Work Tales.

[peter]

Don't tell me Av, that you have lost the mowhican? {htf do you spell mohican - mowhecan, mawhican .... and where the **** is that ubiquitous spell-check when you need it?}

[This, incidentally, is the spell check corrected version - Mahican; that can't be right ..... errrr .......can it? ]

[Avatar]

Haha, yeah, shaved the mohawk off a good few years ago now. Too much upkeep required.

--A

[peter]

Damn shame I call it! I always loved that thing where people used to wax[?] it into a number of really tall and dead straight spikes. I was just a bit too old for the punk era myself, but I loved the music and the whole 'vibe' of the thing.

[Avatar]

Wax is one option. There are multiple possible ways of achieving it, including sugar-water, egg white and glue.

--A

[peter]

Ok, so you thinkyou had a bad day at work?

Well last week, a week into a new job where I've been given a temporary contract over the Christmas period......in a place I wanted to make a good impression so I could secure a full time one.......my God - how can I tell this...... I spilt 140 pints of milk......in the local council owned acess lift (where I was not allowed to be)........ which ran into the main entrance to the department store.......where scores of people were doing their Christmas shopping......... who had to walk through it and drag it through the whole store......... and it took twenty members of staff an hour to clean it up............in the middle of the biggest delivery of the year.......with me standing in the middle of it all as popular as cancer of the cock........ and feeling lower than snake shit.......


Now that is what I call a bad day at work!!!!!!

(Well, it was Friday the 13th - what are you gonna do?)

Guy came up to me afterwards and said "Hey, people are dying out there - forget about it."

He's right - so I did.

[Linna Heartbooger]

Oh, peter!!!

This for-real for-real is your story and something you read in the news, or you're making up to entertain us?!?

(I read it out loud to my kids. Very good telling. You had them cackling out loud!)
Oh, peter!
I bet you were thinking to yourself, "Bah, everyone else seems to get away with taking these shortcuts, cutting corners, etc. Why not me?"

[peter]

Hi Linna!

You got it! It was one hundred percent for real - only I could do it!

Happy Christmas to you and yours! Have a great time and a good new year!

[Linna Heartbooger]

Well!
Bet if you got a youtube video of you telling your first-person story of that chaos...
...you would be the informal hero of dozens of young people.
Everyone experiences humiliation... most of us dread it intensely... but few of us are up for cheerfully replaying it for the benefit of others!

Yess! Happy Christmas to you as well!

(I literally just learned ^this was the conventional way to say it in the UK. Like 2.5 hours ago. If I'd responded before that, you woulda gotten "Merry Christmas!")

[Avatar]

Haha, chances of renewed contract?

--A

[peter]

About zilch just about now Av, but not I think because of the milk. The store is going through a difficult time due to the opening of a larger out of town branch not so distant from it and this will I think, affect recruitment.

No - oddly the milk incident seems to have secured me in the collective memory of the store (I guess it would) and that with my inate raffish charm ( ) seems to be working a bit in my favour. I'm on the list for future contracts as they arise, and in a store of three hundred plus workers there is bound to be a bit of turnover.

[peter]

I didn't return to M&S (where the milk incident occurred) having secured another position in a local 7-11 store. I find I'm working amongst (and spending most of my time serving) people of a right-wing bent that would make Enoch Powell blush. Alas it doesn't always come with much brain or life experience attached and last week when my co-worker, a man who I like but who is so simple in his thinking that he has no opinion that is not just a reiteration of what he has heard in his home environment, told me that he was impressed by Tommy Robinson. For those who don't know, TR is the leader of the English Defence League (the EDL as it is more commonly known), a far-right boarder line fascist party who are in the main comprised of anti-muslim holocaust deniers and their ilk. "He speaks a lot of sense.", my colleague told me seriously.

It was too much. "Sense!", I exploded. "He's against everything we believe in!" Multi-culturalism, diversity.........."

He looked at me from behind his vacant eyes. "Some of us don't agree with multiculturalism," he said.

I reeled across the shop. "You stupid bugger! Multi-culturalism! You wouldn't recognize it if it kicked you in the arse! The closest you come to multiculturalism is the chinese takeaway at the end of the road!"

Perhaps I was hard on him (his face fell), but what I said was true. He lives in a small village outside a small town. He rarely ever leaves the village and is surrounded by a white community, with never a foreign face in sight. I doubt he's met more than a handful of non-white British people in his life. But he's a good guy. His heart's in the right place and I know he's just repeating what he hears said elsewhere - and it makes me mad.

Musing on this later, I realized that in the paradoxical world we live in, it would probably be me that would be taken to task by our employers, for my words to him, rather than he for his albeit second hand, but nevertheless offensive to me views..... but that's life I guess.

[Avatar]

I was constantly surprised in London to meet people who had literally never left their Borough in their lives. Not even taken a Tube to somewhere else in the city...

--A

[SoulBiter]

Well possibly not funny but just a comedy of errors. I mess with data for a living and I send out reports that MUST be accurate and I have years of experience completing these and doing them very accurately.

One series of these I am responsible for creating are reports for physical Inventories (Executive summary and store final reports) at stores that go to the highest levels of the company as well as being sent out to those stores that have the physical inventories. Its quite complex to create these, quite time consuming and its very important that they be accurate as the stores (and their Managers/regional Managers) get on the nice or naughty list due to these.

The current brand I was doing these for is the only brand that wants store results by Retail rather than just Stat cost. All that being said, I created the reports as I always do. I tied them out to the data I pulled out of SAP BI/BO and it all looked fine. I double checked them, then sent them to my boss who takes a quick look. All good.

Round 1
I sent them out and everything was fine except that the brand managers didn't like the retail numbers. I wont go into too many details but we use an average for that because our system didnt "hold" the data. After much handwringing it was decided to use another method...which we did. And to do so I had to refresh some data....well I refreshed the data, and tied out the totals but forgot that I didn't have my formulas turned on so they didn't update. But the totals tied out 100% so it didnt send up any flags. I sent them out.

Round 2
I got a call that evening that it was sent out to the stores and a store noticed that the data for their store was not accurate which snowballed into another and another. Of course I pulled up the original data and it was fine (of course it was, excel refreshes formulas when you save).

I fixed the data, made a new report, made apologies and sent it out again.

Round 3
Again they didnt like the Retail data. So they asked to retract and deep dive for a new way to get there. Which we discovered...... and we were so very proud that we figured out a way to get an accurate retail cost in the file. Well since we were deep diving, I happened to recheck something and realized when I pulled the BO data originally, the company database had not finished updating for monthly numbers and it was missing some data.

I fixed the issue, implemented the new retails but since the background data had been wrong, the Executive summary was not correct.

Round 4
Now I have to send out to the entire distribution list, the entire batch of reports for the 4th time. Keep in mind these go all over the world and to Senior VP's, VP's, etc etc etc..... They dont like getting multiple iterations of the same report.

Honestly, I have never felt so awful about a work situation in my entire career. I took it worse than my boss or the VP of our department who kept telling me to stop beating myself up about it.

All I can say is I am glad I got my bonus for last year already, and that I got an exceptional on last years review. I expect this one to be quite different. I can only hope that since this is so early in the year, they wont remember it in November when they start working on my yearly reviews. I wouldn't count on it.

[peter]

We've got a few hours going in my 7-11 store if push comes to (well.......) push SoulBiter. It's minimum wage but hey, beggars can't be choosers and all..........

[Avatar]

LOL, sounds like part of the process for some people at my job that I'm very glad I don't have to participate in. (My boss loves reports, and he's always making these massive, complicated automated reports for clients that they don't even read. )

--A

[peter]

My step daughter, who is not a tech guru, but has worked her way up from the shop floor in the bank where she is employed, has somehow found herself seconded to the IT department where she finds herself a lone figure amongst a bunch of data crunchers. Speaking to her last weekend, she said that she was amazed that people who were so bright in some ways, had virtually nil common sense in dealing with real situations involving real people. As a result, the bosses higher up the food chain, once having spoken to the tech men of her office, will often come to her to find out what it actually means in terms of dealing with customer accounts. This is I suspect why she is there; her bank, like others in the UK, has been ruthless in paring down its staff, but she has survived half a dozen redundancy rounds and has been promoted considerably during the process. No matter how much data you have at your fingertips, how capable you are of drawing it out and drilling it deep, if you can't cut through it to what is important in respect of your business......

[SoulBiter]

AHAHAHHA yep its the corporate culture world wide.

I always say that a report that is not actionable is just a waste of time. I stand by that but I still have to run reports that are not actionable.

About 6 years ago there were a few that I knew no one read. I quit creating and sending those select few out. It was 6 months before someone noticed.

[samrw3]

Yes most reports annoy me. Spend hours on something that is barely reviewed.

My worst example is reports I had to run for some auditors. They wanted some detailed information - pulled it.

They didn't like how data was set up wanted more detail - pulled it.

They still did not like level of detail - tried pulling even more detail - they still didn't like it.

Tried pulling even more detailed data - they still didn't like it. At this point I go over to their temp office space and I said look here - the only way to get more detailed is by pulling hundreds of invoices and having someone research each line of invoice and comparing those lines year over year. That project can take days - I don't have time or resources for that type of detail. They finally accepted a randomly sampling of invoices. That was frustrating as heck

[High Lord Tolkien]

Ok, so you thinkyou had a bad day at work?

Well last week, a week into a new job where I've been given a temporary contract over the Christmas period......in a place I wanted to make a good impression so I could secure a full time one.......my God - how can I tell this...... I spilt 140 pints of milk......in the local council owned acess lift (where I was not allowed to be)........ which ran into the main entrance to the department store.......where scores of people were doing their Christmas shopping......... who had to walk through it and drag it through the whole store......... and it took twenty members of staff an hour to clean it up............in the middle of the biggest delivery of the year.......with me standing in the middle of it all as popular as cancer of the cock........ and feeling lower than snake shit.......


Now that is what I call a bad day at work!!!!!!

(Well, it was Friday the 13th - what are you gonna do?)

Guy came up to me afterwards and said "Hey, people are dying out there - forget about it."

He's right - so I did.

That is hysterical.
And how did you not get fired for that???????


Reminds me of when I worked at a pet store in a two level shopping mall.
We used a garden hose to fill up fish tanks and occasionally one of us would get distracted and forget.
Then we'd hear someone yell out "Oh shit!".
The clothing store below us was not too happy.

[peter]

Never got fired HLT, but didn't secure the full-time position either. But I'm told that the story has become hard-wired into the mythology of the store - spoken of in hushed whispers and refered to in times of severe duress etc. Nice to be remembered!