Our CEO came to visit us. It was fun. Some people couldn’t make it because they were out on vacation.
Our department manager announced with less than a week’s notice that he’ll visit us after our CEO, for no specific reason, the weeks around the Easter weekend (Friday and Monday are public holidays so 4 days weekend). For the occasion he asked everyone in the team to cancel vacations approved months ago.
All department employees individually politely declined to cancel their personal plans or approved vacations and involved HR. HR wasn’t aware of the manager’s decision.
He’ll be alone at the office for 2/9 visit days 😂
Ha!
Very stupid of the CEO to come during a known holiday period.
Department Manager not CEO
Pardon me. Department manager.
One of the doctors I once worked with bought one of the clerks breast implants. She looks like Kim Kardashian and wore a French maid costume to our work Halloween party and got so plastered she vomited half the night, and proceeded to show me her new breasts lol. He got placed on administrative leave for that when it became known, and then was basically encouraged to leave a fairly prestigious practice for something much smaller.
This one is about my old org. It’s a small firm that keeps bleeding clients. The COO was someone who basically was an empty shirt who loved meetings. All the tech people agreed that he didn’t do anything to advance the company.
When I found out they let him go, I was shocked and considered it a good thing. Then I found out that the CEO didn’t give him any feedback and that the COO had even checked in to see how things were going and was told he was doing a good job. He never got an opportunity to improve his performance and got let go with no warning. That’s a shitty thing to do to a person, even if he was doing a bad job.
I was able to file a grievance against a person everyone hates. It’s a slam dunk grievance, I even have evidence from their Instagram.
Everyone that I’ve told about it has been over the moon that someone gets to put them in their place finally.
Monday morning we have our big meeting regarding it, and I’m going to straight up fuck their ass up. I hope they quit. Seriously, they are such assholes to everyone. No one has a nice thing to say about them.
My business just had two meeting recently, one was about “the seriousness of unionization”, and the second was regarding a potential shift change because they are unable to fill 20+ positions and people keep leaving.
I would like to preface the seriousness of this with some historical facts about the business: they on average used to pay $12-$15 over competitors (now equal to or even less than), they used to offer pensions (Not any more), they used to have a call list of over 200 applicants (for decades) of whom they could call up and offer a job and those people would quit and jump on board (they can’t hire from anywhere in the country or Puerto Rico with relocation bonuses included). And the average length of a workers term was 28 years (now just under 5).
Sounds like it’s time to unionize!
NGL, seems like its getting close! Probably spring of 2025 is gonna be the make or break for this place
It’s Lowe’s isn’t it
Very much not Lowes’s, though I doubt people would travel 1-2 states over to work at Lowe’s
Walking from one end of Lowe’s to the other is like going to a different state to take a 15 minute break
I’m really bad at keeping secrets, and I’m a manager who’s supposed to hold on to everyone’s dirty laundry.
I know a person at work who’s going to be getting fired as soon as we’re less busy, he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.
One of my employees is a chronic alcoholic and goes to AA. He drinks on the job, and I can smell the alcohol strongly on his breath. When he comes back from break, it’s even stronger. It’s a strange situation because I can’t quite confront him about it since I don’t have a way to prove it despite it being obvious. I probably can, but I am just worried about protecting my ass.
Girl at my work who had been flirting with me decided things went too far and she only wanted to stay at casual flirting. She 180’s one day, turns another one of the guys I’m cool with against me and acts terrified of me. Because I’m management and the boss of those two, it’s messy. She doesn’t even know she has the power in the situation, I have a lot more at stake and am held to much higher standards so I’m the one who should be terrified. However I am pretty popular with everyone at work, and she’s likely scared of that power dynamic as well, but I’ve never mentioned her to really anyone and would even get fired for retaliation if I were to do so. In reality I just try to avoid any sort of interaction with them as much as possible and do not really acknowledge them unless strictly work related.
My co-manager is married and she is desperately thirsty for another manager, always calling him “her desire” and gets excited around me when she sees him. It had caused her relationship issues in the past with her husband because of it. I don’t say anything, I think it’s okay to still find others attractive as long as you don’t act on it, she’s just a bit too excited but it’s not my business lol.
In the end, the most valuable lesson I’ve learned about being management is covering your ass. Always make sure your bases are covered and you’re protecting yourself, or shit will hit you much harder since you have much higher expectations since bosses are usually mediators and leaders as well.
If you know someone you are the line manager for is drinking heavily don’t you have a duty of care towards them? It’s a health and safety issue if nothing else
The issue is that unless I have a way to objectively prove, I am throwing out accusations. We don’t have a breathalyzer at my work.
he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.
seems like the first step to improving is being given information on how you’re doing, and the second is being mentored/trained?
That sadly only goes so far. There needs to be an inate ability there as well. They need to be aware of what they’re doing, otherwise they don’t understand what they’re doing wrong. They also have to have a good attitude and actually try to learn. Attendence and basic time management is a big one as well.
These are things that are all controllable by the person, there’s not much excuse. These are things you really can’t train, it’s on them to meet standards here.
If someone is failing in all these areas, then they just might not be a good fit for the job. There’s a competitive market of people looking to get their job.
You’re getting downvoted but as the person who trains all the new people at my job, you can tell when someone either “gets it” or they don’t and no matter how much hand holding you do, the situation isn’t going to improve.
Sure, but you should still have a conversation to set expectations with that individual beforehand.
If you hire someone who’s incompetent, allow them to believe they’re performing well, and then fire them when it’s easy for you—well, that would just make you an asshole.
Those I share a space with typically conflict with each other, it’s not like school where they would go at me, so I tend to not be in the know. The only exception is one tried getting back at the others by using me as a bargaining chip. As in he kept me at his house for 2 days.
As in he kept me at his house for 2 days.
Would you care to elaborate?
That’s basically it. I was the closest thing that could be used against the others, which was out of spite. Only was solved due to passerbies who knew something was going on and where.
…we’re you kidnapped or something?
Yes
Do you sometimes feel like people don’t take you seriously, even when you say very serious things?
Often, but in what way does that connect?
I feel my mind turning off, turning to teflon, when I read your comment. It made me wonder whether others have that experience too.
Here’s something interesting: social scientists have found that humans’ eyebrows dance when they talk to each other. The eyebrow dance is normally not consciously perceived, but it is synchronized between two individuals when they speak to one another.
What’s more is the eyebrow dance is literally a dance, not a conversation, specifically in the way it is timed. It is perfectly in sync, not offset as you’d expect a back-and-forth response pattern to be.
When this eyebrow dance synchronization is inhibited, for example by covering the speaker’s eyebrows, that speaker has an incredibly hard time getting information across.
This is a long-documented phenomenon in human culture: that people can be standing there conveying information and others can be hearing it but not picking it up.
Like one person can be saying “Our car crashed! My brother is badly hurt and he needs an ambulance! Can I use your phone?” and for various reasons another person can just stand there not processing any of it.
So really what I’m trying to say is that human communication is finicky and relies on maintenance of non-obvious parallel channels, and people can get cut off from others when those channels break down.
From reading your writing, and seeing how others respond, it makes me think there might be some channel based on word sequencing that’s not being adhered to.
I know from experience how much it sucks to be cut off and unseen, so I thought I’d point out for you that while I recognize what you’re saying is important, it doesn’t land in my feelings for some reason, and it feels related to how things are worded.
I mean, I was all, ok juicy work drama, juicy work drama. Then I got to the last sentence, I think that goes beyond work drama.
I checked out at “it’s not like school” but you got me to go back and read, yikes
That moment when I’m disqualified from a venting question for going over the meter.
It’s actually a pretty serious problem. It’s not so much that you’re disqualified, as that you’re ineffective at being heard.
This is a serious problem. Have you considered listening to great speeches, or rap, or poetry?
Not in particular, no. In what way are you suggesting I’d use that?
Listen to lots and lots of them. Absorb their patterns, to adopt those patterns, to improve your own communication.
Wat
You two said it was “beyond work drama” and came across like it was unfitting as a result. Are we only expected to describe events that go below a certain glass ceiling of conflict?
came across like it was unfitting as a result.
That was all you. We neither said nor implied any such thing.
The first comment you replied to contrasted things that seemed “beyond work drama” with the “juicy work drama” they were looking for.
cutest girl at work asked me if i knew what poppers were, then supplied the explanation after i said yes. unfortunately i was/am too stupid to advance the ball further, and we both left the job shortly after due to a terrible regime change
