(no subject)

[raliyn.livejournal.com]

I work for (big evil labour contracting company), which contracts help desk employees to (bigger & even more evil IT company). Our managers and HR representatives have a proven history of lying to their employee's faces and spewing bullshit in order to achieve a desired goal, which usually involves threatening us for playing games & watching things on youtube or scaring us into working harder by telling us fake statistics about how bad (certain day of the year) was last year.

Today's latest round of bullshit spewing transpired as such:

My HR representative, who works for (big evil labour contracting company), gave me a "friendly reminder" not to play games during work hours, and that (bigger & even more evil IT company)'s assets, ie. the laptop they assigned me, are for business use only. I asked her what I should be doing, then, in the 5-10 minutes I often have between calls.

Her answer: I'm supposed to go on (bigger & even more evil IT company)'s intranet website and research the company history and how our manager's vision and business plan for the office I work from fits in with (bigger & even more evil IT company)'s overall goals.

Her reasoning: Doing so will give me a greater appreciation for the business that takes place here, will give me a better perspective on what part my contribution (ie answering the phone) plays in the grand scheme of things, and, get this: will "allow me to communicate with (bigger & even more evil IT company)'s employees on a deeper level", thereby improving my overall value to (bigger & even more evil IT company).

This is like trying to get people who clean septic tanks for a living to care about their company's goal of creating a city with less shit in it. It's just not going to happen.

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

She got that out with a straight face? Admirable!

[the-reda.livejournal.com]

Damn, you beat me to that.
I have to secretly admire people who can do that i.e. spew BS of that caliber and not start giggling.

[raliyn.livejournal.com]

to be fair, the bullshit spewing took place over instant messaging... i guess she didnt have the balls to tell me in person

[mouser.livejournal.com]

It was probably a copy and paste. I bet she has to use it a lot because you all really suck and are lazy. Just ask her.

God I hate people like that.

[trayce.livejournal.com]

In all fairness, I can understand why they dont want you playing*games* on the company dime. A bit of facebook or idle news site reading is one thing, but games are full screen and distracting (unless you're talkin' a hand of solitaire) and from experience I can attest that our helpdesk got slammed for games once too - because they got so distracted playing C&C or whatever that they were *not answering the phone calls or emails at night*.

And thats just a bit much.

Asking you to read up on the company history and mission statements is a complete wank though.

[raliyn.livejournal.com]

Update: I was playing minesweeper :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

bring a DS or a PSP :-)

Or play solitaire.... with real cards.

[trayce.livejournal.com]

Or knitting! =)

[kuangning]

Ooh, yes. Knitting is good.

[mouse-from-marz.livejournal.com]

or jewelry craft - it's amazing what you can do with wire, stones and/or beads and two pairs of pliers and a snip. or cut up old discarded components and use circuit board to make interesting geek-style jewelry.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Or an actual book. How quaint is that?

[kuangning]

I second the "bring real cards" suggestion.

[fearrett.livejournal.com]

Thirded.

[taiki.livejournal.com]

bring real mines.

[merlin-t-wizard.livejournal.com]

Absolutely!

[pixilated-serra.livejournal.com]

thirded

[the-reda.livejournal.com]

... what should you do after you are done with that? I mean 10 min later ;-P

Is there at least any training stuff on there? I mean she can hardly object to you using the company intranet to *snort* better yourself ...

[reanimated.livejournal.com]

i swear it must be the same company i'm with. unless all staffing agencies are the same. which is likely.

[arabwel.livejournal.com]

Mmmmh, i think i might be a few cuicls over.. or it is jsut SS, DC.

[merlin-t-wizard.livejournal.com]

My response: "I will give that suggestion all the careful consideration that it deserves. Thank You for letting me know". (noise of vomiting in the background) Then start bringing you own laptop. That's what I've had to do. My employer's Acceptable Use Policy boils down to "don't". So, now I carry two: theirs and an old one that was theirs until the drive crashed, and they decided it wasn't worth paying to rebuild it, so they told me to discard it. I replaced the HD, and set it back up. For network connectivity, a Cel connection card.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Games are OK, but there are games and games.

One of my favorite games was to update as many chunks of the helpdesk FAQ/wiki as I could, especially the ones which hadn't been touched for a while. As well as being easily passed off as a management-approved activity, it meant that (a) three-quarters of the HD staff got used to seeing my name as the author of their documentation, (b) the L3 and higher-level teams got used to me asking for information, which meant I had a lot more direct lines of enquiry when I needed them, and (c) I won a lot of arguments with both managers and co-workers with the simple phrase "Yes, I know what the documentation says, because I WROTE IT."

Good for resumé fodder, too.

Then there were games like digging up obscure documentation on things like network structures, project teams, things which were just off the radar. I didn't always have the time to add all of this to the helpdesk docs, which meant people tended to come to me for info. For a time, I even ran a popular text-only infodump file off our fileserver, right up until management cornered me and gave me a week off to convert it into official documentation.

Two days of cut-n-paste plus making up subject headings, three days of, essentially... oh dear. Did management just give me three days of completely unsupervised free time?

[agmlego.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know what the documentation says, because I WROTE IT.

THIS.

--
"Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem"

[jecook]

Damn Straight.

I've written or updated a lot of the crap we use at work for a bunch of our apps.

[emsporter.livejournal.com]

Oh very yes. It's an excellent thing to do, and also why I appear to have become the official team trainer. And, for some reason, the token old guy on the team always lets me know where he's going (sandwich, coffee, etc) when he takes a break.

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

I have so many documents on my PC and in my home directory that nobody else has access to that it isn't even funny. And most of it isn't in a format I'm allowed to post, so it just sits there and gets sent around as people need it.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

Or recreating ten years of copied and recopied documents that have been through the xerox so many times it looks like they passed through a bend in the space-time continuum.

"Say, where'd you get that nice version of our (insert widely used company document here)?"
"I made it."
"... Can I get a copy?"

Or creating NEW ones from scratch because whatever absurdly inefficient system they are currently using takes an hour to do vice the fifteen minutes yours does.

[taleya.livejournal.com]

Ebooks. Seriously. $boss thought I was going through whitepapers once and I was reading World War Z :D

[seosaimhthin.livejournal.com]

She sounds like my boss. I work in a financial call centre whose call numbers rely on financial business being done. So right now? No calls. Seriously, you can go 40 minutes without a call, then you get a wrong number or a salesman, and then go another 40 minutes. We sit there all slowly dying.

We're banned from games, but also from reading/using the internet, reading books or magazines or bringing in anything to attempt to pass the time. Apparently it "looks unprofessional." And we get so many visitors *eyeroll*

Unless, you know, you were loading up WOW or something and getting settled. But even so. If it doesn't hurt the customer...

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I read Slashdot and various tech blogs and communities. The logic being that it constitutes staying abreast of the state of the industry and therefore is professional development.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

You look like a guy I used to play WoW with.

Sapped? Is it you?

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Nope, sorry. Never got into WoW.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

But the big question is: What do I do AFTER the fifteen minutes it will take to skim through the poorly-worded brainwashing pamphlets?

[mcity.livejournal.com]

Use Notepad++ to write a novel. It looks exactly like real work, especially if you have XYZ.ici or whatever open in a tab you can switch to occasionally. There are also certain browsers that strip all formatting from websites and make them look like some sort of tech thing. If you have Stylish on your Firefox, you can write your own style and do it yourself.