A Case Of The Mondays: Vent Your Work Spleen Here

[emma675]

Huh, I didn't know that about the 10 year rule on resumes. My career is about 16 years old and I've always included everything except for my very first job out of college. Is it still a good rule of thumb to have only one page of info? At a certain point I feel like it has to be longer than that, simply because you've got experience/years under your belt.

[bilgistic]

51 minutes ago, BookWoman56 said:

@ennui, when I teach what amounts to a business writing class online for college students, many of whom are well into their career, I now tell them to go back typically no more than roughly 10 years on their resume in terms of listing the dates for their previous employment, and not to list dates for graduation from high school or college. Obviously, situations will vary, but the current thinking seems to be that the hiring manager doesn't care about jobs more than a decade old, because they're probably not relevant to the job being sought.  I don't necessarily agree with that thinking, but I emphasize that they should treat their age the same way they do political or religious affiliation: those do not belong on a resume, as having them there opens the door to discrimination.  Other than being old enough to work, your age shouldn't be an issue for most employment. 

Yeah, the issue I'm facing is that I've been in commercial real estate for over 11 years and want to move into something else. I'm in the process of revamping my resume, so I may put something like "other experience", since I've also worked in academia-based economic development, a public company, non-profit and a government contractor.

I do not put the year of my graduation.

My resignation letters are in the mail...

[theredhead77]

I think 2 pages is the max now. As the years go by, previous job entries should show progression, tasks relevant to the growth / moving on or the position you are applying to.
For your other experience you could keep those positions but keep the tasks relevant to what you want to do.

The term "career pivot" caught the attention of recruitment and our regional president. I used it when I wanted to move from IT into what I am doing now.

What did you end up saying, @bilgistic?

[bilgistic]

*clearing throat*

Good afternoon:

Please accept this letter as notification that effective August 25, 2017, I am resigning from my position as Whipping Girl at Shitty Company.

While I am quite appreciative of the knowledge and skills that I gained during my employment, I was unable to thrive in the culture and office of Shitty Company Charlotte. I was continually belittled for being introverted because that didn’t fit into the disruptively loud environment. As a woman in a male-dominated culture, office and industry, my 11 years of experience in commercial real estate and 20 years of overall post-college experience was constantly valued far less than my male coworkers’ far fewer years of experience. Nepotism and favoritism run rampant throughout the office.

I discussed these issues multiple times with Asshole McSalesdouche, the broker I supported, while emphasizing the toll it was taking on my mental health. I discussed my concerns with Pushover Glorified Office Manager. I talked about this with Deluded Managing Director. I also discussed this with my supervising director, who I felt was most understanding. Shitty Company is a market leader and has the power to institute change in the industry, but chooses not to do so on every level.

I feel I was left with no choice but to leave an incredibly stressful and unhealthy situation. As I was told many times and as my work showed, I had always been a very dedicated, productive employee and would not have chosen to leave if I could have thrived.

Despite my grievances, I do sincerely appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the success of Shitty Company. I leave knowing I was an invaluable part of the Widget Sales team, contributing to the sale of approximately $1.5 billion in widgets in three years. I genuinely wish you all continued success going forward.

Sincerely,

Bilgistic

===

I had another, more complex version that really laid out all my reasons for leaving, i.e., all the shit that went down, but I took my HR rep sister's advice and am going to save that for the unemployment request and/or appeal if my initial request is denied.

I know my letter will be mocked and shared and fall upon deaf ears (blind eyes), but I don't care. I'm out of that shithole and the fact that there have had to be multiple people hired and others pulled from other departments to do my one job is all the vindication I need.

Edited August 24, 2017 by bilgistic

[BookWoman56]

1 hour ago, bilgistic said:

Yeah, the issue I'm facing is that I've been in commercial real estate for over 11 years and want to move into something else. I'm in the process of revamping my resume, so I may put something like "other experience", since I've also worked in academia-based economic development, a public company, non-profit and a government contractor.

I do not put the year of my graduation.

My resignation letters are in the mail...

Yes, 2 pages is generally the max on a resume. Given that you are trying to change fields, you might consider creating a functional resume rather than the traditional reverse chronological resume.  Focus on  your transferable skills rather than your employment history.  I generally keep both kinds so I can update as necessary just in case there is a sudden need/desire to apply for another job.

[bilgistic]

I sent the resignation email at 3, with the note at the bottom saying "the hard copy's in the mail; kiss my ass, mofos!" Well, I didn't add the last part. My HR rep called me immediately and thanked me for my service and exemplary work. That's how it should be, dammit. She's always been pretty fantastic to me.

Edited August 26, 2017 by bilgistic

[ennui]

I admire you. Today I left work thinking that if I were to quit, I'm not sure I would say anything ...just feign amnesia and forget to go back.

But I did draft a request to be reassigned to another supervisor. 

[bilgistic]

I really wanted to go into the office and throw a punch of stuff off my broker boss's desk (and toss papers in the air dramatically and in slow motion) and say, "Besides my father, you are the most narcissistic piece of garbage I have ever known. Fuck you!" ...but I can't have everything.

My work friend sometimes relieves the front desk attendant. She did today and got the mail, so she got my letter addressed to the managing director, my boss and office manager. She texted me and asked if I was quitting. She said her heart sank when she saw the envelope. I'd just sent the email, so I told her yes, but to keep it quiet for the moment. We're having coffee tomorrow. I haven't seen her since I took leave, and I miss her.

Yet another person has quit in the month I've been gone (she quit this week). Including me, that makes four people this month out of a company branch of maybe 50 people. How the hell no one's paying attention to or concerned with that is baffling, sad and indicative of so many issues. I guess the smoke and mirrors of "we bring in New Talent!" cover up the attrition somehow. I don't know. Not my concern anymore!

Edited August 26, 2017 by bilgistic

[ennui]

At my company, they can't hire anyone. The word is out. No one wants to work there. They interview but no one accepts the offers, or, if they do, they are only leveraging a counter-offer from their current employer. I've never seen anything like it.

[langway]

56 minutes ago, ennui said:

At my company, they can't hire anyone. The word is out. No one wants to work there. They interview but no one accepts the offers, or, if they do, they are only leveraging a counter-offer from their current employer. I've never seen anything like it.

Same with my company. They make it through the hiring process, pay out the ass on background checks, piss tests, and training costs. Those people quit either in training or right after they're done with it. They lose people as quick as they get them. Then, they get desperate and hire people who are incapable of retaining any information, have no people skills (shoutout to the most recent hire who overtakes every conversation with every client and makes it all about her personal life), and can hardly count money (which is kind of needed in banking).

 

Plus there's the whole "goals that are impossible to meet" thing. They tell you in the interview that you make your own goals to your comfort level, and that goes out the window once you're actually in the joint. I was hired right as the Wells Fargo thing was going on and I made sure to bring that up and ask about the goals and my manager literally said "well, let's not talk about that right now, we're changing things a little bit" that was definitely a red flag, but all banks were going through a bit of a change at that time to save face. Of course, they're all back to threatening your job if you're not hitting your goals.

[BookWoman56]

2 hours ago, langway said:

Plus there's the whole "goals that are impossible to meet" thing. They tell you in the interview that you make your own goals to your comfort level, and that goes out the window once you're actually in the joint. I was hired right as the Wells Fargo thing was going on and I made sure to bring that up and ask about the goals and my manager literally said "well, let's not talk about that right now, we're changing things a little bit" that was definitely a red flag, but all banks were going through a bit of a change at that time to save face. Of course, they're all back to threatening your job if you're not hitting your goals.

I've worked for Wells Fargo for three years now, and yes, I'm getting a bit tired of the scandals. The push for insane goals and the subsequent fraudulent creation of unauthorized/unwanted bank accounts went on way the hell too long. I will say it has shaken the company to the core, and they have eliminated sales goals from the performance metrics of the bank employees who open accounts, etc. It's been a major source of disappointment to me, because there are many things about the company that I really admire, such as their ongoing support for the LGBTQ community. But to back away from the specifics of the WF scandals for a minute, I will say this: anyone who believes that this sort of stuff doesn't or hasn't gone on at other banks is incredibly naive. Neither is it confined to large banks. 

I know financial analysts have written about this point, but I do strongly believe that a lot of this behavior started to escalate at least a decade ago, around the time the concept of "relationship sales" began being pushed.  At that time, I was working for a much smaller financial institution, one that included banking, various types of insurance, brokerage accounts, etc. I was doing instructional design work there, helping to revamp both the new employee orientation course and the coursework designed for people in specific parts of the company, the vast majority of whom were phone reps. One concept we emphasized was not to push sales. If someone called about a problem, solve the problem. If in the course of doing so, the customer made a statement that indicated he or she might need another product, then offer to discuss that product or transfer the customer to someone who worked in that area. But we specifically cautioned against hard sales tactics and trained reps not to get pushy with the customers about other products.  Then came the "relationship sales" mantra, and we were told to change our training to emphasize how much the phone reps needed to cross-sell other products, because all the research showed that people with multiple products were much less likely to leave and take their business elsewhere.  And within a year of changing the training, the corporate culture had changed dramatically. What used to be an emphasis on doing the right thing for the customer became an emphasis on getting each customer to buy more products, often ones that the customer didn't need. I had phone reps who'd worked there for years tell me, crying, that they were being written up if they didn't refer for another product on every single call. Another colleague described how someone in her group began pushing unnecessary insurance policies, telling the customer to try it for 30 days and then cancel it if desired. This person pushing the policies was getting rewarded for his high sales numbers, but nobody was noticing additional data that showed a large percentage of his customers cancelled the policy within 60 days of it being issued.  I'm sure there were unauthorized accounts opened as well as unauthorized insurance policies.

That sort of corporate culture creates an environment where upper mgmt pushes mid-level mgmt for better numbers. Mid-level managers push people on the floor for better numbers. And then people start creating fake accounts, and so forth. Even if it is initially just a few employees doing it, those actions have a ripple effect. A manager sees that employee A and employee B have much higher numbers than the other people on the team. The manager pressures the rest of the team, telling them that if employees A and B can achieve those results, then so can they. Some of those other people, in fear for their jobs, resort to the same sort of fraudulent tactics. It doesn't stop there. A higher-level manager looks at the reports for the mid-level managers who report to him, sees that one manager has much higher numbers, and then once again the reaction is not to ask why the hell there's that much deviation from the normal pattern, but instead to point out those anomalous results as the goal everyone should be attaining. Lather, rinse, repeat until you have inflated sales goals throughout the company.  

Again, this is what I saw at a bank roughly 10% the size of WF, so I also get a little tired of the people who think that breaking up big banks into small banks is going to help things like this. If anything, it will make it worse. Small banks can have way fewer controls over their internal processes and often lack effective auditing that would find fraudulent behavior occurring. In the larger scheme of things though, I wish companies would quit going down the rabbit hole of relationship sales, because while it may feel good for a while to get your existing customers to buy crap they don't need from you, if you want to retain and increase your customer base, you need to focus on what your customers actually want and need, not what your sales quotas are. 

[bilgistic]

I met my work friend for coffee. It was so good to see her. She filled me in on all the work gossip. The place is falling apart. Bwa ha ha ha ha!

As I predicted, the various brokers sent out an email blast to their contacts, telling them about all the "new talent" they've brought in. The "talent" are all dumb as stumps, fresh out of school with no real estate experience and very little computer software experience! The new overall office marketing specialist doesn't know how to use Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, etc.). That's insane.

Enjoy it, jackasses!

[bilgistic]

Not to belabor the point, and I'll shut it after this, but the fact that there is now a temp and two new hires doing my "easier" job duties while my team does the more complex ones, and other existing employees are helping with my responsibilities speaks volumes about 1) what all I was doing, and 2) how poorly I was paid. Three people are getting paid now to do my one job. At the very least, that comes to $30K more than I was making. How hard could it have been to hear and address my concerns and pay me what I was worth? The place has imploded in my absence, which is incredibly satisfying. When I was there and they were not paying me my worth, they "saved" what is to them a few thousand bucks out of hundreds of millions in one branch and billions in the whole company. How'd that savings plan work out?

Edited August 27, 2017 by bilgistic

[BookWoman56]

16 hours ago, bilgistic said:

Not to belabor the point, and I'll shut it after this, but the fact that there is now a temp and two new hires doing my "easier" job duties while my team does the more complex ones, and other existing employees are helping with my responsibilities speaks volumes about 1) what all I was doing, and 2) how poorly I was paid. Three people are getting paid now to do my one job. At the very least, that comes to $30K more than I was making. How hard could it have been to hear and address my concerns and pay me what I was worth? The place has imploded in my absence, which is incredibly satisfying. When I was there and they were not paying me my worth, they "saved" what is to them a few thousand bucks out of hundreds of millions in one branch and billions in the whole company. How'd that savings plan work out?

@bilgistic,  your experience is quite similar to mine from ages ago, that I described upthread.  Shortsighted idiots who focus on how they can "save" the company/organization a relatively small amount by underpaying certain employees are all too common in the workplace. Yet somehow they never get blamed when the overworked/underpaid employee leaves, and the company is forced to pay a much higher overall amount, often to more than one replacement employee, to cover those duties. These idiots often count on certain employees being too passive to push back about salary, and when employees do push back, they get what you did: promises that turn out to be worthless and don't result in higher wages; often just the opposite, as the promises revolve around a promotion from an hourly position to a salaried position, in which the employee then no longer receives OT pay. Or there will be a promise of an actual significant raise, but then the manager is sorry to report, that "Oh, upper mgmt wouldn't sign off on it, so sorry, did my best for you," all of which is code for "I made some noise to you to make you feel better, but now you need to shut up, and I didn't even bother to submit a request for a raise (or if I did, made a half-assed job of the request so it would get kicked back by HR)."

Years ago, I worked for a company that overworked and underpaid its employees on a routine basis. They got away with it because these were very niche jobs, and if you lived in this area and wanted to work in that field, you pretty much had to work for that company. That went on for years, while I was making a much lower salary than I should have been, given the extent of my responsibilities, etc. I was offered a position elsewhere, with a fairly large salary increase, and then my manager guilt-tripped me into staying by offering a slightly higher raise and insisting that if I left, our department would lose our major contract. Overall, I don't regret staying, because it ultimately led me to a point where I had to make some hard decisions and take more control of my career choices. But I still resent that manipulation by my manager, even though we have stayed on good terms since then. That type of environment, though, nearly did them in a few years later when a competitor opened shop in town, offering higher salaries and better working conditions.  A lot of the top talent at the company jumped ship, and eventually the original company was forced to raise salaries and implement a better work/life balance to avoid hemorrhaging the rest of its worthwhile employees.  The lesson I learned from that overall experience: Your first responsibility regarding your career needs to be to yourself. Make the decisions that are best for you and what you want. The company will always put its own interests first, and so you need to do what is right for you; if the company happens to do the right thing for you, it's typically only because their interests and your interests coincide for 15 seconds. 

Meanwhile, congrats on resigning and enjoy the knowledge/satisfaction that things are deteriorating because you left. Channel that satisfaction into finding a new job in a field that you want to be in, one that will make you feel good about both what you do and the rewards (financial and other) that you get from it.

Edited August 27, 2017 by BookWoman56

[bilgistic]

Knock me down with a feather, because my former broker boss sent me an email this morning.

Quote

I appreciate the hard work that you put in for the team and the company.  I wish you the best of luck in the future, and hope you have been able to get to a healthier place.  Take care of yourself.

Uh, thanks for three-plus years of hell? Do I need to respond?

[Mindthinkr]

1 hour ago, bilgistic said:

Knock me down with a feather, because my former broker boss sent me an email this morning.

Uh, thanks for three-plus years of hell? Do I need to respond?

Manners always come first and it would allow you to leave them a good last impression of yourself. Best wishes to you in the future. May your dream job land in your lap. 

[BookWoman56]

@bilgistic, if you respond, it should be just a simple two-word reply: Thank you. 

That way, you've been polite but haven't said anything insincere, such as wishing him good luck or continued success, etc. I am also naturally cynical and slightly paranoid, so it struck me that his comment about you finding a healthier place was meant to imply that you left for health reasons, not because you were in a hostile work environment.  For that reason (and call me paranoid if you want to), I would not address the substance of his comments at all and instead just use the "Thank you" as polite noise. 

[Bastet]

2 hours ago, bilgistic said:

Do I need to respond?

Not beyond a "thank you," and even that is not strictly necessary.  Your resignation letter was the primary communication, and his email is the acknowledgment of that; there's not really a need for more, but you can, in turn, acknowledge his reply with a simple "thank you" email.

As for how you'll look back on his email when this chapter in your life is truly closed, there are several possible motivations behind it, and time may tell which one was at play here.

My suggestion is to get your unemployment claim squared away, continue to enjoy your downtime with your kitty, and move forward when you're ready.  Oh, and stop for a laugh from time to time at what you learned about the place falling utterly to pieces in your absence, of course.

[DeLurker]

@bilgistic - I'd be cautious in case he's worried about an employment lawsuit or how the vast number of people leaving/budget for replacing is a concern his managers have brought up with him.  If you write back anything that sounds the least bit grateful for the opportunity yada yada yada, he has some cover to say "Hey!  It had nothing to do with me!  See the nice email I got?".

[bilgistic]

I appreciate y'all's insight. Yes, "y'all's" is a word in NC. I agree with just saying "Thank you", while writing, "you're a gaping asshole" in invisible type. No?

My work friend told me that one of the new hires went to get drinks with them. So, they got what they wanted, I guess. A "happy" person who will socialize, regardless of whether they are dumb as a box of hammers.

It also says something about the place that they hired people when I was on leave, as in, there was always the possibility that I would be back. I learned quite a lot in talking to my friend. My choice to leave was a good one.

[ABay]

I agree with @Bastet that no response is required in order to be polite. It's like you said "hey" and he said "hey".  End of conversation. You don't have to keep going "hey" back and forth until someone puts an awkward end to an awkward exchange. I am certain Miss Manners would agree, but put it more eloquently.

[theredhead77]

7 hours ago, bilgistic said:

Knock me down with a feather, because my former broker boss sent me an email this morning.

Uh, thanks for three-plus years of hell? Do I need to respond?

 

5 hours ago, BookWoman56 said:

@bilgistic, if you respond, it should be just a simple two-word reply: Thank you. 

That way, you've been polite but haven't said anything insincere, such as wishing him good luck or continued success, etc. I am also naturally cynical and slightly paranoid, so it struck me that his comment about you finding a healthier place was meant to imply that you left for health reasons, not because you were in a hostile work environment.  For that reason (and call me paranoid if you want to), I would not address the substance of his comments at all and instead just use the "Thank you" as polite noise. 

 

4 hours ago, Bastet said:

Not beyond a "thank you," and even that is not strictly necessary.  Your resignation letter was the primary communication, and his email is the acknowledgment of that; there's not really a need for more, but you can, in turn, acknowledge his reply with a simple "thank you" email.

As for how you'll look back on his email when this chapter in your life is truly closed, there are several possible motivations behind it, and time may tell which one was at play here.

My suggestion is to get your unemployment claim squared away, continue to enjoy your downtime with your kitty, and move forward when you're ready.  Oh, and stop for a laugh from time to time at what you learned about the place falling utterly to pieces in your absence, of course.

 

4 hours ago, DeLurker said:

@bilgistic - I'd be cautious in case he's worried about an employment lawsuit or how the vast number of people leaving/budget for replacing is a concern his managers have brought up with him.  If you write back anything that sounds the least bit grateful for the opportunity yada yada yada, he has some cover to say "Hey!  It had nothing to do with me!  See the nice email I got?".

Nothing more than "thank you" and frankly I wouldn't even bother with that. The cynic in me says he's doing it to be manipulative, try to keep a line of communication open to torment you further.

[bilgistic]

I went with:

"Thank you, [broker name].

Bilgistic"

I thought a lot of other things, but we all know that by now.

[hoosier80]

Well, so far a more peaceful week.  The Dip has been out for a week, and out until part of next week.  Where did the Dip go on vacation?  Texas.  Planned on San Antonio, and maybe Houston.  The storm warnings were already out when the Dip left; Dip never said a word that they were worried about the storm - I'm sure never saw any of the weather reports.  Dip did see the news about the lottery, so not sure how the weather was missed - but it' the Dip.

Today a new team member, who I've been trying to show stuff to help out (because the Dip is no help), said oh I have to go to this meeting and that meeting.  I think they want to get me into project management.  I almost went ballistic.  So they're going to elevate this person, and I get to keep doing the grunge work?  If that is their plan, I will look and start interviewing.  I have contacts around.  I won't stay and let them walk on me, that is for sure.   I was leery of the new person when they were hired; basically did accounts receivable for years at another company we work with - and apparently a friend of the boss (but this person is female - in her 40's so not an old boys club thing - just a we're friends deal).  The thing is, they are so stupid, because so much of what gets done, regular stuff that runs seamlessly, I do.  I've done 99.999% of the new client set ups this year (Dip did 1, took a week to do 1 - and jacked it up). No one else does the majority of what I do, plus if there's an issue, comes to me.  There's an upcoming event, that even if I show this new person how to do the basics, there are always questions that come to me because of how long I've worked with these specific systems.  Things that I may know or try to resolve based upon years of experience, which you can't get out of a procedures manual.  I think that they think I'm a lifer at this point, which no, do not push me.  

[Guest]

21 hours ago, hoosier80 said:

 There's an upcoming event, that even if I show this new person how to do the basics, there are always questions that come to me because of how long I've worked with these specific systems.  Things that I may know or try to resolve based upon years of experience, which you can't get out of a procedures manual.

I can sympathize.  This is my situation too.  I'm a user of a system.  But I'm also the one that implemented and designed how that system would work  Well I finished that and don't do that job anymore.  They replaced that role for system maintenance and upgrades.  And yet somehow that role is mostly administrative and doesn't even really do that.  Maybe other things happen but I don't know what that is.

Basically users are expected to write a specification that IT people can read and implement.  Which is ridiculous and unrealistic and only a thing because I am a user and I am capable of doing it because I designed every last detail of the system and IT people know they can share their screen and I can read their code and identify the bug.  Basically I learned to be a user to IT translator.

So other users complain about something.  I rattle off a solution for them in 5 min because I'm that familiar with the system.  I've got a ton of improvements that I don't even mention because I don't have time for the added workload that isn't my current job.

Their problems go into a database as a project as a high level sketch and then nothing happens.  Because IT expects what I wrote them when I was implementing the system.  The only things that happen are the things I think will help me or my team enough to work more efficiently that I spend time writing the whole thing up for IT.  The new person needs to be the user to IT translator but I don't think really knows enough of the details to do it. 

Honestly, I'm not really even sure any one set that expectation or if it just seems logical to me.  So I suppose it could be a result of management of the process and failure of any of the managers to correct it because correcting it adds workload by creating a person who can feed the beast with projects IT doesn't have time for instead of IT saying users don't have time to flush out the projects.

22 hours ago, hoosier80 said:

I think that they think I'm a lifer at this point, which no, do not push me.  

Seriously.  I check if I can retire a couple decades early twice a week at this point.  I've started thinking about whether I should offer to go part time in my old job if they would create a new role and get more done in six months than they've done in the last couple years.  I can holiday while the IT beast is fed. 

I think about leaving a lot, but I'm not sure anything would be any better elsewhere.  Most of the people are fine.  They pay me  well.  I'm really incredibly busy all the time.  I hate certain aspects of this job because they don't suit my personality and I really enjoy others .  I am busy all the time.  It needs to be repeated.  There are a bunch of personalities that aren't so nice, especially under stress, which stress all the time. 

But it doesn't sound like anywhere is much better and its hard to figure out if you are going to end up better or worse off in an interview.  So far, I have a knack for changing roles to fix a portion of the job I don't like only to have the next one be even worse in that aspect and add another challenge.  But I think that is a reflection of how the culture of the company changes as the leadership changes. 

I haven't quite come up with an interview strategy to figure out whether leadership has too many bad apples to accept an offer without asking questions that would preclude getting an offer.

[magicdog]

Quote

My manager's overt preference for people of certain national origins: This was S. Florida and my boss, who was Cuban-American, openly stated in many internal meetings that he wanted to hire primarily Cuban-Americans; I was the token Anglo he had on his immediate staff; and if you were from another country, such as Jamaica, you might be hired but would not advance in any significant way.

Quote

 

I had the exact same experience at my last office job,except the bosses were Trinidadian, not Cuban. They favored any POC of Caribbean descent; I was one of 3 white folks on the staff, and there were 3-4 Black American staff members also. My immediate boss straight up told me that the Americans were the tokens of the office, so that visitors would get the impression that we were a multi-cultural company.  The Caribbean staff members had free reign to talk to the Americans  as disrespectfully as they wanted to and no corrective action would be taken. In fact, you would get in trouble if you complained about the treatment. They could some and go as they pleased; if the American staff members were even less than 5 minutes late, they would get a write up. Calling out sick also resulted in a write up, if you couldn't provide a doctors note every single time you called out.....even if you explicitly told the supervisors it was a non-medical issue  (car broke down, family issue, needing to be home to deal with service repairs, etc).

My boss constantly made fun of my weight (I was too skinny at the time according to her) , complained that although I met the office dress code, I wasn't wearing designer label outfits, complained if I repeated outfits within a span of two weeks, hated that I tied my hair back in a ponytail (I literally can't do anything else with my hair---its that difficult to manage), and took offense that I didn't want to discuss my personal life with her.

So one Friday, I came into the office and she told me I was fired because "she was tired of seeing my face".  She blatantly stated that she had no problem with my work ethic, but she just didn't like me as person, and didn't want me on her team anymore.

 

I had some reverse discrimination myself back in the 90s.  

I was working in medical billing back then.  I was already an experienced biller  and had a knack for closing delinquent accounts.  I was forced to leave my previous employer because the practice had chosen to hire an outside billing agency from Canada (another story entirely as they were later under federal investigation for some financial no-nos)  so I went to the want ads and found a position with a local pediatrics practice.  I had been told there was a lot of turnover there but I figured I could make the most of it.  I went about my work when the boss (the wife of one of the pediatricians - who was black) called me into her office saying I wasn't doing my job right.  I asked how so?  She said I wasn't supposed to call the insurance company to seek out the current address of the patient or to inquire  if they were still insured by that company.  I told her the companies are the first place you call for such information.  That info determine your next course of action with the account.  She got all flustered and told me not to do it again.   

 

Before I knew it she was constantly on me for "not doing things right" even though I knew they were SOP in any other billing office.  I also noticed she was having her "cousins" spying on me.  In fact half of the office was filled with "cousins".  I kept doing my job the best I knew how and being polite but I knew I'd have to find work elsewhere soon.  I later found out from another employee (non - cousin) that this boss's problem stemmed when her husband had an affair with a white biller in the department.  The girlfriend was fired, and in compensation, the doctor put his wife in as boss over the billing department (so she could also keep an eye on him as well as nurse her bruised ego).  She was always particularly mean to any potential rivals (read:  white young females) who might turn her husband's head again.   Now I knew why the turnover was high at this place.  Finally I'd had enough and quit (I was living at home at that time so I could afford to do so).  That witch wasted no time in giving me my final paycheck, taking my work ID and putting me outside the billing office like a bag of trash!!  At least I didn't have to suffer her abuse anymore.  I had no extent proof of racial discrimination and to be quite frank I don't think anyone would have believed me since when one hears of it - it's usually drawn as white against black, not black against white.

[BookWoman56]

@magicdog, it sounds as if the discrimination there was a combination of factors, including ethnicity, age, and gender. It reminds me, though, of my experience working for a real estate firm that had a husband and wife as realtors. Never again. The wife was one of the founders of the firm; she was one of those realtors always in the top 5-10% of sales in the entire state. The husband had been let go from his previous job and decided that if his wife could make a substantial amount of money selling real estate, then he should be able to breeze right in and do the same thing. There was an undercurrent there that he wanted to keep an eye on her; he was constantly checking up on her whereabouts. He was also a major asshat, especially as it turned out he sucked at selling real estate and was not the most ethical person. The firm ended up losing one of their best realtors over a stunt the husband pulled. This other realtor had some private listings because the owners of the properties did not want them listed in the MLS database, where any other realtor could see the information and set up showings. They trusted this one realtor to set up showings with people who would actually be interested in their properties, and did not want a lot of traffic coming through just because another realtor had simply included the property as one to view without knowing anything about it other than the basic info on price, square footage, etc. But the husband was desperate for a sale one month and literally went into the other realtor's office and was rummaging through his files when the other realtor walked in. Major arguments with much shouting ensued.  The husband didn't see what the big deal was and yelled that the other realtor was keeping the prime listings to himself. It got very heated, with the husband pushing and shoving the other realtor.  I was in an open area where this was going on. so I saw and heard the entire incident. Very telling, to me, was that afterward the other realtor apologized to me for the argument having taken place in front of me like that;  he wanted to make sure I was not upset by it. The husband, OTOH, did not say a word to me or anybody else in the office, all of whom had heard the argument going on.  Within a month, the other realtor left to start his own firm, and I am convinced it was primarily because of that incident and similar instances of the husband trying to poach clients. He had a habit if someone showed up for an appointment with another realtor a little early, before that realtor got back to the office, of just shamelessly trying to convince the client that he could handle their needs better than the realtor with whom they had the appointment. I was there for around 6 months or so, and in that time, the top three producers (except for the wife) all left. They didn't say outright that they were tired of dealing with the husband, but I heard enough to figure it out. 

ETA: @bilgistic, that was when I realized I couldn't work in real estate, or at least in that kind of real estate setting. There were aspects of my job I liked; I got to go into the upscale houses to take photos and write brochures about them for marketing purposes. But that did not compensate in any way for the ongoing tension and low pay.  By the time I left for another job, it was taking all my self-control not to tell the husband that he sucked at selling real estate and needed to find another job, so that his wife could concentrate on her job instead of either appeasing him over some perceived slight or placating other realtors because the husband had once again been an ass. He was one of those guys who always blamed someone/something else if things didn't work out the way he wanted. If other realtors were making many more sales than he was, it was because they had some kind of unfair advantage, which is accurate if you consider the ability to interact with people, listen to what they want, and then find them a property that matches their wants to be an unfair advantage.  His approach was more like listening to the clients saying they wanted a 3BR/2BA with a large yard, with a specified price limit, and then taking them instead to a 4BR/3BA with a small yard and priced tens of thousands of dollars above their price limit, because he was hellbent on selling that specific property. 

Edited September 7, 2017 by BookWoman56

[bilgistic]

In other words, it was another day in real estate.

[Hanahope]

On 9/3/2017 at 9:35 AM, magicdog said:

I don't think anyone would have believed me since when one hears of it - it's usually drawn as white against black, not black against white.

I know of some lawsuits that have involved "reverse discrimination."  It does happen and it can be compensated.  

[Petunia13]

[langway]

On 8/26/2017 at 5:19 AM, BookWoman56 said:

I've worked for Wells Fargo for three years now, and yes, I'm getting a bit tired of the scandals. The push for insane goals and the subsequent fraudulent creation of unauthorized/unwanted bank accounts went on way the hell too long. I will say it has shaken the company to the core, and they have eliminated sales goals from the performance metrics of the bank employees who open accounts, etc. It's been a major source of disappointment to me, because there are many things about the company that I really admire, such as their ongoing support for the LGBTQ community. But to back away from the specifics of the WF scandals for a minute, I will say this: anyone who believes that this sort of stuff doesn't or hasn't gone on at other banks is incredibly naive. Neither is it confined to large banks. 

I know financial analysts have written about this point, but I do strongly believe that a lot of this behavior started to escalate at least a decade ago, around the time the concept of "relationship sales" began being pushed.  At that time, I was working for a much smaller financial institution, one that included banking, various types of insurance, brokerage accounts, etc. I was doing instructional design work there, helping to revamp both the new employee orientation course and the coursework designed for people in specific parts of the company, the vast majority of whom were phone reps. One concept we emphasized was not to push sales. If someone called about a problem, solve the problem. If in the course of doing so, the customer made a statement that indicated he or she might need another product, then offer to discuss that product or transfer the customer to someone who worked in that area. But we specifically cautioned against hard sales tactics and trained reps not to get pushy with the customers about other products.  Then came the "relationship sales" mantra, and we were told to change our training to emphasize how much the phone reps needed to cross-sell other products, because all the research showed that people with multiple products were much less likely to leave and take their business elsewhere.  And within a year of changing the training, the corporate culture had changed dramatically. What used to be an emphasis on doing the right thing for the customer became an emphasis on getting each customer to buy more products, often ones that the customer didn't need. I had phone reps who'd worked there for years tell me, crying, that they were being written up if they didn't refer for another product on every single call. Another colleague described how someone in her group began pushing unnecessary insurance policies, telling the customer to try it for 30 days and then cancel it if desired. This person pushing the policies was getting rewarded for his high sales numbers, but nobody was noticing additional data that showed a large percentage of his customers cancelled the policy within 60 days of it being issued.  I'm sure there were unauthorized accounts opened as well as unauthorized insurance policies.

That sort of corporate culture creates an environment where upper mgmt pushes mid-level mgmt for better numbers. Mid-level managers push people on the floor for better numbers. And then people start creating fake accounts, and so forth. Even if it is initially just a few employees doing it, those actions have a ripple effect. A manager sees that employee A and employee B have much higher numbers than the other people on the team. The manager pressures the rest of the team, telling them that if employees A and B can achieve those results, then so can they. Some of those other people, in fear for their jobs, resort to the same sort of fraudulent tactics. It doesn't stop there. A higher-level manager looks at the reports for the mid-level managers who report to him, sees that one manager has much higher numbers, and then once again the reaction is not to ask why the hell there's that much deviation from the normal pattern, but instead to point out those anomalous results as the goal everyone should be attaining. Lather, rinse, repeat until you have inflated sales goals throughout the company.  

Again, this is what I saw at a bank roughly 10% the size of WF, so I also get a little tired of the people who think that breaking up big banks into small banks is going to help things like this. If anything, it will make it worse. Small banks can have way fewer controls over their internal processes and often lack effective auditing that would find fraudulent behavior occurring. In the larger scheme of things though, I wish companies would quit going down the rabbit hole of relationship sales, because while it may feel good for a while to get your existing customers to buy crap they don't need from you, if you want to retain and increase your customer base, you need to focus on what your customers actually want and need, not what your sales quotas are. 

 

Oh yeah, I am well aware all banks do it. It was just WF that got caught. In fact, I had a client come in and we got to talking about her credit cards. She's got one with a pretty big limit and high interest at Capital One and I told her about our balance transfers with 0% interest for however many months. She immediately came in to get this card, we looked at her account and sure enough, she already had it. It had never been activated, never been used, complete confusion from the customer who said she didn't even know about this card before I spoke about it. It had been applied for over a year ago. My manager comes over, we call CC support and this woman completely missed out on the 0% intro offer because it's only for 15 months, which could have actually helped her. She said she usually doesn't bank at our branch, but goes to the one a couple minutes down the road. She's very upset when she leaves and is adamant that she never gave consent to get this card, she never received disclosures, etc. We look to see who put in this app and it happens to be the manager of the branch she says she usually goes to. My manager says "Oh, I could never imagine him doing something like that" and more or less tells the customer she had to of given her approval because that other manager "isn't dishonest" the customer was obviously upset when she leaves, my manager continues to defend the manager at the other branch and says "our company doesn't do business this way", like somehow our smaller east-coast only bank is somehow above dishonesty. I laughed at him and said he was delusional. 

 

I'm just waiting for our new hires to start doing this. We work teller + platform due to the set up of our bank, and the new people heavily rely on people walking in specifically for products. Even at the teller line they don't offer anything, they just wait for someone to say "I want this". They also fight over walk ins, right in front of the clients, rofl. 

 

But this one new hire, my god, is she a fuck up. In banking, every day is a "will today be a day that I hella fuck up?" (we're human, it happens) Apparently, for this woman, every day is a great day for a big fuck up. 

I mentioned previously in this thread that my bank is unconventional. Our little branch is inside of a grocery store that our bank has a contract with. There are a bunch of these "in-store branches" in our market. We're open 7 days a week, we're open til late in the evening, open on holidays, etc. As a result of this, it's very important to have a good relationship with the people that work for the grocery store. The GM of the grocery store came over to cash his money orders. In new woman's mind, money orders are cash, period. True in theory, but they have to be ran like checks. That's why they have MICR numbers. And if they're not money orders from our bank, you need to have the funds available in your account for recourse in the off chance it bounces or is fraudulent. The amount of people who don't understand how money orders work is too damn high. This goes for all checks not drawn on our bank.  Leave it to this lady to not even scan the money orders and just give the dude cash, and later being short $1200.00. This is something I've gone over with her previously. This is something that gets taught extensively in training. Why she decided to do this after doing it the right way for 2 or 3 months now is beyond me. But, instead of just cashing the money orders off of his account, in a panic, she fucking deposits the money orders into his account AFTER SHE ALREADY GAVE HIM THE MONEY. So not only did this man receive cash for these money orders, he also got a deposit for 1200.00 into his account. She refuses to take responsibility for this, she refuses to have anything to do with it, she makes excuses left right and center. If she would just say "I'm a fucking dumbass", I'd be more inclined to not want to choke her to death. Instead, it's "well money orders = cash" Lady, it could have been a fake for all you know! Fake checks, fake money orders, fake certified checks, I've seen them all! You have no idea! This is why we don't cash checks unless the money is in there! Fucking hell. 

And then she told a client we could cash a check not drawn on our bank despite not having the funds in his account. That was fun to deal with. Love getting screamed at for something I can't control.

Yesterday, a lady came in to deposit a check into her account. The account had two names: Brandy Lynn Smith and Brandy Lynn Johnson, lol wat. I told the client this, she has a debit card, the debit card says Jane Doe (her name), the signature card has Jane Doe with her signature, plus Brandy Lynn Smith. What the fuck. Brandy Lynn Smith is her daughter, she recently got married and came in her to change her name, she's now Brandy Lynn Johnson. My coworker gets back from lunch, we look further, Brandy did come in to get her name changed. The same fucking dumbass that did the shit above also ERASED Jane Doe's name from this account and put in Brandy Lynn Johnson in her title spot, thus displaying Brandy's name twice with two different last names, and Jane's name no where to be found. I was like ROFL I AM NOT CLEANING UP THIS MESS YO.

 

So yeah, I wanna kill her.

[Mindthinkr]

[riley702]

1 hour ago, langway said:

My manager says "Oh, I could never imagine him doing something like that" and more or less tells the customer she had to [have] given her approval because that other manager "isn't dishonest" the customer was obviously upset when she leaves...

Well, of course she is! Your idiot manager just called her dishonest - to her face! I'd be hot, too, and never use that bank again. At any branch.

[langway]

4 hours ago, riley702 said:

Well, of course she is! Your idiot manager just called her dishonest - to her face! I'd be hot, too, and never use that bank again. At any branch.

He's a whole post on his own. He recently got promoted to a traditional branch, so good riddance to that fucker. A lot of our customers hate him, except for the very few that do whatever he suggests despite the fact it might not be the best idea for them. My bank really likes to push that we're "not like other banks" in the sense that "we care about their financial well being" but it's all bullshit. You're a business, you're trying to make a profit. You'd be stupid not to. Just say that.

[Guest]

Work is so demoralizing when you could literally put in 24 hrs a day and not have any hope of catching up.

I'm back to not even being able to read the email coming in.  Its like someone turned on the fire house and now deliberately ignoring that they are holding the hose and I am wet.

Oh well,  at least when you know you can't catch up the temptation to pull an all nighter to try to catch up is gone.

[JTMacc99]

I've got my "I'm not going to lie to you. I just make shit up." socks on today.  (I am in charge of the whole budget process, so I've also got the crystal ball out, the tea leaves, and will be attending Divination Class after work today.)

I actually like my job. I'm an accountant by training, but my numbers get to have words like "I think", "Probably", and "What do you want them to be" attached to them. WAY more fun than what the accountants do on the other side of the building.

[BookWoman56]

I had to deal with a situation at work today that is still making me angry, hours later. I have been working for the past month or so on a major project, and had a set of deliverables due this past Friday. The project manager has done fuck all in terms of actual work on this project, unless you count having daily meetings to harass the people actually doing the work about why they haven't finished yet. And the answer to that would be, if you quit having meetings every other hour, not to mention getting the same people trying to produce these deliverables to create other deliverables for presentations that should have taken place a month ago, that you failed to schedule, gee, they'd probably be finished by now. But anyway, we pulled it off, despite her pulling me off that project for about a day to update something else for her. Our final set of deliverables for this project is due at the end of this month, and the last thing she said on Friday, before she left early, leaving me to have to send the deliverables to an external vendor (which is her fucking responsibility, not mine), was that we needed to jump back into the next set of deliverables first thing on Monday. Then Monday, during our weekly one-on-one meeting, she spent 99% of the meeting bitching and moaning about everybody she has to work with and how she's so overworked, etc., and in the middle of this casually threw out that she wanted me to do another update to the same document I had updated for her the preceding week. Okay. But then, a couple of hours later, in our group meeting, she said that document was not a priority and we needed to concentrate on the next set of deliverables for our main project. So I continue to concentrate on  those deliverables, only to get an email this morning bitching that I had not yet updated the other document, and she'd had an approval meeting scheduled for this morning, which got cancelled because the major people who needed to be there were out sick and/or blew off the meeting. Understand, this document still has a tracked comment/question in it that I inserted almost 2 weeks ago, that she still has not resolved. But somehow it's my fault for not updating the freaking document. 

So I responded to her email by asking that she please quit dumping edits on me in the middle of meetings, and instead do what everybody else in the group does, which is to send me an email or IM to say, please revamp section ABC of the document to reflect new policy DEF, along with the date by which the document is needed or the updates are needed.  And she responded with this extremely snide email, on which I'm sure she blind copied our mutual manager, essentially stating that she felt both of us were capable of having discussions and taking notes, and she was too busy to send me minutes of our discussions, but if I insisted on that, we could have a meeting with our manager. Bitch, please. I did not ask for meeting minutes; I asked that you follow the same damn process that everybody else except you does.

My mood was not helped by the fact that this project manager spends way more time finding ways to get other people to do her work for her than it would take her to do the actual work. She's hellbent right now on turning another project manager, at a lower level, into her own personal assistant. Nor is it helped by the fact that I had a mini-stroke a few weeks ago, which she is aware of, and since then I've had ongoing problems with memory impairment (for conversations, but not with written stuff) and hand tremors that make it so there will periodically be 10-15 minutes where I can't use a pen/pencil or type. I have an appointment with a neurologist next week to see WTF is going on, but in the meantime, I do not think it is too damn much to ask that she spend less than 2 minutes to send me a freaking email to say, please go into document A and change "glad" to "happy." And so I responded to her explaining that no, at the moment I cannot in fact engage in discussions and take notes simultaneously, nor was I asking for meeting minutes but instead just a quick note listing what it is she wants done to a given document. 

In the past month, two people in our area have left, and both of them commented to me that having to work with her was a major reasons they left. Another colleague is currently looking for another position for the same reason. I'm not ready to jump ship, but I've decided it's time to start keeping an eye out for other positions or else push for a promotion that would get me out of working directly with her. 

[hoosier80]

Langway, that woman sounds like a relative of the Dip that is my co-worker.  I get back in after a few days off (always an avalanche of questions), and Dip has once again been unable to communicate to our boss as he was asking about set up procedures for auditors.  Had to schedule a meeting with me.  I went over how it's supposed to happen.  Now mind you, neither of us did this crap until last fall when someone else got pissed and found another job.  I had done it years ago, so Dip basically thought I'd handle the majority of it.  How fucking nice.  It's not rocket science, but the Dip has limited skills.  You can show them how to do shit step by step, multiple times, and they won't retain a damned thing or get it twisted.  Etch-a-Sketch brain.  So Dip takes what I said, twists it and sends to manger.  Dip then gets an urgent email - boss is at home, so we have to do a conference call with him.  I cleared it up within 5 minutes.  Dip then says well I think he's gunning for me.  Probably true.  He has a tendency to do that - if it's fucked up, someone becomes the scapegoat, but honestly, Dip should've been on a short leash a long time ago.  Years of doing very, very little and supposedly the expert on one system, when Dip really knows very little - just did a good job of keeping all the info to themselves and bull shitting everyone on their knowledge.   

Went through checking shit the Dip did later yesterday, and half assed work.  Then Dip had a new person check, who has done a shitty job before for me of reviewing stuff.  Yep, I found stuff that was wrong or done halfway.  When your checklist says make sure all fields are zero or NO, and some have big YES's in the fields, no that is not following procedure.  Well, I turned everything else off - true, but auditors will nail your ass.  Then questioning shit I'd set up, not reading or not entering the screen commands.  I look and everything was set up correctly.  The notes Dip makes are not legible, you ask and they don't know what their question was or what they wrote (handwriting and general writing skills are awful).  

I told Dip to confirm how A should work with another department.  Dip asked about A and B (tries to sound smart or upstage me).  B is only done for entirely new client, not just a new sleeve of business for a client.  So we get manager from other department asking WTF, coming over to MY desk.  I'm like no we don't need that, just confirm A because we have to document for auditors.  He was like fine, then shook his head.  And it said for the one item on our fucking checklist, ONLY FOR B, which I then circled on the Dip's sheet.  I know they think I'm a bitch, but I'm not going down for their mistakes.  

Then the Dip asked Asshat1, who is very high strung, who does this task (when it clearly stated who did it).  Asshat1 comes over and starts asking primary questions - what does program Z mean?  A programmer has to add Z to the program.  Ok, so who would do that?   Don't know.  Who does updates to programs?  No response.  A1 says oh it'd be a programmer.  Then the response Dip got back from programming was that Z was already the value for whatever.  A1 asks so does anything need to be updated?  Don't know. Five minutes of it.  A1 said at one point, I feel like I'm just repeating myself.  A1 was trying for a teachable moment, but got a shitload of frustration.  It was a bit of validation for me, that I'm just not saying stuff wrong or being too complicated in explaining stuff.  Sadly, we also have procedures out the ying yang, which have loads of screen shots, and Dip can't follow that either.   Good news is that Dip is out coming up, but I think there's also others on the team out at the same time, basically leaving me and a part timer.  That's not to be done.  Not sure how it's being allowed now.  

[BookWoman56]

Today was even worse than yesterday. The PM from hell shared my health info with our manager, who in turn sent it to her manager. The result was a call from my manager to see if I am still capable of performing my job functions, because if not, then maybe I need to take some FMLA time off. Jesus fucking christ. I have been doing my job with nothing but positive comments until I missed one BS retroactively created deadline.  I explained that I would prefer, regardless of any health issues, that this specific PM request work like everybody else does, but my manager was all, oh, but I'm sure the normal process is that you have meetings with everybody at which you discuss what changes need to be made to documents, and you just take notes about which changes need to be made. Yes, we have meetings at which we discuss at a high level what we need to do with various documents. But when it comes to specific updates or edits, literally everybody else on the team except this one PM sends me an email stating what specific change is needed, or the gist of the change;  I make the change, and email them back the link to the updated document. Similarly, if it's a document I have written from scratch or edits I have initiated, I send the people involved an email explaining what I've done and why, for them to review. It's a fairly simple process that works well with everybody else because we then have the paper trail of what was requested, who requested it, and when it was completed, etc. But no, having informal conversations in which someone randomly throws out a request in the middle of a rant about something completely different is much more efficient.  And the claim by the PM that she didn't have time to take notes during our meetings of what she wants me to do: total BS. I have it from two different sources that every phone meeting she has, she sits there and takes notes for herself about the specifics of what she has assigned people to do.  She apparently has the habit of keeping those detailed notes in a notebook, so that she can then call people out if they don't jump through the particular hoop she has given them.

And so today was the tipping point at which I realized that my ability to endure the little games that this PM is playing is rapidly declining. I made the fucking edits she had asked for and sent them to her. She then replied, oh, but I also wanted you to do these other things, and proceeded to write a paragraph listing all the crap she now wants done (again, copying our manager).  This paragraph was a huge expansion of the scope of changes she originally said she wanted;  when she first asked me to do these updates, I had told her I was busy working on the major deliverables we have due at the end of next week, but she assured me that the changes she wanted would take me about 20 minutes to do; this was more like 3 hours of work tracking down information and writing a process from scratch.  And this is all after some updates she did herself and asked me to review, in which she had managed to write a new process so that if there was a problem, to keep on going, but if everything was fine, stop and escalate it up the ladder.  I spotted that mistake, tagged it for her, and now I really wish I hadn't so she could have walked into this upcoming approval meeting and gotten mud on her face (although I would undoubtedly be blamed for not catching the mistake).  I will continue to do my job to the best of my ability, but I will never again offer to assist or help her out in any way that is not strictly required in the fulfillment of my official job duties. Earlier this month when my two former colleagues left, they both offered to assist any way they could if I wanted to jump ship. I will give myself another week to concentrate on finishing this major project. Then I need to start thinking about whether the perks of this job outweigh the pain of having to work with this person. I already had a meeting scheduled for next week with someone higher up the ladder; during that meeting I am going to throw out the idea of changing my reporting line to him for various reasons that make good business sense. If that doesn't work, then I will start a serious job search after the first of the year when more positions typically open up. 

[MrSmith]

On 8/26/2017 at 10:22 PM, bilgistic said:

Not to belabor the point, and I'll shut it after this, but the fact that there is now a temp and two new hires doing my "easier" job duties while my team does the more complex ones, and other existing employees are helping with my responsibilities speaks volumes about 1) what all I was doing, and 2) how poorly I was paid. Three people are getting paid now to do my one job. At the very least, that comes to $30K more than I was making. How hard could it have been to hear and address my concerns and pay me what I was worth? The place has imploded in my absence, which is incredibly satisfying. When I was there and they were not paying me my worth, they "saved" what is to them a few thousand bucks out of hundreds of millions in one branch and billions in the whole company. How'd that savings plan work out?

@bilgistic I am delighted - DELIGHTED - to read your updates. My Friday was already going absolutely swimmingly and your updates have put it crazily over the fucking top! Enjoy the schadenfreude! God knows you've more than earned it!

[bilgistic]

Thanks, @MrSmith! I remain very glad I left that horror show!

[Petunia13]

@BookWoman56 the answer is simple. You get a fortune teller/mindreader.

This person sounds like a nasty piece of work. A control freak who is manipulative and passive aggressive with a dash of that "fun" laziness so many narcissists have. 

I have a huge nut jerk abusive prejudiced violent (hes struck me w/a plastic storage crate) dickhead I work with escalating his bullshit in frustration since I finally got my transfer/promotion approved. I only have to see him and another jerk (his BFF who also trashes my stuff and calls me names) one more time and this store is on its own now. 

 

 

[BookWoman56]

@Petunia13, very happy to hear you have your escape planned. As much of a bitch as my colleague is, there's never been any physical violence. Of course, I work in a different city and work from home, so the geography prevents that from being a real possibility anyway. 

One aspect of all of this situation that I find very ludicrous is that this PM has been throwing a hissy fit lately with our manager that she needs more help. However, within the last 9-10 months, the project she is in charge of has transitioned from being a very major component of stuff we have to submit to a federal agency to being an extremely minor component. On the other hand, components that are handled by other teams within our general area have gone from a minor status to major status. At some point, the exec over our area is going to look at this situation and ask himself why he's paying a senior level program manager, plus a lower level program manager, plus a tech writer to work on something of fairly minor importance when those salaries could be used to support the major components. That is one reason I have a meeting scheduled with someone higher up next week; he's borrowed me to work on those major components, and I am going to suggest to him that it would make much more sense to change my reporting line to him and have me work primarily on the major stuff, which desperately needs a tech writer, rather than on the stuff that is now very minor.  And yet this PM keeps acting as if she should have even more resources assigned to her, when it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out her job is probably going to disappear within the next 3-6 months.  If I were in the position of the exec over our general area, I would freeze further development work on this specific component, and assign the lower level program manager to run it and provide support to the other project in our specific team. There would need to be a couple of math/stats people to update this component once a year, but simple updates would take maybe a month or two at longest, and the math/stats people can just be borrowed from the general pool of them.  The focus in our general area needs to be on the major components, not on the components that the feds have said should have only a very minor role.  There is no space for this PM on the teams that are handling the major components, and even if there were, they perceive her as difficult to work with and lazy. So my guess is that our little team is about to be broken up in the next few months, with me going over to one of the other teams, the lower level program manager being put in charge of the minor stuff, and the higher level program manager plus my manager forced to look elsewhere. Another high level program manager left our team within the past few weeks, and that role is for the project that is still at the same level of importance as it was previously. This is a role that my manager previously held, and if push comes to shove, I have zero doubt that my manager will claim that role and leave the other program manager to fend for herself.  

[emma675]

I'm coming up on my one year anniversary with the job from hell, which I still can't believe I made it this far. Happily, I just completed interview #2 with a potential new employer. This team seems great, in a job I have experience with, would be a promotion, a higher paycheck and a shorter commute. The department head I interviewed with first says it's a 3-4 round interview process, so I'm hopeful I will move on to round 3. If I can time this out right, I will hit my one year anniversary and accrue all of my PTO time (which they will have to pay me for), then quit right after.

[Mindthinkr]

Good Luck @emma675

[bilgistic]

Yay, @emma675! I hope it happens!

[Petunia13]

My old store I'm transferring from shorted me on my check. ?

[Mindthinkr]

2 hours ago, Petunia13 said:

My old store I'm transferring from shorted me on my check. ?

Is there something that you can do about it or are you going to just let it go and let karma bite them in the butt? 

[MrSmith]

I would just like to take a minute to complain about the cyclomatic complexity of software. I get that the software is supposedly more easily readable and maintainable than it is with a higher complexity score. I'm just not sure I'm entirely on board with that idea. I just had to refactor a couple of if/elseif/elseif blocks to reduce the complexity score and the resulting switch statement, while technically less complex, actually looks messier than it did before. Anyway, that is all. I now return you to your regularly scheduled work complaints. :D

[Petunia13]

7 hours ago, Mindthinkr said:

Is there something that you can do about it or are you going to just let it go and let karma bite them in the butt? 

I suppose I could go in and complain and see if they can retro it. It's about $80. I kinda don't wanna have to go, they'll make me explain why and make a big deal.