Grumpy Coworker

  • Wrong number … again

    I do not work in the Parts Department. I have never worked in the Parts Department. You would think after working in this office as long as I have, I would stop getting calls for the Parts Department.

    I can understand the need to reuse extension numbers within an office building. What I cannot understand is the frequency that I have the following conversation.

    “Hello, this is Mr. Grumpy, in Marketing. How may I help you?”
    “Yes…” <pause> “Is Denise there?”
    “What part of my greeting did you not understand, sir?”
    “Is this 111-1234?”
    “Yes.”
    <pause> “Well, I am looking for Denise in the Parts Department.
    This is the number I got from the phone listing.”
    “Sir, I can assure you that nobody named Denise is hiding in my cubicle. Just out of curiosity, is there a date on your phone listing?”
    <longer pause> “Uh, it looks like 1995.”
    “Gee, that’s a shock. Would you like me to transfer you to the Operator now?”

  • Meeting Personalities

    • Off-mute chewer – Chews on (lunch?) audibly into the microphone.
    • Absent-minded mute button user – Starts responding with the mute button on for about a minute or more before realizing that no one is hearing the response.
    • Mute button blamer – Wasn’t paying attention.  Had to have name called several times.  Blames mute button for not having a clue what’s going on.  See also:  How the Mute Button on Your Phone Actually Works
    • Clock Watcher – Spends more time checking watch that actually participating in meeting.
    • Filibusterer – Single handedly talks the meeting into oblivion.  Not to be confused with the derailer or rambler.
    • Derailer – Somehow manages to bring up tangential topics that get everyone completely off topic for the next 15 minutes.
    • Rambler – Responds to any question with a barely intelligible introspection on the topic.  Responses to follow-up questions for clarification grow at an exponential rate.
    • Hedger – Treats every remote possibility as likely and stays non-commital unless you accept the exceptions noted.
    • Side Conversation Starter – Either completely oblivious or too rude to care that another meeting is going on.
    • Overhead speaker – Not an actual attendee or person, but an object which causes an echo in speakerphones and disrupts the meeting until it becomes silent again.
    • Tattle-tale – At the first of not getting his or her way, threatens to go tell a more powerful person to whom the tattler is connected.
    • Foot propper – The meeting is a lounge to this person:  Feet are propped up on the table and behaves generally too relaxed to actually be engaged in the meeting.
    • Multitasker – Furiously typing on the keyboard, but obviously not to take notes on the meeting.  Don’t bother asking this person questions unless you want to rehash the entire meeting.
    • Referee – “Sees the merits of both sides” of an intense debate.  Tries to make everybody play nice, regardless of their agendas.
    • Idea killer – Always has a negative scenario for any proposal.  Never has an idea himself.
    • Yes man – Would say no pants Friday at the office was a good idea, provided the right person proposed it.
    • Interrupter – Jumps in mid-details and often freaks out about half the story or asks questions whose answers were already on their way.
    • Belittler – Often pulls rank or “experience” to shut other people off.
    • Saboteur – Is either annoyed at the assignment or annoyed at not getting the project lead, but plays nice during the meeting, silently plotting the slow death of the project.  Can also accomplish goals as an inciter.
    • Inciter – May jump communication chains to create the illusion of one person hiding information from another.

  • Are you a Business Manager or a Parole Officer?

    I understand that small organizations, especially non-profit organizations, have a need to tightly control their flow of funds.  If you’re dealing with a new “contractor” for the first time, I can understand wanting to make sure that you don’t get burned by some con artist trying to squeeze more than was agreed upon out of your organization.

    However, once your organization has a working and ongoing relationship with someone, especially over more than a year, it’s time to assume a certain level of trust.

    This is particularly true if your organization paid the wrong amount–say $420 instead of $240.  I would expect the at fault party to assume the risk in correcting the mistake as soon as possible.

    This is especially true if your contractor was the one who called you to let you know that you wrote a check for too much.   That’s pretty insulting to someone’s intelligence and integrity to make them mail back or drop off a check for the wrong amount before writing a check for the right amount.  If theft was the motive, it be easier for the contractor to play dumb and just deposit the check for the wrong amount.

    Some other, less offensive ways of dealing with accidentally paying too much to a repeat contractor:

    • If you still don’t trust the person to return the check at his or her next convenience, you could issue a stop payment on the incorrect check.  You’re spending $30 to save $180 in this case, but at least the evil contractor that you regularly trust to do a job won’t steal from you in such an obvious way.
    • Considering you have more work assigned to the contractor, consider a credit for future services instead.

    Bottom line, if you’ve hired someone for thousands of dollars worth of services over the years, and have more services scheduled for that person, is it worth creating a breakdown in trust because you made an error?  If you don’t trust the contractor, why is this person doing any work for your organization after all of this time?

  • 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?