Monday, July 2, 2012
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
hhmmmmmm flash backs...
Many years ago I worked in the warehouse of a reputable media retailer. I worked as a logistic executive hired by them to also lias with their technology provider. My job was to supervise and lead a project of a migration for the company’s stock taking system from a mainframe based, to web based.
It was a challenging job because the data bank for their new web based system was created by a bunch of foreigner s that weren’t even computer literate. Yes, they used the cheap labours that came from Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Cambodia etc, to do their data entry. Most of these people didn’t even go to school.
The first day when I did a test on the system I almost fainted. The barcode error rate was as high as over 80%. There’s no way you can use a data bank like this to do your day to day stock taking. So that’s where I came in. I joined their MIS (Management of Information System) team to lead a project of rectifying the barcode data bank so that the whole system can actually be useable. Project timeframe was given a minimum of 3 months.
3 Months was a very long time.
It took me 1 month to rectify the data base and make the system usable again Improving the accuracy of the data base from virtually unusable, to about 85%. I was confident that I could complete the project within time frame and able to complete the migration in under 2 months time.
By the 6th week of the project being kick started, the accuracy of the data base was already around 90%, and so I have advised the manager that all that is left now is to have someone to constantly monitor the platform to ensure further data to be accurate and need a strict control on future data entry, while slowly removing redundant data that are still remaining in the system, whenever it shows up.
So, the project was a success at that stage, until the migration completes, all that was left to do was monitoring the system. My job became easy after the initial 6 weeks of nightmarish OT OT and OT.
One day in the 7th week, a newbie was brought into the department; she was assigned to sit at my place. Yes you read it right, my place. But how? No one told me that someone was going to sit at my place, I was also not designated to a new work station. All of a sudden my workstation was given to another new employee with immediate effect. Where am I gonna sit? I was damn confused. I tried to visit the manager for this matter and find out what’s happening. The manager refused to see me. In 2 days time when this continued, I kinda had a feeling that the manager was being damn cheap and was trying to force me to resign. The project was designed for 3 months time frame, and I have almost completed the project in the 7th week time. The manager got the impression that the job is so damn easy that they wouldn’t even need to pay my salary for this last piece of work to be done, and they can just spent half my salary to hire a high schooler to continue what I have done, and so save a lot of money.
They were trying to force me to resign.
Oh dear oh dear.
Wouldn’t that be shitty.
In the end I didn’t resign, at the end of 2nd month they sent me a letter to ask me to pack up and leave. No reason given, just exercising their rights in the hiring contract. No compensation was given. A bit sad though, I should have read the contract much more carefully. It said if I were to resign I need to repay the company for the salary for the rest of the contract if I decided to end the contract prematurely, but if they were to do so all they need to give me is 1 week notice.
Oh well, lesson learned.
Sky is gloomy, no harm for a little bit of a flash back isn’t it?
P/S: A friend that resigned after me told me that the migration project failed one month later as data bank started to fall apart in the hands of the high schoolers and migrant workers. The project was decomissioned 3 months after I left. The manager was fired. Total cost for that project itself was around half a million. haha... damn my 2 months effort wasted.
Signing off…
It was a challenging job because the data bank for their new web based system was created by a bunch of foreigner s that weren’t even computer literate. Yes, they used the cheap labours that came from Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Cambodia etc, to do their data entry. Most of these people didn’t even go to school.
The first day when I did a test on the system I almost fainted. The barcode error rate was as high as over 80%. There’s no way you can use a data bank like this to do your day to day stock taking. So that’s where I came in. I joined their MIS (Management of Information System) team to lead a project of rectifying the barcode data bank so that the whole system can actually be useable. Project timeframe was given a minimum of 3 months.
3 Months was a very long time.
It took me 1 month to rectify the data base and make the system usable again Improving the accuracy of the data base from virtually unusable, to about 85%. I was confident that I could complete the project within time frame and able to complete the migration in under 2 months time.
By the 6th week of the project being kick started, the accuracy of the data base was already around 90%, and so I have advised the manager that all that is left now is to have someone to constantly monitor the platform to ensure further data to be accurate and need a strict control on future data entry, while slowly removing redundant data that are still remaining in the system, whenever it shows up.
So, the project was a success at that stage, until the migration completes, all that was left to do was monitoring the system. My job became easy after the initial 6 weeks of nightmarish OT OT and OT.
One day in the 7th week, a newbie was brought into the department; she was assigned to sit at my place. Yes you read it right, my place. But how? No one told me that someone was going to sit at my place, I was also not designated to a new work station. All of a sudden my workstation was given to another new employee with immediate effect. Where am I gonna sit? I was damn confused. I tried to visit the manager for this matter and find out what’s happening. The manager refused to see me. In 2 days time when this continued, I kinda had a feeling that the manager was being damn cheap and was trying to force me to resign. The project was designed for 3 months time frame, and I have almost completed the project in the 7th week time. The manager got the impression that the job is so damn easy that they wouldn’t even need to pay my salary for this last piece of work to be done, and they can just spent half my salary to hire a high schooler to continue what I have done, and so save a lot of money.
They were trying to force me to resign.
Oh dear oh dear.
Wouldn’t that be shitty.
In the end I didn’t resign, at the end of 2nd month they sent me a letter to ask me to pack up and leave. No reason given, just exercising their rights in the hiring contract. No compensation was given. A bit sad though, I should have read the contract much more carefully. It said if I were to resign I need to repay the company for the salary for the rest of the contract if I decided to end the contract prematurely, but if they were to do so all they need to give me is 1 week notice.
Oh well, lesson learned.
Sky is gloomy, no harm for a little bit of a flash back isn’t it?
P/S: A friend that resigned after me told me that the migration project failed one month later as data bank started to fall apart in the hands of the high schoolers and migrant workers. The project was decomissioned 3 months after I left. The manager was fired. Total cost for that project itself was around half a million. haha... damn my 2 months effort wasted.
Signing off…
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Haunted. By a good-for-nothing but morale killing supervisor.
I joined this reputable company about 2 years ago.
I was offered freedom, challenges, and flexibility. All I need to do, is to be as good as I can be at work.
For almost a year, I have good leaders, good work mates. It was like a dream job, besides the pay. The pay was not bad at start, but after 2 salary adjustments and 2 increments that didn’t seem like anything, friends that have started off much later have already climbed beyond my salary level. Being a senior for 2 years but if fresh grads joined the company, they'd be taking the same salary that I’m taking. I can’t help but to start to feel quite disturbed.
Anyways, for almost a year, I have had a job that was quite satisfying, always feeling that I have so much to learn; leaders that I can always look up and depend upon; seniors that are always willing to help. I'm free to do work the way I want it, as long as my performance proves that my way is efficient. I enjoyed so much that I am always at the top of my things and I was always happy to learn or do anything that's not even included in my job description, as long as there's something to learn.
I enjoyed so much freedom, as I am given my task in the morning, and I am free to manage my work load on my own, planning on when and what to finish, when to take a break from work, and lunch time is just a discussion away with my work mates. At the end of the day when I check out how much work I have accomplished, I usually feel proud and satisfied and always would look forward to the next day I could get myself to accomplish more.
Not anymore.
I came across an article on the internet one day; let me paste it here to share a little.
10 ways you know that you have a bad boss:
1. The knot you get in your gut whenever you have to deal with him. You never know which person is going to show up — the nice, benevolent manager or the insane, angry hophead.
2. The feeling you get when you have to get dressed every morning. You know, the sensation that life wasn’t meant to be like this, that nobody knows what the day ahead will hold — and not in a good way, either.
3. He’s either absent — or omnipresent. On days when he is supposed to be there, leading the way, guiding his people with a firm and gentle hand, he is nowhere to be found. Yet on days when everybody is executing the plan with distinction, there he is, standing in the middle of everything, gumming up the works, micro-managing, driving everybody crazy.
4. His word cannot be trusted. He lies when it suits him, and worst of all, he believes his lies once they are uttered.
5. He is never wrong. Sometimes he may be “misinformed,” or “misled by others,” but he is never, ever, wrong. Those who think he might be in error had better keep that opinion to themselves.
6. All credit goes to him. All blame goes to others.
7. His only loyalty is to herself. More times than you can count, you have seen him sell people down the river who used to be his favorites. If there is trouble, he's the first one to throw his colleagues and subordinates overboard into the shark-infested waters. Strangely, he is also the first person to question other people’s loyalty.
8. Work hours are hard to predict. There are long stretches of unmanaged, vague, pointless activity or inactivity, followed by short bursts of frenzy. Weekends are not safe. Vacations are not honored. Your time is not your own.
9. His door is closed most of the time. Particularly after lunch.
10. He's the main topic of conversation. Wherever coworkers gather, all they talk about is what an annoying, hurtful, scary, irrational nutbag the boss is. And when a bad boss goes, he dies unmourned — except perhaps by the one person at the office who did his bidding.
Honestly speaking, I found all the above so true because what’s happening right now is that we actually have someone like that in our department, that met all the above signs. Like, exact match, if you know what I mean. Hooray… but not exactly that’s something to celebrate for, it’s totally the opposite of hitting jackpot.
I’m going through hell.
Honestly speaking, I really dun hate this job. I am reasonably capable of doing what I am doing. I enjoy the people that I work with, minus the person that I am talking about.
The most recent big problems I have with him, is him trying to micro manage every single little thing in the department. Especially micro managing me. I am a living human being, I am not a puppet. In a normal world, no one can stand being micro managed, especially when you are not doing anything wrong but someone is just picking something wrong out of you because everything else you did was right.
Let me briefly describe what he is doing to me.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to look at your screen every other minute, to see what you are doing, and whenever you are caught doing something that seems irrelevant to work, he provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if you are holding your phone, and as soon as you are spotted with your phone, he provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if your phone is on your table, if the phone is spotted on the table, he provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if your phone is being charged, if your phone is spotted being charged, even if it’s not anywhere obvious nor you are playing with it, he provides a feedback nonetheless
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if you are reading the newspaper, if you are caught reading your newspaper, even if you have not started working, or you have completed whatever you are required to do for the day, he still provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if you sitting at your cubical, if you have left your cubical for a tad bit too long by his standard be it your bottle took too long to fill, or you went and get food, or you spent a little longer in toilet to take a dump, he provide a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps bringing up what you just completed a few minutes ago, and questions why you did a BAU task the way you did it, seemingly that he has zero knowledge of the day to day process and why you have done it, even though he is YOUR DIRECT BOSS, and he has been in this company a year and a half, AND HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN EXPERT IN THESE. And provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see what you are doing, and you are caught being efficient at what you do, so happens that you have completed your work before the end of the day. Instead of a compliment, he provides a feedback.
I am sorry if you have not been driven insane until reading this point, because I have. This is exactly what is happening to me, only more. I cannot spend more time in listing more because if I continue to do so, I will probably stand the hell up right now, and saw his head off.
I’m not ready to go to jail; I still love my family and my girlfriend.
Lucky him.
I am now so desperate to get away from this. Either I get my work station changed, or I murder him and get him replaced, or I suicide and get myself charged.
Or I quit my job.
Damn. I dun want to pick the easiest option from that list. Not yet.
But heck, day by day he’s driving me up the wall and everyone has got a limit to these kinda shits. Let’s hope I won’t murder him any time soon.
Desperately in need of a session with some friends to bitch about all of what has been happening and let off some steam.
Suddenly I feel a need for alcohol, although I am by no means anything near a drinker.
Signing off…
I was offered freedom, challenges, and flexibility. All I need to do, is to be as good as I can be at work.
For almost a year, I have good leaders, good work mates. It was like a dream job, besides the pay. The pay was not bad at start, but after 2 salary adjustments and 2 increments that didn’t seem like anything, friends that have started off much later have already climbed beyond my salary level. Being a senior for 2 years but if fresh grads joined the company, they'd be taking the same salary that I’m taking. I can’t help but to start to feel quite disturbed.
Anyways, for almost a year, I have had a job that was quite satisfying, always feeling that I have so much to learn; leaders that I can always look up and depend upon; seniors that are always willing to help. I'm free to do work the way I want it, as long as my performance proves that my way is efficient. I enjoyed so much that I am always at the top of my things and I was always happy to learn or do anything that's not even included in my job description, as long as there's something to learn.
I enjoyed so much freedom, as I am given my task in the morning, and I am free to manage my work load on my own, planning on when and what to finish, when to take a break from work, and lunch time is just a discussion away with my work mates. At the end of the day when I check out how much work I have accomplished, I usually feel proud and satisfied and always would look forward to the next day I could get myself to accomplish more.
Not anymore.
I came across an article on the internet one day; let me paste it here to share a little.
10 ways you know that you have a bad boss:
1. The knot you get in your gut whenever you have to deal with him. You never know which person is going to show up — the nice, benevolent manager or the insane, angry hophead.
2. The feeling you get when you have to get dressed every morning. You know, the sensation that life wasn’t meant to be like this, that nobody knows what the day ahead will hold — and not in a good way, either.
3. He’s either absent — or omnipresent. On days when he is supposed to be there, leading the way, guiding his people with a firm and gentle hand, he is nowhere to be found. Yet on days when everybody is executing the plan with distinction, there he is, standing in the middle of everything, gumming up the works, micro-managing, driving everybody crazy.
4. His word cannot be trusted. He lies when it suits him, and worst of all, he believes his lies once they are uttered.
5. He is never wrong. Sometimes he may be “misinformed,” or “misled by others,” but he is never, ever, wrong. Those who think he might be in error had better keep that opinion to themselves.
6. All credit goes to him. All blame goes to others.
7. His only loyalty is to herself. More times than you can count, you have seen him sell people down the river who used to be his favorites. If there is trouble, he's the first one to throw his colleagues and subordinates overboard into the shark-infested waters. Strangely, he is also the first person to question other people’s loyalty.
8. Work hours are hard to predict. There are long stretches of unmanaged, vague, pointless activity or inactivity, followed by short bursts of frenzy. Weekends are not safe. Vacations are not honored. Your time is not your own.
9. His door is closed most of the time. Particularly after lunch.
10. He's the main topic of conversation. Wherever coworkers gather, all they talk about is what an annoying, hurtful, scary, irrational nutbag the boss is. And when a bad boss goes, he dies unmourned — except perhaps by the one person at the office who did his bidding.
Honestly speaking, I found all the above so true because what’s happening right now is that we actually have someone like that in our department, that met all the above signs. Like, exact match, if you know what I mean. Hooray… but not exactly that’s something to celebrate for, it’s totally the opposite of hitting jackpot.
I’m going through hell.
Honestly speaking, I really dun hate this job. I am reasonably capable of doing what I am doing. I enjoy the people that I work with, minus the person that I am talking about.
The most recent big problems I have with him, is him trying to micro manage every single little thing in the department. Especially micro managing me. I am a living human being, I am not a puppet. In a normal world, no one can stand being micro managed, especially when you are not doing anything wrong but someone is just picking something wrong out of you because everything else you did was right.
Let me briefly describe what he is doing to me.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to look at your screen every other minute, to see what you are doing, and whenever you are caught doing something that seems irrelevant to work, he provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if you are holding your phone, and as soon as you are spotted with your phone, he provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if your phone is on your table, if the phone is spotted on the table, he provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if your phone is being charged, if your phone is spotted being charged, even if it’s not anywhere obvious nor you are playing with it, he provides a feedback nonetheless
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if you are reading the newspaper, if you are caught reading your newspaper, even if you have not started working, or you have completed whatever you are required to do for the day, he still provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see if you sitting at your cubical, if you have left your cubical for a tad bit too long by his standard be it your bottle took too long to fill, or you went and get food, or you spent a little longer in toilet to take a dump, he provide a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps bringing up what you just completed a few minutes ago, and questions why you did a BAU task the way you did it, seemingly that he has zero knowledge of the day to day process and why you have done it, even though he is YOUR DIRECT BOSS, and he has been in this company a year and a half, AND HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN EXPERT IN THESE. And provides a feedback.
Imagine someone keeps peeking over the cubical to see what you are doing, and you are caught being efficient at what you do, so happens that you have completed your work before the end of the day. Instead of a compliment, he provides a feedback.
I am sorry if you have not been driven insane until reading this point, because I have. This is exactly what is happening to me, only more. I cannot spend more time in listing more because if I continue to do so, I will probably stand the hell up right now, and saw his head off.
I’m not ready to go to jail; I still love my family and my girlfriend.
Lucky him.
I am now so desperate to get away from this. Either I get my work station changed, or I murder him and get him replaced, or I suicide and get myself charged.
Or I quit my job.
Damn. I dun want to pick the easiest option from that list. Not yet.
But heck, day by day he’s driving me up the wall and everyone has got a limit to these kinda shits. Let’s hope I won’t murder him any time soon.
Desperately in need of a session with some friends to bitch about all of what has been happening and let off some steam.
Suddenly I feel a need for alcohol, although I am by no means anything near a drinker.
Signing off…
Friday, July 8, 2011
Rage Quit.
When gamers talk about rage quitting, usually they are referring to people that couldn't stand the way the are being trashed, hence leaving the game prematurely before the game has ended. We called them rage quitters.
In real life there's something of the same nature. Especially at work.
I almost became one of those.
I like to manage my job the way I like it, within the acceptable freedom, of coz. However when things get really tough, like in March, I was totally overwhelmed with work, during working hours at least. I was handling quite a number of extra tasks plus my BAU work load. Some of these extra tasks were taken up by myself voluntarily, some were forced to be taken up because no one else could or know how to do it, some of these were assigned to me. These tasks were supposed to be distributed among 3-4 people. And for shit's sake some loser above me kept sending me emails to me to ask me to deal with some ad hoc non-BAU shitz that are forever complicated and frustrating to deal with. All these added up and impacted my BAU work performances.
I know it has and I know I should voice it, so in one of the meetings I have voiced it so that the whole team knows that what and how I am doing, and I voiced that it's necessary that these tasks are to be shuffled and distributed to different members of the team to share the work load.
Supervisor seems shocked, his newly promoted "expert" at that time seemed shocked too. One of these tasks were supposed to handled by her previously when she was still an analyst. The reason that I took it up is simple.
Because she fucking abandoned it.
Let me describe what happened.
When you are handling a task, and you are going to move on to a different role, anyone with a logic mind would understand that you will need to pass the task to someone so that things are not impacted. This Expert however, seems to live in a different world. First of all, no one knows that when and how she was moving on to her new role, secondly, she stopped doing all the things that she was supposed to do as an analyst, 3 WEEKS BEFORE she move on to the role of that capable senior, as a Subject Matter Expert.
So as expert as she is to be, she just quietly stopped doing all the tasks she had on hand, and also stopped doing all her BAU work, and also stopped taking calls, ALL WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE TEAM HAVING ANY KNOWLEDGE ABOUT. Yes, awesome. I'll talk about what happened to our schedules later. Now let me get back to the matter of overwhelming amount of tasks that i was handling.
So, I was saying, I brought it up in the meeting and made it clear so that everyone understood that these tasks needs to be handled as a team, not for some certain individuals to handle alone. I thought I communicated clearly. So finally I managed to convince most the team that the tasks needs to be distributed. Supervisor was there, the expert was there.
I also made it clear that by handling all these extra things have impacted by performance of my BAU tasks. I made it clear that because the team tasks were so important that i have to give priority to and therefore I have no time to touch many of the cases assigned to me and there's nothing i could do about it. Supervisor nodded and said he understood. I thought he did because all of us were speaking English but then, once again I have over estimated his level of literacy in English language.
2 months down the road and the cases are closed and sure enough some of these cases were not touched and had a negative results to them. Sure enough that my BAU performance have dropped for the month of March, after staying above average for more than a year.
One day a list of cases came in from the back office team saying that 7 of the cases they have capture have not been worked on. 6 of these cases were untouched by his minions, and 1 of them has my name on in. Being an ass he is, he sent an email to me with the following message:
"Please help to advise why this below cases were not worked – I believe we had mutual agreement to update for each cases assigned.
Please response by today."
I frowned and I was quite frustrated. I am a person that is very obsessed when statistics have my name on it. It takes a lot of heart of me to prioritise the team's benefit over my own, and seeing my own stats taking a hit for doing other people's work is a pain. I have already brought this issue up in the meeting and have already made things clear why and how this has happened, and yet a fierce email has ended up in my mailbox. And fuck him for his "mutual agreement", there was never any, he who does not know what his team is actually doing did make that request, we have already given the justification that cases that we did not work on simply shouldn't be updated to seem like we did. Yet he insisted that we should, just to cover his ass. All of the seniors did not agree with that arrangement and did not agree to do such. All his newly hired minions agreed, because they are his minions. duh. However, here he is, "mutual agreement" he said.
Kaaaaatuuuui~!
So what did I do with that email?
I ignored it because I have no reason to reply to his hostility.
Alzheimer's disease did not remember what I said in the meeting and then sent me another email on the following day:
"I have not heard from you yet- let me know if you’re facing any challenges."
OK, FINE.
Since he wants to know so bad, then I'll explain again. Irritated, I replied his email with as much detail as possible of what happened:
"There's no special reason sir.
There was not enough time and that case was simply missed out due to lack of time."
And then I listed out what I was doing (comments in bracket was not included in the email):
"I was doing:
1)Check and forwarding merchant supporting documents in team email inbox. (Which Volume is enough to take up 1/3 of a person's working day;)
2)Assignment of Ad hoc requests that came from other teams. (I needed to screen through and reject inappropriate requests and then assign the valid requests back to the analyst that was previously handling case. And I take up ownership of most of the cases that has no ownership. takes up about 1/2 my day when there's a heavy volume.)
3)Case Assignment, (a weekly activity that downloads a record of cases opened for the markets that we service and then manually filter and then distributes them to each of the team members. Usually takes 2 hours or up to 1/2 a day of my time doing this)
4)Concluding the team's monthly result. (I think most of us can understand, this doesn't look like a normal analyst's task at all. how can i present my own result? Because i can manipulate the outcome if I wanted to, it's non-compliance. I tried to make him understand that his Expert has to do this, but he didn't get it.)
Regards"
and so I sent out the email explaining what CHALLENGES that I am facing and hoping that he can get the email knowing that it's his poor management with me ending up with so many tasks and so he will shut the fuck up.
Sure enough, being an idiot he is, he didn't get it, he replied to my email quickly:
"I totally understand that you’re busy with your daily task and but I believe this would not be a valid excuse.
Please ensure to work on the cases below and make sure to update in The System. Hope you understand the severity of cases not being worked on."
WHAT??? EXCUSES??? ME??? WHY WOULD I FIND EXCUSES WHEN I AM ALREADY DOING MORE THAN I SHOULD? And hell yeah I know how severe when cases weren't work on, why they hell on earth did you think that i brought up the matter when I have not enough time to work on my cases??????
Bloody Idiot.
One thing in me is that I do not like slacking in terms of work because I am very very very very obsessed with statistics that has my name on it, aka job performance metrics. If i were to do something, I will do it as best as I could. Sometimes my best isn't good enough for someone but the effort is always there. Calling me giving excuses not only is an insult to my commitment to what i was doing, it also show that this Supervisor, which is a direct boss of mine does not understand what his team members are doing. I immediately understood from that point onwards that this guy is not someone I want to work under. This guy is not the person that would lead me to an advancement in my career. He is only using all his team members as stepping stones so that he himself can get as much credit as possible, and to please his superiors.
I felt rage, and immediately I fired up Microsoft Word and started typing my resignation letter. I thought to myself although I like most of the rest of the people I am working with, when work is so damn screwed up with a boss that does not know and does not appreciate whatever I am doing, there's no longer any reason I want to stay here in this office. Plus this asshole is harassing me day in day out stopping me from reading newspapers, having breakfasts, checking my headphone, trying to check on how many minutes I went for my toilet sessions etc etc etc etc etc etc. Just because he is fucking sitting next to me. If i didn't know that he is such an asshole he is, I would have thought that he is picking on me. But I know he is just being what an asshole should be doing.
I was doing something that i despise the most when I am playing online games.
Rage quitting.
Shit.
Suddenly a friend that were newly transferred to another position came and visited me. He saw what I was doing and immediately pulled me off my workstation and had a work with me. It didn't matter what he said but what he did was able to give me some time to cool down and calm down.
Shit. I realised I was doing something I despised so much.
Even if I wanted to quit, I have to plan for it.
And so started to plan for it.
signing off...
In real life there's something of the same nature. Especially at work.
I almost became one of those.
I like to manage my job the way I like it, within the acceptable freedom, of coz. However when things get really tough, like in March, I was totally overwhelmed with work, during working hours at least. I was handling quite a number of extra tasks plus my BAU work load. Some of these extra tasks were taken up by myself voluntarily, some were forced to be taken up because no one else could or know how to do it, some of these were assigned to me. These tasks were supposed to be distributed among 3-4 people. And for shit's sake some loser above me kept sending me emails to me to ask me to deal with some ad hoc non-BAU shitz that are forever complicated and frustrating to deal with. All these added up and impacted my BAU work performances.
I know it has and I know I should voice it, so in one of the meetings I have voiced it so that the whole team knows that what and how I am doing, and I voiced that it's necessary that these tasks are to be shuffled and distributed to different members of the team to share the work load.
Supervisor seems shocked, his newly promoted "expert" at that time seemed shocked too. One of these tasks were supposed to handled by her previously when she was still an analyst. The reason that I took it up is simple.
Because she fucking abandoned it.
Let me describe what happened.
When you are handling a task, and you are going to move on to a different role, anyone with a logic mind would understand that you will need to pass the task to someone so that things are not impacted. This Expert however, seems to live in a different world. First of all, no one knows that when and how she was moving on to her new role, secondly, she stopped doing all the things that she was supposed to do as an analyst, 3 WEEKS BEFORE she move on to the role of that capable senior, as a Subject Matter Expert.
So as expert as she is to be, she just quietly stopped doing all the tasks she had on hand, and also stopped doing all her BAU work, and also stopped taking calls, ALL WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE TEAM HAVING ANY KNOWLEDGE ABOUT. Yes, awesome. I'll talk about what happened to our schedules later. Now let me get back to the matter of overwhelming amount of tasks that i was handling.
So, I was saying, I brought it up in the meeting and made it clear so that everyone understood that these tasks needs to be handled as a team, not for some certain individuals to handle alone. I thought I communicated clearly. So finally I managed to convince most the team that the tasks needs to be distributed. Supervisor was there, the expert was there.
I also made it clear that by handling all these extra things have impacted by performance of my BAU tasks. I made it clear that because the team tasks were so important that i have to give priority to and therefore I have no time to touch many of the cases assigned to me and there's nothing i could do about it. Supervisor nodded and said he understood. I thought he did because all of us were speaking English but then, once again I have over estimated his level of literacy in English language.
2 months down the road and the cases are closed and sure enough some of these cases were not touched and had a negative results to them. Sure enough that my BAU performance have dropped for the month of March, after staying above average for more than a year.
One day a list of cases came in from the back office team saying that 7 of the cases they have capture have not been worked on. 6 of these cases were untouched by his minions, and 1 of them has my name on in. Being an ass he is, he sent an email to me with the following message:
"Please help to advise why this below cases were not worked – I believe we had mutual agreement to update for each cases assigned.
Please response by today."
I frowned and I was quite frustrated. I am a person that is very obsessed when statistics have my name on it. It takes a lot of heart of me to prioritise the team's benefit over my own, and seeing my own stats taking a hit for doing other people's work is a pain. I have already brought this issue up in the meeting and have already made things clear why and how this has happened, and yet a fierce email has ended up in my mailbox. And fuck him for his "mutual agreement", there was never any, he who does not know what his team is actually doing did make that request, we have already given the justification that cases that we did not work on simply shouldn't be updated to seem like we did. Yet he insisted that we should, just to cover his ass. All of the seniors did not agree with that arrangement and did not agree to do such. All his newly hired minions agreed, because they are his minions. duh. However, here he is, "mutual agreement" he said.
Kaaaaatuuuui~!
So what did I do with that email?
I ignored it because I have no reason to reply to his hostility.
Alzheimer's disease did not remember what I said in the meeting and then sent me another email on the following day:
"I have not heard from you yet- let me know if you’re facing any challenges."
OK, FINE.
Since he wants to know so bad, then I'll explain again. Irritated, I replied his email with as much detail as possible of what happened:
"There's no special reason sir.
There was not enough time and that case was simply missed out due to lack of time."
And then I listed out what I was doing (comments in bracket was not included in the email):
"I was doing:
1)Check and forwarding merchant supporting documents in team email inbox. (Which Volume is enough to take up 1/3 of a person's working day;)
2)Assignment of Ad hoc requests that came from other teams. (I needed to screen through and reject inappropriate requests and then assign the valid requests back to the analyst that was previously handling case. And I take up ownership of most of the cases that has no ownership. takes up about 1/2 my day when there's a heavy volume.)
3)Case Assignment, (a weekly activity that downloads a record of cases opened for the markets that we service and then manually filter and then distributes them to each of the team members. Usually takes 2 hours or up to 1/2 a day of my time doing this)
4)Concluding the team's monthly result. (I think most of us can understand, this doesn't look like a normal analyst's task at all. how can i present my own result? Because i can manipulate the outcome if I wanted to, it's non-compliance. I tried to make him understand that his Expert has to do this, but he didn't get it.)
Regards"
and so I sent out the email explaining what CHALLENGES that I am facing and hoping that he can get the email knowing that it's his poor management with me ending up with so many tasks and so he will shut the fuck up.
Sure enough, being an idiot he is, he didn't get it, he replied to my email quickly:
"I totally understand that you’re busy with your daily task and but I believe this would not be a valid excuse.
Please ensure to work on the cases below and make sure to update in The System. Hope you understand the severity of cases not being worked on."
WHAT??? EXCUSES??? ME??? WHY WOULD I FIND EXCUSES WHEN I AM ALREADY DOING MORE THAN I SHOULD? And hell yeah I know how severe when cases weren't work on, why they hell on earth did you think that i brought up the matter when I have not enough time to work on my cases??????
Bloody Idiot.
One thing in me is that I do not like slacking in terms of work because I am very very very very obsessed with statistics that has my name on it, aka job performance metrics. If i were to do something, I will do it as best as I could. Sometimes my best isn't good enough for someone but the effort is always there. Calling me giving excuses not only is an insult to my commitment to what i was doing, it also show that this Supervisor, which is a direct boss of mine does not understand what his team members are doing. I immediately understood from that point onwards that this guy is not someone I want to work under. This guy is not the person that would lead me to an advancement in my career. He is only using all his team members as stepping stones so that he himself can get as much credit as possible, and to please his superiors.
I felt rage, and immediately I fired up Microsoft Word and started typing my resignation letter. I thought to myself although I like most of the rest of the people I am working with, when work is so damn screwed up with a boss that does not know and does not appreciate whatever I am doing, there's no longer any reason I want to stay here in this office. Plus this asshole is harassing me day in day out stopping me from reading newspapers, having breakfasts, checking my headphone, trying to check on how many minutes I went for my toilet sessions etc etc etc etc etc etc. Just because he is fucking sitting next to me. If i didn't know that he is such an asshole he is, I would have thought that he is picking on me. But I know he is just being what an asshole should be doing.
I was doing something that i despise the most when I am playing online games.
Rage quitting.
Shit.
Suddenly a friend that were newly transferred to another position came and visited me. He saw what I was doing and immediately pulled me off my workstation and had a work with me. It didn't matter what he said but what he did was able to give me some time to cool down and calm down.
Shit. I realised I was doing something I despised so much.
Even if I wanted to quit, I have to plan for it.
And so started to plan for it.
signing off...
Friday, June 24, 2011
Promises vs Breaking Promises.
In my previous post I mentioned that I have moved from Part A of the team, to Part B of the team. From taking incoming calls serving angry customers helping them to avoid going into debt; changed to making calls to do debt collection from customers that couldn't avoid their debts.
I know that's confusing but I do not intend to make any clarifications. You're on your own if you cant understand what I said. Read that last paragraph again.
Anyway, how I moved has quite some story behind it as well.
One day The supervisor suddenly pull me off my seat and want to have a quick private conversation. So he walked me to a corner of the office and told me that he is offering me a switch. Switching from Part A, to Part B with the Stonehead (pls see post dated 21 Feb) that he recruited. He didn't explain what was the reason that the switch was needed but we all knew why. Mister Stonehead is doing so bad in B team that he is becoming an exile of the team, and he has so many un-salvagable screw ups that sooner or later Supervisor is going to run out of excuses to not fire him. We know. He thinks we don't.
And so he tried to sugar coat it. He said he was offering me an opportunity, a chance for me to return to my friends in B team. Little does he know that I am friend to most people that I know, regardless of A team or B team, simply because I am not a retard like all those that he hired. I know how to bargain when I have one. So i offered him ONE condition to be met, for me to agree with the switch. Because this switch has totally no benefit to me. It's a switch. not a move, there's no increment, no appraisal, no complement, and I have to learn everything again before I can get back to my most productive self. He wants to make this switch happen just because he wants to save his minion, simple fact being firing someone hired by himself, does not look good for him.
So I told him, for me to agree with that switch I want to maintain my current fixed shift, coming in to work from 7am-4pm, until I said otherwise. He quickly agreed. No dramas there.
I was wrong to believe that he would kept his words.
So my imminent switch was decided. What needs to happen now is to wait for it to happen in about 3 weeks time.
And then, something unexpected happened. One of the top performing guy in A team (let's call him Spikes since he has spikey hair) suddenly announce that he is a successful candidate for a new role under another manager. So he will be leaving the team at the end of that month. In other words, with Spikey and myself both either switching or transferring, he is going to loose the top 2 guys in his A team. Which our scores were the main bragging subject for him in all his management meetings. He panicked. We could all see that because he had started to come to me and tried to give me shit about how is the switch bad for me. We know that he is trying to at least keep a high scorer in A team to keep the average scores high because the minions that he hired, and all pretty much failing in terms of that.
He started to regret that he has offered me with the switch. Yet because he has promised my switch, he is now feeling so regret that he is starting to feel that he is going to loose something that he boasted so much about in his meetings. To top that off, I have been getting top scores for the last 2 months of my move. That gotta make him regret even more.
So being a pitiful asshole he is, he started to throw shits to me on a daily basis about how is it bad for me to move from A team to B team. He has regretted to offer the option to move but instead of being honest he is now trying to con me into giving up the move and stay where I am, so that he can keep the team's score high. Again, He is such a pitiful jerk.
So one day, again, he couldn't stand it any longer because I am either ignoring his obvious hints or have been ignoring him in general, he called me into a room for a private talk again.
Knowing that my condition was to maintain the current shift after moving, he was probably thinking disallowing me to come in on that particular shift is going to have me back down and give up on the switch. He said "Alvin what if I tell you I cant give you that switch that you wanted?" And So as a normal logical human being I asked him why, just to see what justification can he give for eating his own words. And then the next line totally pissed me off.
He said :"I know that you need the 7 am shift but I never promised you anything."
What the fuck? He did fucking promised it. I'll swear to Satan that he did, else he can just go serve Satan forever.
Like hell I'm going to give in to that kinda bullshit.
So I told him, "Yes you did. That was the only condition that I demanded when you requested me to switch with Stonehead. You cant be having memory lost."
He knew that he couldn't get around that, because it was in fact true. He was obviously irritated that I was so calm at what he threw at me. So suddenly he changed his tactic.
"Do you know what will happen if you insist on that shift? I will have to revise the allowance that you are getting, do you know that coming in at 7am will get you a lower allowance?"
I didn't buy it "Come on Supervisor, I have been getting the same allowance from the start, besides all our previous leaders has justified why we are taking full allowance although we are not on rotation."
So he said "You are going to force me to put you guys on a rotation. Do you know that what will happen if you force me to make the whole team B to be on a rotating shift?"
Instead of answering him question, I asked him "Do you know why we are not on rotating shifts, although we are coming in on shifts?" I was angry that he actually touched on my pay, more over the whole team's pay, to try to have me back off on my condition. What a low life.
Let me explain the situation in B team.
I work in a center that has a system of shift rotation for most teams. Basically it means that people that comes in in odd hours gets paid more allowances. However that's intended for voice teams, which means the front office call agents, instead of the back office agents, like us.
We are not on rotating shifts, simply because our team serves a couple of different markets, ANZ, Hong Kong and Singapore. Obviously it requires a few different language capabilities for different markets. Not all of us are equipped with the language skills for all markets. So we can't go on a rotation shift. Further more it's not just about language limitations, it's also about people that come in to handle additional tasks. It's also not fair to have some people to come in later and do more work, and take a lower allowance because it's simply ain't fair. It's also not making sense to make the people that cant speak more languages to come in later because there are simply some markets that they cant touch on due to language limitations. So to be fair, our previous leaders have justified that we are to take all the same full allowances, reason being most of us working on all markets and also additional tasks.
Besides, the same allowance has been given ever since we were hired. After 2 years of hard work, instead of getting a promotion or an increment, he propose a pay cut? He's not insane, He's just simply totally stupid.
Later I kinda worked out that another reason he wanted to put me on an earlier shift was because one of the strong fella in B team has been coming to work late consistently. He couldn't find a way to control that guy so he thought that having me coming in on an earlier shift and have that guy coming on a later shift would solve his problem with the punctuality issues. Well he can dream on. I'm not going to give up what I requested to fix a problem that he couldn't. Because from what I know about that guy, there's no way in hell he will be punctual no matter what shift you put him on. His motto is always to "do the job, fuck the rest". Coming in early just to please the Supervisor? Not a chance.
After he failed what he tried he was obviously upset that I didn't budge on whatever that he proposed or whatever threats about pay cut that he threw at me.
So all of a sudden, he put on a friendly face:
"OK ALVIN! I am your team leader! I will keep my word! I will do what I promised! Dun worry! You know I will always fight for you! I will always do what I can for you!"
So i thought: "yeah fucking right, what were you trying to pull just a couple of minutes ago..."
Before the conversation ended, he asked me again with a hopeful tone:
"So what if I cant put you on the shift that you requested?"
I told him simple answer:
"I'll resign. I'm sure you know why."
"OK, he said"
And there the conversation ended.
What he did later was lame. Because he was trying to keep me in the team for as long as possible, just to get a couple more high scoring calls, and also tried to have me to pass on as much knowledge as possible to his new minions, he delayed my switch for more than a month, after he already switched Stonehead to A team. That means B team has been in operation with 1 less head count for that more than a month. I really dunno what's he's thinking.
And within this month, more things happened. There were more things that have affected my drive to work. Seriously made me ultra disgust with him.
I'll write on in the next post.
Stay tuned.
Signing off...
I know that's confusing but I do not intend to make any clarifications. You're on your own if you cant understand what I said. Read that last paragraph again.
Anyway, how I moved has quite some story behind it as well.
One day The supervisor suddenly pull me off my seat and want to have a quick private conversation. So he walked me to a corner of the office and told me that he is offering me a switch. Switching from Part A, to Part B with the Stonehead (pls see post dated 21 Feb) that he recruited. He didn't explain what was the reason that the switch was needed but we all knew why. Mister Stonehead is doing so bad in B team that he is becoming an exile of the team, and he has so many un-salvagable screw ups that sooner or later Supervisor is going to run out of excuses to not fire him. We know. He thinks we don't.
And so he tried to sugar coat it. He said he was offering me an opportunity, a chance for me to return to my friends in B team. Little does he know that I am friend to most people that I know, regardless of A team or B team, simply because I am not a retard like all those that he hired. I know how to bargain when I have one. So i offered him ONE condition to be met, for me to agree with the switch. Because this switch has totally no benefit to me. It's a switch. not a move, there's no increment, no appraisal, no complement, and I have to learn everything again before I can get back to my most productive self. He wants to make this switch happen just because he wants to save his minion, simple fact being firing someone hired by himself, does not look good for him.
So I told him, for me to agree with that switch I want to maintain my current fixed shift, coming in to work from 7am-4pm, until I said otherwise. He quickly agreed. No dramas there.
I was wrong to believe that he would kept his words.
So my imminent switch was decided. What needs to happen now is to wait for it to happen in about 3 weeks time.
And then, something unexpected happened. One of the top performing guy in A team (let's call him Spikes since he has spikey hair) suddenly announce that he is a successful candidate for a new role under another manager. So he will be leaving the team at the end of that month. In other words, with Spikey and myself both either switching or transferring, he is going to loose the top 2 guys in his A team. Which our scores were the main bragging subject for him in all his management meetings. He panicked. We could all see that because he had started to come to me and tried to give me shit about how is the switch bad for me. We know that he is trying to at least keep a high scorer in A team to keep the average scores high because the minions that he hired, and all pretty much failing in terms of that.
He started to regret that he has offered me with the switch. Yet because he has promised my switch, he is now feeling so regret that he is starting to feel that he is going to loose something that he boasted so much about in his meetings. To top that off, I have been getting top scores for the last 2 months of my move. That gotta make him regret even more.
So being a pitiful asshole he is, he started to throw shits to me on a daily basis about how is it bad for me to move from A team to B team. He has regretted to offer the option to move but instead of being honest he is now trying to con me into giving up the move and stay where I am, so that he can keep the team's score high. Again, He is such a pitiful jerk.
So one day, again, he couldn't stand it any longer because I am either ignoring his obvious hints or have been ignoring him in general, he called me into a room for a private talk again.
Knowing that my condition was to maintain the current shift after moving, he was probably thinking disallowing me to come in on that particular shift is going to have me back down and give up on the switch. He said "Alvin what if I tell you I cant give you that switch that you wanted?" And So as a normal logical human being I asked him why, just to see what justification can he give for eating his own words. And then the next line totally pissed me off.
He said :"I know that you need the 7 am shift but I never promised you anything."
What the fuck? He did fucking promised it. I'll swear to Satan that he did, else he can just go serve Satan forever.
Like hell I'm going to give in to that kinda bullshit.
So I told him, "Yes you did. That was the only condition that I demanded when you requested me to switch with Stonehead. You cant be having memory lost."
He knew that he couldn't get around that, because it was in fact true. He was obviously irritated that I was so calm at what he threw at me. So suddenly he changed his tactic.
"Do you know what will happen if you insist on that shift? I will have to revise the allowance that you are getting, do you know that coming in at 7am will get you a lower allowance?"
I didn't buy it "Come on Supervisor, I have been getting the same allowance from the start, besides all our previous leaders has justified why we are taking full allowance although we are not on rotation."
So he said "You are going to force me to put you guys on a rotation. Do you know that what will happen if you force me to make the whole team B to be on a rotating shift?"
Instead of answering him question, I asked him "Do you know why we are not on rotating shifts, although we are coming in on shifts?" I was angry that he actually touched on my pay, more over the whole team's pay, to try to have me back off on my condition. What a low life.
Let me explain the situation in B team.
I work in a center that has a system of shift rotation for most teams. Basically it means that people that comes in in odd hours gets paid more allowances. However that's intended for voice teams, which means the front office call agents, instead of the back office agents, like us.
We are not on rotating shifts, simply because our team serves a couple of different markets, ANZ, Hong Kong and Singapore. Obviously it requires a few different language capabilities for different markets. Not all of us are equipped with the language skills for all markets. So we can't go on a rotation shift. Further more it's not just about language limitations, it's also about people that come in to handle additional tasks. It's also not fair to have some people to come in later and do more work, and take a lower allowance because it's simply ain't fair. It's also not making sense to make the people that cant speak more languages to come in later because there are simply some markets that they cant touch on due to language limitations. So to be fair, our previous leaders have justified that we are to take all the same full allowances, reason being most of us working on all markets and also additional tasks.
Besides, the same allowance has been given ever since we were hired. After 2 years of hard work, instead of getting a promotion or an increment, he propose a pay cut? He's not insane, He's just simply totally stupid.
Later I kinda worked out that another reason he wanted to put me on an earlier shift was because one of the strong fella in B team has been coming to work late consistently. He couldn't find a way to control that guy so he thought that having me coming in on an earlier shift and have that guy coming on a later shift would solve his problem with the punctuality issues. Well he can dream on. I'm not going to give up what I requested to fix a problem that he couldn't. Because from what I know about that guy, there's no way in hell he will be punctual no matter what shift you put him on. His motto is always to "do the job, fuck the rest". Coming in early just to please the Supervisor? Not a chance.
After he failed what he tried he was obviously upset that I didn't budge on whatever that he proposed or whatever threats about pay cut that he threw at me.
So all of a sudden, he put on a friendly face:
"OK ALVIN! I am your team leader! I will keep my word! I will do what I promised! Dun worry! You know I will always fight for you! I will always do what I can for you!"
So i thought: "yeah fucking right, what were you trying to pull just a couple of minutes ago..."
Before the conversation ended, he asked me again with a hopeful tone:
"So what if I cant put you on the shift that you requested?"
I told him simple answer:
"I'll resign. I'm sure you know why."
"OK, he said"
And there the conversation ended.
What he did later was lame. Because he was trying to keep me in the team for as long as possible, just to get a couple more high scoring calls, and also tried to have me to pass on as much knowledge as possible to his new minions, he delayed my switch for more than a month, after he already switched Stonehead to A team. That means B team has been in operation with 1 less head count for that more than a month. I really dunno what's he's thinking.
And within this month, more things happened. There were more things that have affected my drive to work. Seriously made me ultra disgust with him.
I'll write on in the next post.
Stay tuned.
Signing off...
A new start in an old shit hole.
I have moved from A part of the team to B part of the team.
From a role that takes on angry customers all the time, to a role that customers are scared most the time.
For a change, I guess. Changing the role does not give me an increment, no credit. Only different job roles and some added job functions. I became some sort of a debt collector.
Dumbest thing in this change, is that I still have the same Supervisor. Sucks, ain't it? However, I hope it will not be long that I can get away from his shadow.
A lot has been changing at where I am working in this 2 years. Many people have joined but more people have left. Shitty thing is that most that have joined are recruited by the supervisor, which pretty much share the same shitty traits he possesses; and all the people that have left are the good people that couldn't stand how shitty he is.
Speaking of the Supervisor, it seems that he has never stopped to be featured in my blog. Lucky him. Unlucky me, and unlucky you for having to read about him.
He has been here for about 1 and a half year or somewhere around that, it's not like I care how long he has been here. It's just that as long as he's here, it's pretty much hell for me when I am at work, so much that it has started to mess with my personal life because I was so frustrated with him and I am always angry because of him.
I'm glad that my girlfriend gave me a session of counselling to get me out of that, otherwise it's gonna be really miserable for me to live a life under his shadow. Now I just focus on my work and just dun care about what he says, as long as I can make sure that my performance matrix are on par with the top people, that should pretty much shut him up.
But you know, a pest is a pest, he always have ways to annoy me. Well, not just me. If everyone is upset with him, I would think that it's probably not just me that's having some grudges with him.
Let me paint you a picture:
I am sitting right next to him now, as my new seating. All he has to do to see my screen, is to lean on his chair, and he can see whatever I have on my computer screen. the wall between the cubical now is so damn thin, it's merely separated with a 1 feet tall cloth like wall, so thin you cant even pin anything on it.
Just so that you know, I have always been multi-tasking in the last past 2 years. I am efficient enough to finish most of what I can do at work, slightly before the end of my day. So I have got a habit of surfing the Internet a little while I wait for the clock to tick a few more minutes to 4pm. So one day, he leaned over and asked me "Hey, are you logged in?", which means if my line is still live and call can come in anytime. So I answered yes. He said, "if you are logged in don't do something like that." OK, fine. I give him that.
On the following day, after I logged in at 7am. In the morning the call volumes are usually low to none, so all of us use that kinda gaps to have our breakfast, to kick start our day or something like that. Once again he leaned over and asked :"Are you logged in?". SO I answered yes. He said, "don't eat if you are logged in". What the heck? And so I am now disallowed to have breakfast at work.
And then a few days later, in the middle of the day where most of the customers are out for lunch, so the call volumes often drops to low or none. And so I took the break in the calls to catch up with some information by reading the newspaper. once again he leaned over and asked "are you logged in?". So being the honest person I am, I said yes. He said: "can you not read newspaper if you are logged in?" WHAT? my job is to make calls and take calls, when calls can be made and no calls are coming in, I cant even do whatever shit is available to my hands? is this what I get for being efficient and earn my own time?
Like all of us, we tend to whip out our phone to check of missed calls and SMSs from time to time, just to be sure that nothing emergency is happening and friends and family are not looking for us. and so one day i whipped out my phone and replied a long SMS to my mom. He leaned over and asked "Hey are you logged in?", he didn't even let me answer and continued "Can you not play with your phone while you are logged in? I'm sure you have more work to do!"
I kinda snapped. I talked to him in a slightly annoyed manner: "I AM HAVING MY LUNCH BREAK NOW BOSS. I NEED TO TEXT MY MOM, K THANKS BYE."
Ok I admit that I was very annoyed.
So no newspaper, no web forums, no googling, no eating, no nothing. He expects me to be doing something related to work ALL THE TIME. So isn't it better if i just fucking slacking and day dream until the end of the day? because by doing that I would seem busy all the time, although I am going to be blardy low on efficiency, at least it's gonna seems like I'm working.
Screw it.
So, that's what my life has became, sitting next to this loser.
Like I said, he has been here for about 1 and a half year now. So although he hasn't exactly progress much in his way of doing work, his ego has grown quite a bit. Well, he has always been arrogant to begin with but when he was new, he knew that he was new and so he was more courteous. However, as time goes by and as his tenureship becomes longer, he has started to feel superior in terms of his power as a Supervisor. So, he began to get people to do his work including things that he isn't clear how to do, or simply things that he think he dun need to do. In other words, feeling lazy. More over, the way he talks has also changed. When he was new and he needed something done, he would at least ask nicely. "please", "thank you" was the basics. Now, when he wants to see someone to discuss on whatever shit, he goes "hey, come, now!"
As if we have nothing more important to do than responding to his "calling a dog" way of summoning.
Oh well, I guess I should just leave him be. It's not like i care now anyway. I might as well consider a way out of this. we'll see.
OK let's end this post and let's get on a different topic. There's more about this ass I'd need to expose. Next post.
Signing off...
From a role that takes on angry customers all the time, to a role that customers are scared most the time.
For a change, I guess. Changing the role does not give me an increment, no credit. Only different job roles and some added job functions. I became some sort of a debt collector.
Dumbest thing in this change, is that I still have the same Supervisor. Sucks, ain't it? However, I hope it will not be long that I can get away from his shadow.
A lot has been changing at where I am working in this 2 years. Many people have joined but more people have left. Shitty thing is that most that have joined are recruited by the supervisor, which pretty much share the same shitty traits he possesses; and all the people that have left are the good people that couldn't stand how shitty he is.
Speaking of the Supervisor, it seems that he has never stopped to be featured in my blog. Lucky him. Unlucky me, and unlucky you for having to read about him.
He has been here for about 1 and a half year or somewhere around that, it's not like I care how long he has been here. It's just that as long as he's here, it's pretty much hell for me when I am at work, so much that it has started to mess with my personal life because I was so frustrated with him and I am always angry because of him.
I'm glad that my girlfriend gave me a session of counselling to get me out of that, otherwise it's gonna be really miserable for me to live a life under his shadow. Now I just focus on my work and just dun care about what he says, as long as I can make sure that my performance matrix are on par with the top people, that should pretty much shut him up.
But you know, a pest is a pest, he always have ways to annoy me. Well, not just me. If everyone is upset with him, I would think that it's probably not just me that's having some grudges with him.
Let me paint you a picture:
I am sitting right next to him now, as my new seating. All he has to do to see my screen, is to lean on his chair, and he can see whatever I have on my computer screen. the wall between the cubical now is so damn thin, it's merely separated with a 1 feet tall cloth like wall, so thin you cant even pin anything on it.
Just so that you know, I have always been multi-tasking in the last past 2 years. I am efficient enough to finish most of what I can do at work, slightly before the end of my day. So I have got a habit of surfing the Internet a little while I wait for the clock to tick a few more minutes to 4pm. So one day, he leaned over and asked me "Hey, are you logged in?", which means if my line is still live and call can come in anytime. So I answered yes. He said, "if you are logged in don't do something like that." OK, fine. I give him that.
On the following day, after I logged in at 7am. In the morning the call volumes are usually low to none, so all of us use that kinda gaps to have our breakfast, to kick start our day or something like that. Once again he leaned over and asked :"Are you logged in?". SO I answered yes. He said, "don't eat if you are logged in". What the heck? And so I am now disallowed to have breakfast at work.
And then a few days later, in the middle of the day where most of the customers are out for lunch, so the call volumes often drops to low or none. And so I took the break in the calls to catch up with some information by reading the newspaper. once again he leaned over and asked "are you logged in?". So being the honest person I am, I said yes. He said: "can you not read newspaper if you are logged in?" WHAT? my job is to make calls and take calls, when calls can be made and no calls are coming in, I cant even do whatever shit is available to my hands? is this what I get for being efficient and earn my own time?
Like all of us, we tend to whip out our phone to check of missed calls and SMSs from time to time, just to be sure that nothing emergency is happening and friends and family are not looking for us. and so one day i whipped out my phone and replied a long SMS to my mom. He leaned over and asked "Hey are you logged in?", he didn't even let me answer and continued "Can you not play with your phone while you are logged in? I'm sure you have more work to do!"
I kinda snapped. I talked to him in a slightly annoyed manner: "I AM HAVING MY LUNCH BREAK NOW BOSS. I NEED TO TEXT MY MOM, K THANKS BYE."
Ok I admit that I was very annoyed.
So no newspaper, no web forums, no googling, no eating, no nothing. He expects me to be doing something related to work ALL THE TIME. So isn't it better if i just fucking slacking and day dream until the end of the day? because by doing that I would seem busy all the time, although I am going to be blardy low on efficiency, at least it's gonna seems like I'm working.
Screw it.
So, that's what my life has became, sitting next to this loser.
Like I said, he has been here for about 1 and a half year now. So although he hasn't exactly progress much in his way of doing work, his ego has grown quite a bit. Well, he has always been arrogant to begin with but when he was new, he knew that he was new and so he was more courteous. However, as time goes by and as his tenureship becomes longer, he has started to feel superior in terms of his power as a Supervisor. So, he began to get people to do his work including things that he isn't clear how to do, or simply things that he think he dun need to do. In other words, feeling lazy. More over, the way he talks has also changed. When he was new and he needed something done, he would at least ask nicely. "please", "thank you" was the basics. Now, when he wants to see someone to discuss on whatever shit, he goes "hey
As if we have nothing more important to do than responding to his "calling a dog" way of summoning.
Oh well, I guess I should just leave him be. It's not like i care now anyway. I might as well consider a way out of this. we'll see.
OK let's end this post and let's get on a different topic. There's more about this ass I'd need to expose. Next post.
Signing off...
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
It's been a while.
It's been a while.
In fact looking at my last post, it's 15 March. it's more than 3 months already, gosh.
Naturally, I am not going to say that I'm not lazy, however it is in fact that there were things in life so important that I couldn't spare enough time to type what has been happening.
Well, I guess it's time to do some update.
As of 3 months ago, I told you that my boss sucked. Nothing has changed 3 months later. In fact I feel sorry for him that he is still pretty much who he used to be but he still thinks that he's doing a damn good job leading a team that was already good. He is someone who is really good at claiming credit I think that's why he can feel so much sense of achievement without really achieving anything. well, good for him, I guess he lives a happy and fulfilling life.
So, like I said a lot has changed.
The reason that I have been busy was mainly because I have met a girl that is very important to me. I have been spending most of my time with her, and our relationship grew. So I am now officially her boyfriend, which makes me happy. She's is the happiest thing that has happened to me in recent years, what a lucky guy I am.
So, about work. I wrote about an entry in February about a senior leaving the team. the decision for the successor for her position of Subject Matter Expert stirred up quite some drama. The thing is that there were a couple of candidates applied for that position, some were very qualified, some were incompetent.
Well before I get to that, let me explain what this role is about, I'm sure you guys will understand my point.
There's a "SME", or "Subject Matter Expert" in every team here in this organisation. Like the name of the role suggests, it usually is a person that is most familiar with all the processes in the team so that he/she will be the point of reference not only for the whole team, also for the Team Leader as well. Simply because if you have a Team Leader that was transfered from another department, he may be good in doing everything else but there's a good chance of a new leader being lacking in terms of process knowledges.
A SME should not be:
When we talking about a successor to my senior that's leaving, we are now seeking for a person that is knowledgable in terms of process flows, who are the point of escalations, and someone that is efficient, and a quick decision maker. On top of that this person needs to be good enough to be a substitue whenever the Team Leader is absent. No one expects this successor to be as good as my senior however, should at least on par or not so far away.
So, from the above description, it is so clearly who is the person that would have got the job.
My friend that is qualified for everything, was turned down for the position. Reason given by the Supervisor?
He is over qualified........................................................
What a whole lot of utter bullshit.
Which part of the world will you hear a promotion denied for being over qualified? Well, right here, no where else. This place suddenly became a land of jokes, decisions made by a retard will often end up with retarded outcome. This outcome, is far beyond retarded. I think linguists from oxford needs to come out with a new word to describe this level of retardness.
So who got the job?
The newbie that was newly transfered from another department who has minimal experience with things in this department, has became our SME. So how good she is?
In the "should not be" catagory, she fits number 1,2,4,5,6,7,9,10.
In the "should be" unfortunately she fits none.
Pretty much a total disaster. As time goes by, the fact manifested itself again and again, it's a disaster for her for getting the role; it is also a disaster for the team to have her as the new SME. I do not blame her for going to the interview, because she once mentioned that she did not even intend to get the job, was only going for the experience. So who is there to blame?
The supervisor that selected her.
Well it may not be fair to blame the Supervisor. However think of it in this way: no matter how good she is with her interview skills and everything, it is still down to the Supervisor to judge who is the more suitable candidate. In terms of performance there is always satistics, in terms of knowledge there will always be appropriate demonstartion while working on the floor. If there isnt sufficient time to judge a person to possess sufficient knowledge due to tenureship, then it should be considered that a person is not qualified.
Sounds logical?
And so my friend was disqualified for over qualified.
Think of it this way, in a F1 race in Sepang, a Ferrari car was so damn fast that it finished the race 2 laps ahead of the rest of the cars. Instead of being crowned the champion, the FIA ruled the Ferrari car to be disqualified because it was simply too fast, and the slowest car should get the opportunity to be award to a podium position.
Full of shit, isnt it?
That was exactly what happened.
And so a person that has zero knowledge about how things are run, has been given a title of "EXPERT", and recieves the relevant salary.
The only thing that she is different from my friend, is that she is an absolute dog that listens to every single little thing that Supervisor says, from go down and buy tissue paper, to attend a call conference that the Supervisor is reluctant to go for.
Master plan. Instead of hiring a Process Master, he hired a secretary/clark.
Good job.
I feel sorry for her, honestly. She has been suffering since she got the role, struggling to gain everyone's trust because of her poor performance. Instead of being an asset to the team she has become quite a baggage. She is constantly going to the adjacent team's SME to ask about things that is relevant to our team, asking for outsider's help. She is also unfamiliar with most of the operation procedures within the team so bad that she has to keep asking various people about how to do her job. It's already becoming a joke.
And she is responsible of doing Quality Analysis of the team's performances.
Hooray, like hell that's gonna ever be accurate. Anyway, it's none of my business.
That doesnt conclude the whole matter, but that's all I am going to say about this. It's not like anyone can help this. The only thing we can hope for is that this SME will pick up as much as she could and as soon as possible, and not become a jerk like her boss. Then maybe this team is salvagable. One thing that the supervisor fails to see, is that the morale in this team is at its historical low point. Well, minus those that he hired and 2 newbies, maybe they are still in good condition.
I'm already tired of bitching about him.
Ok, so, first post for returning to my dear blogging.
To be continued....
Signing off...
In fact looking at my last post, it's 15 March. it's more than 3 months already, gosh.
Well before I get to that, let me explain what this role is about, I'm sure you guys will understand my point.
There's a "SME", or "Subject Matter Expert" in every team here in this organisation. Like the name of the role suggests, it usually is a person that is most familiar with all the processes in the team so that he/she will be the point of reference not only for the whole team, also for the Team Leader as well. Simply because if you have a Team Leader that was transfered from another department, he may be good in doing everything else but there's a good chance of a new leader being lacking in terms of process knowledges.
A SME should not be:
- a secretary
- a clark
- a driver
- a bangla
- an admin
- a media coordinator
- an analyst
- an idiot
- a blur case
- a dog.
- Good in process knowledges
- Knows the correct point of escalations for different issues
- possess the ability to spot weakness in processes and come up with improvements
- has good leadership (as need to step in when Leader is away)
- Decision maker
When we talking about a successor to my senior that's leaving, we are now seeking for a person that is knowledgable in terms of process flows, who are the point of escalations, and someone that is efficient, and a quick decision maker. On top of that this person needs to be good enough to be a substitue whenever the Team Leader is absent. No one expects this successor to be as good as my senior however, should at least on par or not so far away.
So, from the above description, it is so clearly who is the person that would have got the job.
My friend that is qualified for everything, was turned down for the position. Reason given by the Supervisor?
He is over qualified........................................................
What a whole lot of utter bullshit.
Which part of the world will you hear a promotion denied for being over qualified? Well, right here, no where else. This place suddenly became a land of jokes, decisions made by a retard will often end up with retarded outcome. This outcome, is far beyond retarded. I think linguists from oxford needs to come out with a new word to describe this level of retardness.
So who got the job?
The newbie that was newly transfered from another department who has minimal experience with things in this department, has became our SME. So how good she is?
In the "should not be" catagory, she fits number 1,2,4,5,6,7,9,10.
In the "should be" unfortunately she fits none.
Pretty much a total disaster. As time goes by, the fact manifested itself again and again, it's a disaster for her for getting the role; it is also a disaster for the team to have her as the new SME. I do not blame her for going to the interview, because she once mentioned that she did not even intend to get the job, was only going for the experience. So who is there to blame?
The supervisor that selected her.
Well it may not be fair to blame the Supervisor. However think of it in this way: no matter how good she is with her interview skills and everything, it is still down to the Supervisor to judge who is the more suitable candidate. In terms of performance there is always satistics, in terms of knowledge there will always be appropriate demonstartion while working on the floor. If there isnt sufficient time to judge a person to possess sufficient knowledge due to tenureship, then it should be considered that a person is not qualified.
Sounds logical?
And so my friend was disqualified for over qualified.
Think of it this way, in a F1 race in Sepang, a Ferrari car was so damn fast that it finished the race 2 laps ahead of the rest of the cars. Instead of being crowned the champion, the FIA ruled the Ferrari car to be disqualified because it was simply too fast, and the slowest car should get the opportunity to be award to a podium position.
Full of shit, isnt it?
That was exactly what happened.
And so a person that has zero knowledge about how things are run, has been given a title of "EXPERT", and recieves the relevant salary.
The only thing that she is different from my friend, is that she is an absolute dog that listens to every single little thing that Supervisor says, from go down and buy tissue paper, to attend a call conference that the Supervisor is reluctant to go for.
Master plan. Instead of hiring a Process Master, he hired a secretary/clark.
Good job.
I feel sorry for her, honestly. She has been suffering since she got the role, struggling to gain everyone's trust because of her poor performance. Instead of being an asset to the team she has become quite a baggage. She is constantly going to the adjacent team's SME to ask about things that is relevant to our team, asking for outsider's help. She is also unfamiliar with most of the operation procedures within the team so bad that she has to keep asking various people about how to do her job. It's already becoming a joke.
And she is responsible of doing Quality Analysis of the team's performances.
Hooray, like hell that's gonna ever be accurate. Anyway, it's none of my business.
That doesnt conclude the whole matter, but that's all I am going to say about this. It's not like anyone can help this. The only thing we can hope for is that this SME will pick up as much as she could and as soon as possible, and not become a jerk like her boss. Then maybe this team is salvagable. One thing that the supervisor fails to see, is that the morale in this team is at its historical low point. Well, minus those that he hired and 2 newbies, maybe they are still in good condition.
I'm already tired of bitching about him.
Ok, so, first post for returning to my dear blogging.
To be continued....
Signing off...
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Relationship Status: "it's complicated"
One day I have had nothing better to do. So I logged into facebook to cause some trouble.
What did I do?
Simple, I changed my relationship status from “single” to “it’s complicated”. All of a sudden there was like a bomb exploded among my friends. Some left comments on the status change to ask for an answer obviously I will never answer publicly, for the simple fact that it’s complicated. Some had the time to actually draft up a private message and sent to me expecting me to spill all the information about who the girl is, how old she is, where she works yadaa yadaa yadaa… some closer friends even decided to call me up and expecting me to also just open up my heart and let them do a lab test.
One friend was especially an idiot; he called asked me who is that unfortunate old woman that I fell in love with, then he came up with all these conspiracy theories that how I would eventually murder this old woman and inherit all her fortune and such. If he wasn’t on the phone, I would have probably kicked him in the nuts. What an idiot. But it’s OK, that’s why we’re friends. Although you are an idiot but I still love you, no worries. Now go die.
Nothing has happened, nothing has changed. I was just having a few extra minutes to do some clicking. The reason that I haven’t changed it back is because my Internet died shortly after that and I haven’t had another opportunity to update it back to “single” again, and the mobile facebook doesn’t offer that kind of functionality. So for all you people who kicked up lots of dust thinking there’d be a lot of hooos and haaaaas, please settle down. I’m sorry to disappoint you because there will not be any love drama or people jumping off buildings, planes or ships that eventually hit an iceberg. Not one is going to drown in cold water and asking the girl to live on. I can swim, and I have not enough money to board a ship that is capable of travelling to somewhere with an iceberg to hit and sink itself.
With that said, I think it’s enough for me to say this much. So you people who don’t believe what I just said, suit yourself and let your imagination run wild. I’m glad that one mouse click fulfilled your life for at least a couple of minutes coming up with speculations. Hope you had fun.
Signing off.
What did I do?
Simple, I changed my relationship status from “single” to “it’s complicated”. All of a sudden there was like a bomb exploded among my friends. Some left comments on the status change to ask for an answer obviously I will never answer publicly, for the simple fact that it’s complicated. Some had the time to actually draft up a private message and sent to me expecting me to spill all the information about who the girl is, how old she is, where she works yadaa yadaa yadaa… some closer friends even decided to call me up and expecting me to also just open up my heart and let them do a lab test.
One friend was especially an idiot; he called asked me who is that unfortunate old woman that I fell in love with, then he came up with all these conspiracy theories that how I would eventually murder this old woman and inherit all her fortune and such. If he wasn’t on the phone, I would have probably kicked him in the nuts. What an idiot. But it’s OK, that’s why we’re friends. Although you are an idiot but I still love you, no worries. Now go die.
Nothing has happened, nothing has changed. I was just having a few extra minutes to do some clicking. The reason that I haven’t changed it back is because my Internet died shortly after that and I haven’t had another opportunity to update it back to “single” again, and the mobile facebook doesn’t offer that kind of functionality. So for all you people who kicked up lots of dust thinking there’d be a lot of hooos and haaaaas, please settle down. I’m sorry to disappoint you because there will not be any love drama or people jumping off buildings, planes or ships that eventually hit an iceberg. Not one is going to drown in cold water and asking the girl to live on. I can swim, and I have not enough money to board a ship that is capable of travelling to somewhere with an iceberg to hit and sink itself.
With that said, I think it’s enough for me to say this much. So you people who don’t believe what I just said, suit yourself and let your imagination run wild. I’m glad that one mouse click fulfilled your life for at least a couple of minutes coming up with speculations. Hope you had fun.
Signing off.
Friday, March 11, 2011
So is it my fault you made an error?
I have already typed this entry somewhere.
Almost 5 thousand words long and I got really fed up having to edit/proof read that entry. At some point it got so tired that I gave up reading my own typing and decided not to go over it and retype it. That entry is at home on my own computer which lately I have so little time to get to, so I’ve decided to write another entry again, to overwrite that.
Some of you would think that I was wasting such an effort on the last piece I typed but then it’s my own effort, and I typed it for my own pleasure, so I dun really care if I want to type it again because it’s entirely up to me.
Anyway, enough being arrogant, let me get back to what I typed and retype it again in this entry.
It’s been almost a month since my last entry, around half a month; you can do your own math when you see the dates of this entry and the last. In the previous entry I briefly mentioned that this lazy colleague of mine actually confronted me secretly on the company’s internal messenger on something he didn’t do right.
Let me give you a little bit of a background on what’s happening:
I am the person that’s taking care of the team’s email inbox at the moment. Every day when emails that comes into our team inbox I will sort, filter, reject, forward and then drop into the inboxes of the appropriate team member. My idea is that the more that I take care of what’s coming in, the fewer burdens the team will have. Some friends told me I dun have to do this because all I have to do is to randomly drop into everyone’s mailbox and my job is done but I believe that each person has to pick up his/her own shits. I know how annoying It is when someone screws up, and you have to pick up from there.
With that explained, you should understand better of how this happened.
So a couple a days before my previous entry, I came across an email in the team inbox with some serious accusations towards some other team, escalated from the lazy team mate to my supervisor, then from my supervisor towards the team to question them about why they did not do their work. I had a hunch of something is wrong about this escalation. I’m sorry to say that I dun really care but I’m also sorry to say that I really lack confident in all the information that this lazy workmate provides most the time.
So being busybody as I am, I went ahead and do some brief check on whatever he’s escalating before I drop that mail into his own inbox.
Not surprisingly, he’s got things all wrong.
Basically what happened is that he spoke with a client and client complains that our company never got in touch with them before proceeding with the actions against the client. The client felt unfair. This lazy work mate was supposed to check through on all the clients claim before going ahead and decide what he can do about the client, or what he could have done for the client. However being a lazy ass as he is, he did not bother to check anything at all. All he did was straight away taken the client’s story, writing that onto an email and then escalated to our supervisor. There’s a Chinese saying that says bad things always happen in pairs. I’d say idiots always come in pairs. These two good friends, the supervisor and the lazy work mate, then proceeded to escalate this case to the other team to question why the other team has not done their work of sending the appropriate communication to the client.
The thing is, we have worked with this other team for more than a year; I am already so familiar with how they work and this kind of mistake are so damn rare that it shouldn’t even have happened. So I went ahead and checked if the communication was indeed sent out to the client. Not surprising of course it was indeed sent to the client. What the client was claiming and what the lazy work mate was accusing was totally an empty accusation. He didn’t check the case before he escalated it, and his good friend the supervisor just took his word and shoot the other team about it.
The mutual work relationship and trust we have with the other team was built by the senior members of our current team. This kind of unjustified and unchecked accusation posts a potential threat to harm the relationship we have built over the last year. I couldn’t stand to watch them jeopardize this valuable relationship, so I had to do something. So since the supervisor previously complained I dun go to him directly, this time I drafted an email telling him that there’s nothing wrong the other team has done, and we should withdraw the escalation and just call back the client and tell them what he have missed, to save our grace.
Of course after I told him that he realized how bad of a mistake he has made. I didn’t pay attention what have happened after that because it was actually none of my business, I was just giving a gentle reminder just so that the person who represents the team does not embarrass himself and in turn embarrasses all of us. Apparently he wasn’t quite happy and called his good friend for a private talk. I was just sitting next to the supervisor so I kinda have an idea what kind of thing they are talking about. These kinda things are like… ok, you spot a problem, you rectify, and remember it so that it doesn’t happen again.
Not for some people.
The moment that lazy colleague walked back to his computer after being shown how he almost got all of our asses kicked, not only he didn’t appreciate the favor, he was upset that I actually picked up the error. This is when he really really got on my bad side.
Instead of telling you what he did, let me show you what he did. He had no balls to confront me directly, so he did it over the internal messenger for our office. The conversation was as below, my thoughts at that time are in brackets, all the names are edited to protect the relevant identities:
================================================
9:08 AM Lazy Colleague
bro....whats up with the email u sent to Supervisor ....in regards to the System notification??????
(what the fuck you actually dare come confront me?)
9:09 AM Me
i said, the SYSTEM notification was sent correctly and client even answered it.
it was just FYI for him.
nothing was up.
(You moron, it wasn’t against you)
9:09 AM Lazy Colleague
was it ur case?
(It was yours, I know)
9:10 AM Me
it was in Team Inbox.
9:11 AM Lazy Colleague
well my name was sitting in the heading of the mail....u cant see it?
(What the fuck are you trying to do? Pick a fight? What a childish fella.)
9:11 AM Me
your point being?
(actually I meant WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT)
9:16 AM Lazy Colleague
if u wanna help on my cases....im more than happy to push all my email to u
(You were already doing shits like this, not doing your own work and other people were picking up shits after you)
9:18 AM Me
if you have a problem, raise it.
i was monitoring for SYSTEM erros and so happened that these cases showed up, and i was just sharing my findings with Supervisor. i didnt touch your cases.
(I meant, if you wanna fight, bring it on, I am kind enough already for not exposing your sorry ass to the whole world)
9:21 AM Lazy Colleague
come la bro....share the info with me....since its my case.....i got no intentions of raising it...im not that childish.....why u have the interest of raising sumthing amoung the team members?...so my point is share the findings..ok?....are we aligned or u think we need to raise it?
(If I wanted to raise something against you, you would have already been gone. You think you never make mistakes? You make at least a dozen a day)
9:22 AM Me
come on bro. if i have an issue i would have already raised it. the case was raised to Argentina and i was just trying to stop Our Team from being embarrassed by alerting Supervisor.
(It wasn’t for you, it wasn’t about you, it wasn’t about me against you either, stop thinking you are so fucking important that I have to waste my time to think about how I need to get rid of you)
9:23 AM Lazy Colleague
all right im not happy ...lets talk over this with sum starbucks coffee.....hehehehe... agree?
(bring it on)
9:36 AM Me
It's better to include Supervisor
i'm ok with that.
(get your friend, let’s see what he says)
9:42 AM Lazy Colleague
whos buying?....shall we lure Supervisor in to this?
(If you are able to get the stingy fella to buy you a drink, I’d like to see you try)
9:50 AM Me
you can go ahead and see if you con him into buying. i'll pass. gonna cut down on sugar intake.
(I dun want no drink from neither of you)
9:51 AM Lazy Colleague
alrite...will do
no worreis ....
(I have so much confident that you will not make this happen)
=========================================================
And so the conversation ended.
I couldn’t really believe he actually dared to bring this up. If I were him I would just shut the fuck up and start checking carefully before I raise another escalation in the future. Obviously the only thing he thought was wrong was that I checked out what have happened. Instead of blaming himself for making such a shameful mistake he blamed me for picking up the mistake that he made.
What a retard.
Anyway, I think I’ve said enough. This post was supposed to be up by 22 January but I was so busy due to so many things and it’s delayed until now.
Stay tuned, there's more to come.
Signing off.
Almost 5 thousand words long and I got really fed up having to edit/proof read that entry. At some point it got so tired that I gave up reading my own typing and decided not to go over it and retype it. That entry is at home on my own computer which lately I have so little time to get to, so I’ve decided to write another entry again, to overwrite that.
Some of you would think that I was wasting such an effort on the last piece I typed but then it’s my own effort, and I typed it for my own pleasure, so I dun really care if I want to type it again because it’s entirely up to me.
Anyway, enough being arrogant, let me get back to what I typed and retype it again in this entry.
It’s been almost a month since my last entry, around half a month; you can do your own math when you see the dates of this entry and the last. In the previous entry I briefly mentioned that this lazy colleague of mine actually confronted me secretly on the company’s internal messenger on something he didn’t do right.
Let me give you a little bit of a background on what’s happening:
I am the person that’s taking care of the team’s email inbox at the moment. Every day when emails that comes into our team inbox I will sort, filter, reject, forward and then drop into the inboxes of the appropriate team member. My idea is that the more that I take care of what’s coming in, the fewer burdens the team will have. Some friends told me I dun have to do this because all I have to do is to randomly drop into everyone’s mailbox and my job is done but I believe that each person has to pick up his/her own shits. I know how annoying It is when someone screws up, and you have to pick up from there.
With that explained, you should understand better of how this happened.
So a couple a days before my previous entry, I came across an email in the team inbox with some serious accusations towards some other team, escalated from the lazy team mate to my supervisor, then from my supervisor towards the team to question them about why they did not do their work. I had a hunch of something is wrong about this escalation. I’m sorry to say that I dun really care but I’m also sorry to say that I really lack confident in all the information that this lazy workmate provides most the time.
So being busybody as I am, I went ahead and do some brief check on whatever he’s escalating before I drop that mail into his own inbox.
Not surprisingly, he’s got things all wrong.
Basically what happened is that he spoke with a client and client complains that our company never got in touch with them before proceeding with the actions against the client. The client felt unfair. This lazy work mate was supposed to check through on all the clients claim before going ahead and decide what he can do about the client, or what he could have done for the client. However being a lazy ass as he is, he did not bother to check anything at all. All he did was straight away taken the client’s story, writing that onto an email and then escalated to our supervisor. There’s a Chinese saying that says bad things always happen in pairs. I’d say idiots always come in pairs. These two good friends, the supervisor and the lazy work mate, then proceeded to escalate this case to the other team to question why the other team has not done their work of sending the appropriate communication to the client.
The thing is, we have worked with this other team for more than a year; I am already so familiar with how they work and this kind of mistake are so damn rare that it shouldn’t even have happened. So I went ahead and checked if the communication was indeed sent out to the client. Not surprising of course it was indeed sent to the client. What the client was claiming and what the lazy work mate was accusing was totally an empty accusation. He didn’t check the case before he escalated it, and his good friend the supervisor just took his word and shoot the other team about it.
The mutual work relationship and trust we have with the other team was built by the senior members of our current team. This kind of unjustified and unchecked accusation posts a potential threat to harm the relationship we have built over the last year. I couldn’t stand to watch them jeopardize this valuable relationship, so I had to do something. So since the supervisor previously complained I dun go to him directly, this time I drafted an email telling him that there’s nothing wrong the other team has done, and we should withdraw the escalation and just call back the client and tell them what he have missed, to save our grace.
Of course after I told him that he realized how bad of a mistake he has made. I didn’t pay attention what have happened after that because it was actually none of my business, I was just giving a gentle reminder just so that the person who represents the team does not embarrass himself and in turn embarrasses all of us. Apparently he wasn’t quite happy and called his good friend for a private talk. I was just sitting next to the supervisor so I kinda have an idea what kind of thing they are talking about. These kinda things are like… ok, you spot a problem, you rectify, and remember it so that it doesn’t happen again.
Not for some people.
The moment that lazy colleague walked back to his computer after being shown how he almost got all of our asses kicked, not only he didn’t appreciate the favor, he was upset that I actually picked up the error. This is when he really really got on my bad side.
Instead of telling you what he did, let me show you what he did. He had no balls to confront me directly, so he did it over the internal messenger for our office. The conversation was as below, my thoughts at that time are in brackets, all the names are edited to protect the relevant identities:
================================================
9:08 AM Lazy Colleague
bro....whats up with the email u sent to Supervisor ....in regards to the System notification??????
(what the fuck you actually dare come confront me?)
9:09 AM Me
i said, the SYSTEM notification was sent correctly and client even answered it.
it was just FYI for him.
nothing was up.
(You moron, it wasn’t against you)
9:09 AM Lazy Colleague
was it ur case?
(It was yours, I know)
9:10 AM Me
it was in Team Inbox.
9:11 AM Lazy Colleague
well my name was sitting in the heading of the mail....u cant see it?
(What the fuck are you trying to do? Pick a fight? What a childish fella.)
9:11 AM Me
your point being?
(actually I meant WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT)
9:16 AM Lazy Colleague
if u wanna help on my cases....im more than happy to push all my email to u
(You were already doing shits like this, not doing your own work and other people were picking up shits after you)
9:18 AM Me
if you have a problem, raise it.
i was monitoring for SYSTEM erros and so happened that these cases showed up, and i was just sharing my findings with Supervisor. i didnt touch your cases.
(I meant, if you wanna fight, bring it on, I am kind enough already for not exposing your sorry ass to the whole world)
9:21 AM Lazy Colleague
come la bro....share the info with me....since its my case.....i got no intentions of raising it...im not that childish.....why u have the interest of raising sumthing amoung the team members?...so my point is share the findings..ok?....are we aligned or u think we need to raise it?
(If I wanted to raise something against you, you would have already been gone. You think you never make mistakes? You make at least a dozen a day)
9:22 AM Me
come on bro. if i have an issue i would have already raised it. the case was raised to Argentina and i was just trying to stop Our Team from being embarrassed by alerting Supervisor.
(It wasn’t for you, it wasn’t about you, it wasn’t about me against you either, stop thinking you are so fucking important that I have to waste my time to think about how I need to get rid of you)
9:23 AM Lazy Colleague
all right im not happy ...lets talk over this with sum starbucks coffee.....hehehehe... agree?
(bring it on)
9:36 AM Me
It's better to include Supervisor
i'm ok with that.
(get your friend, let’s see what he says)
9:42 AM Lazy Colleague
whos buying?....shall we lure Supervisor in to this?
(If you are able to get the stingy fella to buy you a drink, I’d like to see you try)
9:50 AM Me
you can go ahead and see if you con him into buying. i'll pass. gonna cut down on sugar intake.
(I dun want no drink from neither of you)
9:51 AM Lazy Colleague
alrite...will do
no worreis ....
(I have so much confident that you will not make this happen)
=========================================================
And so the conversation ended.
I couldn’t really believe he actually dared to bring this up. If I were him I would just shut the fuck up and start checking carefully before I raise another escalation in the future. Obviously the only thing he thought was wrong was that I checked out what have happened. Instead of blaming himself for making such a shameful mistake he blamed me for picking up the mistake that he made.
What a retard.
Anyway, I think I’ve said enough. This post was supposed to be up by 22 January but I was so busy due to so many things and it’s delayed until now.
Stay tuned, there's more to come.
Signing off.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Knowledge VS Stone Head
Never in my life I have seen someone that is so much of an idiot. How hard is it to understand “This is wrong! Don’t do it!” Yet I wasted one and a half hours trying to explain to him why the way he was doing is wrong and why he shouldn’t be doing it. and for that one and a half hours he was just repeatedly trying to talk back with “but… but… but..”.
Screw his “Buts”. I was so frustrated talking to him to a point that I almost shoved the “Buts” into his butt if my friend didn’t message me and told me to join them at Aloha (a pub) ASAP.
Ok if I seem exaggerated and you are thinking that I might be bad in teaching someone to do something as easy as pressing the power button to turn on the PC, let me give you an idea of my ability in teaching things to living beings. Normal living beings, mind you.
My mom was a teacher, before she decided to resign and take care of us 3 sons she was the finest teacher known at where she was teaching, and was promoted to be the vice principle of the school before she resigned. I grew up watching her teach, and I learn from that. I have been teaching on and off since my college days, and after I graduated from my university holding a degree in “Communications” I even taught in a famous primary school in SS2 PJ to have a taste of the life of a teacher. My mother’s teaching methodologies are tested and proven to be one of the most effective and most influential even for me and for all the students that I have taught. I do not regard myself as the best teacher but I am confident enough with the ways of teaching children and my skills in face to face communication when I want to teach a person to what is right or wrong of ONE SIMPLE FUCKING MATTER, there shouldn’t be much problem.
I was wrong. Unfortunately when you are teaching a stone head, everything is a problem.
Friday night after work there was supposed to be a celebration going on for 2 of the colleagues in the same floor, both of them celebrating birthdays in February. I finished work at 4pm and I was staying back to chat with a girl and also to wait for 6pm so that everyone would be there and I can join them. 5:30pm when I was going to leave suddenly this fella in the other half of the team suddenly called out to me, he was checking on something as simple as 1+1=2 and he wanted to get a second opinion. Who the heck on earth gets a SECOND OPINION for 1+1=2? No matter of where you put either of the number “1”s, the answer will still be “2”.
So, being a nice person that I am (screw you all that are disagreeing that) I went ahead and gave him a walk through on what he was asking about. With him give me “but…but…but…” in between my answers, I managed to finish what I had to say without feeling too irritated because I already knew that he can be irritating and I was prepared.
And then he questioned what I just asked. I was starting to think that I was a little under prepared about how irritating he could have been.
So being a nice person that I am (I am starting to agree with the sounds of disagreement to that now) I went ahead and gave him a second walk through on the same subject again, inevitably showing some annoyance in my voice. With him give me “but…but…but…” in between my answers, I started to feel really irritated. At the end of that walk through I couldn’t help but asked him, why does he not know how to do such simple things?
And then something tipped me off further. I asked him to check on some vital information that is a must do before he check on how to handle the cases, he answered “I already checked” in a SO DAMN SURE kinda way. I requested him to check again as I didn’t see him do it, he answered back “I did lar”. So I then firmly DEMANDED him to do it again. He looked annoyed and so did it while mumbling and guess what, he didn’t check. The status of the case was not what he said, I am so fucking sure that he was assuming it and he didn’t check it. I got annoyed.
So I questioned him on why did he not do it.
He answered: “no one taught me how to do this and no one told me that I’m supposed to do this.”
I immediately felt uncontrollably irritated for one very blardy simple reason, I WAS THERE when his seniors taught him about this. I heard the whole thing and I knew it was well taught to him. I thought my violent days have been long gone but I had a surge of rage and almost just gave him a smack in his face. I screamed in my mine at him “WHAT AN IDIOT!”.
(as I was typing this another idiot in the team has sent me messages over the internal messenger trying to start a fight with me. No balls to bring it up in broad day light but trying to start something in the dark. What a wuss).
So being an emo fella I am, I just threw it straight into his face to save time. “I was there when they teach you this, don’t give me this bullshit.” He got stunned and he tried to argue further but I decided to take none of his bullshit any further. So I told him to shut the fuck up and listen to me while I go over the whole process again. He tried to argue but I told him if he doesn’t want to listen it’s fine, I further pointed out a problem that I already pointed out on day 1 when he joined the team, he needs to pay attention to listen to what people tell him. He wasn’t happy but I’m glad he didn’t argue further because I was ready to leave him be.
And so, for the third time, I gave him another walk through, this time I demanded him to start making notes. True enough, I knew one of his reasons of not being able to learn things effectively is not being able to take notes. He seems to think that asking the same question 10000 times is fine as long as he learns it. So I delivered to him, I pointed out all his bad habits in learning especially about not taking notes and even if he does all his notes became trash once the session is done. Not only that he does not refer to them, even if he wanted to he has no idea where and what notes to refer to, or even if he found the notes, he wouldn’t even be able to comprehend what his notes were about anyway. Like I said, the notes are just trash. He wasn’t happy, but I proved to him to get him to show me some notes that he has taken regarding previous topics. Not only that he is unable to find them, on things that he is able to find, he can’t comprehend, and in the end he even claimed that no one taught him about certain subjects.
I was very unhappy on that claim and couldn’t control myself but to deliver whatever he said right back into his face, pointed out again that I was there when he was being taught.
It wasn’t the end of it. He was talking back all the while when I was telling him that he wasn’t doing things right. And then I decided that I had enough. I got a message from friends in Aloha that I am an hour late. So I told him fuck it. I already said whatever shit I had to say, over and over again. It’s up to him to take it or not. And so I left the office.
First time in my life I just dunned 2 bottles of Calsberg in 10 minutes. Shows how stress it was for me to talk to him. One and a half hours. that’s it. no more. Not on the same subjects anyway. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Signing off.
Screw his “Buts”. I was so frustrated talking to him to a point that I almost shoved the “Buts” into his butt if my friend didn’t message me and told me to join them at Aloha (a pub) ASAP.
Ok if I seem exaggerated and you are thinking that I might be bad in teaching someone to do something as easy as pressing the power button to turn on the PC, let me give you an idea of my ability in teaching things to living beings. Normal living beings, mind you.
My mom was a teacher, before she decided to resign and take care of us 3 sons she was the finest teacher known at where she was teaching, and was promoted to be the vice principle of the school before she resigned. I grew up watching her teach, and I learn from that. I have been teaching on and off since my college days, and after I graduated from my university holding a degree in “Communications” I even taught in a famous primary school in SS2 PJ to have a taste of the life of a teacher. My mother’s teaching methodologies are tested and proven to be one of the most effective and most influential even for me and for all the students that I have taught. I do not regard myself as the best teacher but I am confident enough with the ways of teaching children and my skills in face to face communication when I want to teach a person to what is right or wrong of ONE SIMPLE FUCKING MATTER, there shouldn’t be much problem.
I was wrong. Unfortunately when you are teaching a stone head, everything is a problem.
Friday night after work there was supposed to be a celebration going on for 2 of the colleagues in the same floor, both of them celebrating birthdays in February. I finished work at 4pm and I was staying back to chat with a girl and also to wait for 6pm so that everyone would be there and I can join them. 5:30pm when I was going to leave suddenly this fella in the other half of the team suddenly called out to me, he was checking on something as simple as 1+1=2 and he wanted to get a second opinion. Who the heck on earth gets a SECOND OPINION for 1+1=2? No matter of where you put either of the number “1”s, the answer will still be “2”.
So, being a nice person that I am (screw you all that are disagreeing that) I went ahead and gave him a walk through on what he was asking about. With him give me “but…but…but…” in between my answers, I managed to finish what I had to say without feeling too irritated because I already knew that he can be irritating and I was prepared.
And then he questioned what I just asked. I was starting to think that I was a little under prepared about how irritating he could have been.
So being a nice person that I am (I am starting to agree with the sounds of disagreement to that now) I went ahead and gave him a second walk through on the same subject again, inevitably showing some annoyance in my voice. With him give me “but…but…but…” in between my answers, I started to feel really irritated. At the end of that walk through I couldn’t help but asked him, why does he not know how to do such simple things?
And then something tipped me off further. I asked him to check on some vital information that is a must do before he check on how to handle the cases, he answered “I already checked” in a SO DAMN SURE kinda way. I requested him to check again as I didn’t see him do it, he answered back “I did lar”. So I then firmly DEMANDED him to do it again. He looked annoyed and so did it while mumbling and guess what, he didn’t check. The status of the case was not what he said, I am so fucking sure that he was assuming it and he didn’t check it. I got annoyed.
So I questioned him on why did he not do it.
He answered: “no one taught me how to do this and no one told me that I’m supposed to do this.”
I immediately felt uncontrollably irritated for one very blardy simple reason, I WAS THERE when his seniors taught him about this. I heard the whole thing and I knew it was well taught to him. I thought my violent days have been long gone but I had a surge of rage and almost just gave him a smack in his face. I screamed in my mine at him “WHAT AN IDIOT!”.
(as I was typing this another idiot in the team has sent me messages over the internal messenger trying to start a fight with me. No balls to bring it up in broad day light but trying to start something in the dark. What a wuss).
So being an emo fella I am, I just threw it straight into his face to save time. “I was there when they teach you this, don’t give me this bullshit.” He got stunned and he tried to argue further but I decided to take none of his bullshit any further. So I told him to shut the fuck up and listen to me while I go over the whole process again. He tried to argue but I told him if he doesn’t want to listen it’s fine, I further pointed out a problem that I already pointed out on day 1 when he joined the team, he needs to pay attention to listen to what people tell him. He wasn’t happy but I’m glad he didn’t argue further because I was ready to leave him be.
And so, for the third time, I gave him another walk through, this time I demanded him to start making notes. True enough, I knew one of his reasons of not being able to learn things effectively is not being able to take notes. He seems to think that asking the same question 10000 times is fine as long as he learns it. So I delivered to him, I pointed out all his bad habits in learning especially about not taking notes and even if he does all his notes became trash once the session is done. Not only that he does not refer to them, even if he wanted to he has no idea where and what notes to refer to, or even if he found the notes, he wouldn’t even be able to comprehend what his notes were about anyway. Like I said, the notes are just trash. He wasn’t happy, but I proved to him to get him to show me some notes that he has taken regarding previous topics. Not only that he is unable to find them, on things that he is able to find, he can’t comprehend, and in the end he even claimed that no one taught him about certain subjects.
I was very unhappy on that claim and couldn’t control myself but to deliver whatever he said right back into his face, pointed out again that I was there when he was being taught.
It wasn’t the end of it. He was talking back all the while when I was telling him that he wasn’t doing things right. And then I decided that I had enough. I got a message from friends in Aloha that I am an hour late. So I told him fuck it. I already said whatever shit I had to say, over and over again. It’s up to him to take it or not. And so I left the office.
First time in my life I just dunned 2 bottles of Calsberg in 10 minutes. Shows how stress it was for me to talk to him. One and a half hours. that’s it. no more. Not on the same subjects anyway. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Signing off.
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