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Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

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Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

MinnesotaNorthStar said:
As someone who has filled out a couple incident reports because a cart attendant got hit by a car WHILE WEARING AN ORANGE SAFETY VEST...people drive like morons in parking lots. Reflective vests help them be seen. Your very post proves that.
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It doesn't make them more seen to me because I would have and do see them anyway (along with the customers). Using the orange vest logic in the lot, then why aren't all customers required to wear a safety colored vest in the lot? Are't we just as concerned about customer safety as employee safety? ;) Where do we stop with this silliness?
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

jen said:
don't heat up your stinky cheese in the work microwave, people. The break room smells like an old shoe.
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Isn't that something that you just have to come to terms with when you live in WI? ;)
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

Timothy A said:
It doesn't make them more seen to me because I would have and do see them anyway (along with the customers). Using the orange vest logic in the lot, then why aren't all customers required to wear a safety colored vest in the lot? Are't we just as concerned about customer safety as employee safety? ;) Where do we stop with this silliness?
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The store's insurance company can't mandate the customers wear safety attire the way they can mandate employees to wear it.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

Now I'm in a 4-hour training conference call (read: we don't have to talk) with an attendee who didn't mute his phone. And dropped it several times. And he has a cough.

And the host isn't saying anything.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

90 minutes in, she finally said something.
 
Timothy A said:
It doesn't make them more seen to me because I would have and do see them anyway (along with the customers). Using the orange vest logic in the lot, then why aren't all customers required to wear a safety colored vest in the lot? Are't we just as concerned about customer safety as employee safety? ;) Where do we stop with this silliness?
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Customers don't typically spend more than a minute in the lot any given time, aren't employed by the store, and don't as often move around parked cars from previously hidden blind spots nearly as often as the employees. This is a case where the helicopter parents have it right.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

Slap Shot said:
Customers don't typically spend more than a minute in the lot any given time, aren't employed by the store, and don't as often move around parked cars from previously hidden blind spots nearly as often as the employees. This is a case where the helicopter parents have it right.
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The parking attendants got hit WITH the vests on, that just proves this is an over-reacting, litigation paranoid scenario.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

Timothy A said:
The parking attendants got hit WITH the vests on, that just proves this is an over-reacting, litigation paranoid scenario.
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Trying to keep employees alive is overreacting?

Why are you so offended by employers protecting their employees?
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

On the first business day of each month, I'm supposed to pull metrics reports for a group that handles operations in India. This is the first month my group has been assigned to pull these reports. Since I do production support work now, and I kept receiving notification of various issues with applications, I put the metrics reporting on the back burner until I could deal with the more pressing issues. These metrics reports take around 6.5 hours to pull, most of the time spent waiting upon the DB to respond (have to use MS Access - too much overhead). Given a couple other projects I've also been handling that have hard deadlines approaching, the metrics reports were really pushed down on my priority list, and another person took up the remaining 4.5 hours of mind numbing report pulls for me. After he completed the reports, sent them to me which I then disbursed to the people who need them. Apparently the guy pulling the report for me accidentally inserted a blank line, resulting in a phonecall this morning from India. "Hello, [Clown], there is a blank row.... this information is critical in our processing..."

They're metrics reports. They're metrics reports so that you know how many free movement items (gifts from grandparents' trusts to grandchildren, things like that) Sandeep, Punjab and Preeti individually handled last month. Critical? No, getting and keeping an application running that corectly moves billions of dollars in a day in investment transactions (actual moneyed transactions) is critical to what we do, you're just micromanaging your underpaid staff. Crtical my a##. :mad:
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

St. Clown said:
On the first business day of each month, I'm supposed to pull metrics reports for a group that handles operations in India. This is the first month my group has been assigned to pull these reports. Since I do production support work now, and I kept receiving notification of various issues with applications, I put the metrics reporting on the back burner until I could deal with the more pressing issues. These metrics reports take around 6.5 hours to pull, most of the time spent waiting upon the DB to respond (have to use MS Access - too much overhead). Given a couple other projects I've also been handling that have hard deadlines approaching, the metrics reports were really pushed down on my priority list, and another person took up the remaining 4.5 hours of mind numbing report pulls for me. After he completed the reports, sent them to me which I then disbursed to the people who need them. Apparently the guy pulling the report for me accidentally inserted a blank line, resulting in a phonecall this morning from India. "Hello, [Clown], there is a blank row.... this information is critical in our processing..."

They're metrics reports. They're metrics reports so that you know how many free movement items (gifts from grandparents' trusts to grandchildren, things like that) Sandeep, Punjab and Preeti individually handled last month. Critical? No, getting and keeping an application running that corectly moves billions of dollars in a day in investment transactions (actual moneyed transactions) is critical to what we do, you're just micromanaging your underpaid staff. Crtical my a##. :mad:
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I always enjoy getting called in the middle of the night because someone is TESTING SOMETHING and they needed some information. Once you work in production support (I've done it for 16 years), "critical" is an interesting word. Everyone thinks that what they do is critical. It almost never is, in the big picture of the company.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

While not as severe as the situations described by St. Clown and jen, a related annoyance for me is when someone walks up to my desk and immediately asks me a question without regard to what I may be doing at the time (though at least it has not yet happened while I've been on a phone call....). I might obviously be engaged in concentration, hunched over a document with pen and marker in hand writing on it, and they don't even say, "is this a good time to ask you something?"

I had noticed a similar temptation in myself several years ago, and so now, no matter how much internal sense of urgency I might feel about my own priorities, I always make it a practice first to say, "do you have a few minutes, or is this a bad time?" and then actually wait for the answer before I launch into my question.

For far too many people, what they mean by "critical" or "urgent" is, "my boss just asked me for something and I don't want to get yelled at." Here's a hint to those people: you ask the boss first how soon he needs the information, or even better, you give him/her a timeline that is manageable for you, and then ask, "will that be okay?" Every boss I ever worked for, and also when I was the boss as well, preferred a reliable timeline of later to an unfulfilled promise of soon (or even worse, a rush job that produced sloppy and unreliable results).

Taking more time to do the job right the first time is always preferable to rushing and delivering something sooner that contains errors due to being in a hurry. The only time something really truly is urgent is when they are on their way out the door to a client meeting, or the phone rings with the client on the line. and even in the latter case, they can always say, "that's a great question, let me research that and get back to you."
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

jen said:
I always enjoy getting called in the middle of the night because someone is TESTING SOMETHING and they needed some information. Once you work in production support (I've done it for 16 years), "critical" is an interesting word. Everyone thinks that what they do is critical. It almost never is, in the big picture of the company.
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Work in medicine if you want to understand the true meaning of critical as interesting. People who go to work, all week, call and expect treatment over the phone for something 'dire' because they can't leave work and need to be better to go out on the weekend is one of my favorites. I really need to work at Burger King where they would pay me to say yes to that. Save a lot of aggravation.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

jen said:
I always enjoy getting called in the middle of the night because someone is TESTING SOMETHING and they needed some information. Once you work in production support (I've done it for 16 years), "critical" is an interesting word. Everyone thinks that what they do is critical. It almost never is, in the big picture of the company.
Click to expand...

My company is an MSP. The only time something is truly critical is when a production system is down. When it's graveyard hours in the US, we have a small (compared to other MSPs) team in Hyderabad to deal with it.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

Allergies. Consider my gears fully ground. Even my allergy meds aren't proving effective this year.
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

FadeToBlack&Gold said:
My company is an MSP. The only time something is truly critical is when a production system is down. When it's graveyard hours in the US, we have a small (compared to other MSPs) team in Hyderabad to deal with it.
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Other than my local airport, what the hell is an MSP?
 
Re: Gear Grinding Part 5: The Story of the Broken Tooth

Protip - when you leave a company, don't BCC your "goodbye email" to the distro list that has all 500 employees on it. Even if you have access rights to said list because of your position. Better yet, don't write a goodbye email. When a company gets to be a certain size, chances are, only a handful of people actually care that you're leaving, and those are the people you should be personally thanking before you depart. Telling the entire company "It's been a great X years!" is a tired cliche at best, and a bald-faced lie at worst.
 
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