketing of nutritional supplements worth the time and energy you spend on it?

    Am I the only coworker you’ve tried to recruit for this?  If so, I must apologize for wearing my “sucker” outfit today.  All my other clothes were dirty, and I’m behind on my laundry.

    On the other hand, if I’m not the only coworker you’ve tried to recruit for this “opportunity”, how much work time are you spending recruiting?  Have you tried spending the same amount of time reading a book that might improve your performance?  Even if you get nothing out of the book, you’ll no longer be known as the “guy who tries to recruit people for every money making opportunity he finds.”  You might accidentally make more money from the lack of negative image drag.

    Honestly, if you were intentionally hired to do the job that you’re paid for, chances are fairly good that you’ll get a higher return on your invested time there than if you spend it trying to sell a product that you virtually nothing about.

  • ROWE, ROWE, ROWE your boat.

    I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Results Only Work Environments [ROWE], particularly from the book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Amazon link).

    I was curious about finding a naysayer and found Why I Don’t Like Rowe | Renegade HR.  The article points out ethics, some worker’s need for structure, and communication/morale/culture challenges of working remotely.

    I thought of an even bigger challenges–loosely related to structure:

    1. Often, there isn’t much agreement on what results are.  Driven employees will hit home runs that management won’t even understand.
    2. It’s so much more convenient to clock watch employees 8 to 5.
    3. Those same clock watchers would rather judge productivity by seeing that more than 40 hours in a week are logged by everyone than try to figure out if more than 1 hour per week of actual work was done.
    4. How the heck can you have a 3 hour, 120 person meeting if not everyone is working 8 to 5?

  • Ideation, innovation, and breakthrough, oh my!

    You want us to what?  Make time to focus on ideation, innovation, and breakthrough thinking?

    It all sounds good enough. Surely we would crush our competition if we could just put our collective brains together and ideate an innovation that led to instant breakthrough.

    But you didn’t hire us to innovate, did you?  Whenever I try, I find it impossible to think past this stack of mundane assignments and my meager paycheck, which are all screaming, “Get back to work you fool!”  Will I be off the hook if I think breakthrough thoughts for an hour and fail to finish my backlog?  (My ideation says not.)

    Look, if all the Innovators are fresh out of good ideas, maybe you should fire them and find some Ideators to take their place. But please stop piling their work on my full plate; after all, somebody has to keep the wheels turning around here.

    How’s THAT for some breakthrough thinking!