BOFH: Come back to the office. Your hotdesk is nice and warm BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns To say the Company may have overplayed its hand in the post-COVID return-to-work thing is a bit of an understatement. Some companies decided early on that everyone should be back at work from day one. Others favored a staggered return to work, whilst others wanted their staff in at least …
I visit Dabbsy at his new digs. I don't think he's coming back, Reg.com® is heading in a new direction, and I think Dabbsy has his pride too! His new columns aren't necessarily SFTW, but still Dabbsy. He published a new column today. If you read him here, you should give him a chance and read him there ;-}. Maybe leave a comment, yeah, I know another login... deal with it.
I am honestly strugling to understand why one would ever shower *before* suffering the experience of public transport.
I have neither will nor inclination to impinge upon anyone else's olfactory senses or inflict unhygiene upon them but I have **BEEN** on public transport. A decontamination chamber at the destination is more appropriate than a shower before departure!
A world in which I felt obliged to maintain a sanitary condition in public would be well beyond my wildest dreams – a proper utopia! Perhaps, in that fairy-land, people would respect the personal space of others and refrain from watching videos on their phones with the sound up in restaurants, too – we can but dream, yeah?
As far as offices are concerned: they are often little better! We can all identify with that sinking feeling of dispair upon finding someone else's username pre-populated into the login screen, irrefutably explaining the novel greasiness of keyboard and other peripherals.
And remember shared desk-phones? I'll stop, now – writing this post is re-traumatising me.
Ah yes, the shitty old monitors without HDMI for your laptop, the skanky keyboards and mice (if someone hadn't nicked the latter for home use), the RJ-45s without latches, the double monitor arms with two mounts but only one monitor, the frankly insanitary loos ( when you flush the first and the product fountains up into the second and third?)...the prat treating us all in the open plan hot desking paradisical office to his phone conversations with his contacts and colleagues all fscking day...how I don't miss it now I've retired. Now my son (post obtained through open competition, calm down) is treated to all this. Working from home for the last couple of years for me was a major productivity and quality of life gain. Offices are for the officious.
Speaking of public sanitation, remember when masks were mandatory? The silver lining of people brushing their teeth because the mask was holding all the stink in was not to be. If anything it seemed to just make the reeky exhalations more directional - stronger, longer range stink, but only when directly in front.
Keyboard and mouse are always locked in the cabinet when I'm not in the office. I can barely cope with someone using "my" screens (too many do not understand that those are NOT touchscreens) but keyboard/mouse? Ugh! Even our helpdesk guy walks around with their own wireless keyboard whenever they need to pay a visit to a user.
I'm of the firm opinion that mice and keyboards should be considered personal hygienic items and should not be shared between users. Companies could probably save multiple weeks of sick days/pay a year if they stopped forcing people to share peripherals (and instead forced them to use equipment dedicated per person). I'm already there on my mouse (Since I get RSI issues if I use the crappy cheapo optical HP mice provided by the boss and bought a Logitech MX Master 2 for my personal use myself) but I just can't get myself to also have to lug around a personal keyboard and have no place to store it at work.
Too good Simon, too good! That was a beer-on-the-keyboard moment! [1]
Thanks for the fix and a Merry Chrimbo to you!
[1] We started early, I blame chivo [2]
[2] @chivo: both Simons in a matter of hours, try not to get too confused buddy! Have a cold one :) *hic*
A friend of mine... Ah, who am I kidding?! One night I'd been to a nightclub, the type of place that you needed shoes and proper trousers to get into. Upon leaving I was somewhat worse for wear, and decided to stop at the adjacent burger van. For a change I bought a hot dog. Walking away I totally misjudged a curb, which was much higher than I could see in the darkness through my beer goggles. Stumbling, my hot dog shot straight out of the bun. I actually tried to find the wayward sausage for a short while, it was mine and I wanted it! Giving up, I went home. Next morning, picking my discarded clothing up of the floor I noticed a load of ketchup down the leg of my trousers. Following the trail, there in the turn-up of my Chinos was the dawg! Breakfast sorted!
Well, it's breakfast time, wonder what I've got this morning! --->
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"Our company decided on the chaotic-neutral approach of letting everyone decide what they wanted to do without requiring them to communicate the option they chose." -- Yep, that's my employer all right, and I'm taking full-remote advantage.
"As expected, many of the institutional deadwood have never been seen since. It's possible they're holding down a second job – but if they are, it'll only be for the extra sick leave." -- I'm not "deadwood" at job 1 -- I'm online a full eight a day and even do some actual "work" -- but who told Simon about the second job?!? It doesn't have sick leave, though, just wee-hours manual labor for extra dosh. Not getting much sleep lately.
(Anon post obvs.)
Opened.
Because thats exactly the lines my boss uses when he talks about the christmas bonus , before telling everyone on dec 23rd that there is'nt one because of 'its been a bad year'.... just like every other year.
Still at least someones got something this yuletide eve, as the PFY has just upgraded from 'Boyfriend 3.0' to 'Fiance 1.0' and has a sparkley ring to prove it too....I dunno what she sees in him.... must be the way his knuckles drag along the ground or something..
Oopss something just went bang... and judging by the screams theres good odds it was the boss's coffee maker.... coincedence? who knows..... we've been having electrical surges all day....
Yep this happens, for some odd reason management never seem to consider that people actually talk to each other, irrespective of them being ‘employees’ or ‘being told not to mention this to anyone else’!
Odd really, it’s almost as if some people don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us!
Even if you're in a location where they can do that (such things are explicitly illegal in many places and legally dubious in most others), it wouldn't stop people who want to obey the letter of the contract from telling you about their bonus. "I have more money now than I expected to have, but I didn't take on a different job or receive a gift from anyone" would be a valid way to communicate the information that the no bonuses claim isn't true.
When will management actually read the research that shows that bonuses rarely improve overall workforce productivity.
Setting aside those for whom the bonus is the major part of their annual income (e.g. certain sales and marketing roles):
1) Bonuses are rarely considered until it gets near to bonus time, so have no significant effect on productivity for >80% of the year.
2) When it gets near bonus time, a lot of time is spent (wasted) discussing the potential bonuses.
3) When awarded, those who get their full award are happy but will make little difference as they're already productive.
4) Those who don't get an award (or less than the maximum) are disincentivised for a while.
Of course, if the workforce can't get bonuses, neither can management who award them!
I've never worked for a company that does bonuses. I suspect it's more of a "normal" thing in the US and much less so in the UK. Or maybe it only ever happens above my pay grade. I always have the feeling that bonuses are more likely to create division and sense of unfairness than any real motivation. After all, how do you decide the bonus level of the cleaners or anyone else at the bottom of the corporate ladder? I bet it's rife with favouritism, which I have certainly seen, even if not bonus related.
Quite often the bonuses are tied to company / department performance as well as one's own performance. To top it off, they tend to insist on following the bell curve and even if everyone exhibits truly exemplary performance only one or two is allowed to be rated as such and receive maximum bonus. it is all smoke and mirrors. You'd be insane to budget including you bonus (even if you budgeted with less than 100% bonus).
It is just a way for companies to claim your total earnings/reward is higher than it generally is.
Our company tried bonuses for a little while.
The first year the structure was a percentage of overall company profits above a certain target. The company had a pretty good year, and we all got a pretty nice bonus, more than they'd been expecting to pay (not life changing, but a few thousand dollars).
The next year the structure was similar, but with a cap. The company still had a pretty good year but we only got about a quarter as much in bonuses.
The third year, the market had a bit of a downturn and we didn't quite meet the target, but they gave us a small bonus anyway to avert discontentment (particularly since 95% of company employees don't do anything that directly impacts the company's financial position, which largely depends on broader market forces).
After that we stopped doing bonuses.
A couple of old decommissioned servers went missing from storage at a company I used to work for.
One of the staff (Let's call him Bob) )okingly suggested that we check eBay for them.
Another employee took him up on his suggestion and found them there being sold by a user alias that was obviously Bob's.
Bob in the meantime was frantically trying to remove them from eBay.
It took him about another year to find a new job.
Joke was on him then?
Honestly, first rule of doing shit like this is that you absolutely don’t, even jokingly, ever, ever mention it!
It’s similar to natural selection, ‘Bob’ wasn’t ‘fit’ to survive and hence goes extinct (unemployed), leaving a gap in the ecosystem for someone else to occupy.
Ain’t science wonderful?
Yep, not quite a Darwin Award, but certainly deserves an honourable mention.
I sometimes think the phrase “thick as thieves” which I think is meant to infer that they are a close knit community really means they only have one brain cell each.
Some of the stories about people trying to steal stuff you do wonder what they are thinking if anything…
I'd think that there are some even more basic rules, such as not using a username that's at all connected to you. Also, it would be worth doing something to hide what they were--if I go to secondhand websites, I can't easily tell a stolen laptop from a laptop of the same build being sold legally, but evidently finding the servers from this case didn't take very long. That's at least three really basic stupid decisions made by the thief.
We briefly got into trouble at Uni when we sold the Uni we were at a load of the floppy disk drives that they had thrown into a skip. We cleaned and tested every unit and sold them to them as reconditioned. They accused us of stealing them but as they were had thrown them away into a skip they quit that line of arguing quite quickly.
in the end we showed their support staff how easy it was to keep floppy disk drives clean using a cleaning/head alignment disk. They had maintenance/cleaning schedules anyway therefore adding this to the process wasn't hard and saved them throwing out otherwise perfectly working floppy disk drives (which weren't cheap at the time).
My friend was asked to buy some gift cards to give to the fellow coworkers (from their own after tax salary) in one of the Big Tech companies. The company would eventually pay you back and treat it as an expense, provided all receipts are valid :) but when would they be refunded nobody knows. Such decision was made above to make the gifts more efficient to distribute. The idea is sound but I fear my friend will now lose the bonus after declining to execute due to money issues.
That's already an automatic "no way" anyway. Who in their right mind is going to pay for multiple gift cards and just trust that the company is going to reimburse them?? All it takes is one beancounter saying no and you will never see your money again without permanently making an enemy out of your employer. Any properly managed company should already have rules against something like that anyway.
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