2 things I don't miss in ER

[LitGal]

George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"?

Wow what a fantastic video. Two of my favorite things are corporate buzzword and Weird Al. That is the ultimate synergistic relationship transforming messaging into the next generation of social media. It is a new paradigm for buzzword.

I can't believe I missed that video and nobody posted it on Facebook. What would I do without this forum.

It's time for me to enjoy morning coffee over Orwell's landmark essay once again. His instruction on the many methods of obfuscation often sustained me during mind-numbing meetings of the past three decades. It was entertaining to sit in in-services, "consultant" presentations, and state curriculum meetings, thinking back to good old George O. (Those meetings gave lots of opportunities to watch presenters say very little with WAY too many words. Orwell would have been chuckling, and it kept me from watching the clock.)

If more folks had been required to read his essay, they might be embarrassed to see how they obfuscate a la Orwell each day.

So, for example, in this video, the corporation spends over four minutes of empty blathering, simply to say, " We'll make ourselves and our employees do whatever it takes to make a lot of money."

But, in our modern, sophisticated world, of course no one would ever want to sound like a robber baron of the 19th century. After all, companies need to keep my investments healthy so I'm free to enjoy ER with Orwell.

 

[Chuckanut]

Paradigm shifts. Just one more paradigm shift for the road. Right?

 

[ERhoosier]

Things I don't miss-
1. Complete lack of appreciation for years (decades) of ongoing hard work and uncompensated 'beyond-the job-description' support given to the organization.
2. Performance reviews based largely upon things you have no control of.
3. Long process improvement meetings where any honest suggestions are met with "if you aren't happy here, why don't you leave?".

Only semi-ERed as I'm still doing some consulting. Lower pay, but low stress, interesting, flexible, and my efforts honestly seem appreciated. Why couldn't my 'career' have been like this?

 

[rodi]

even though I'm retired I still have alarm clocks.... I have to get the kids out to school and I'm taking an Italian class at the JC that starts at 8am.

But... I don't miss:
- weekly conference calls with the Bangalore teams. I had one at 10:30pm Monday nights, and another at 5am Wed. mornings. Sometimes there was another at 5am Thur. mornings. Ironically, the east coast teams never could manage to make the 5am call (8am their time) but I wasn't allowed to skip these calls despite them being when normal people are sleeping. I was SO glad when I got switched to a different project and was able to pass off those calls to a different group that was going to take over management/support of the legacy products.

- The commute. My home is only 6.5 miles from my former work campus. But due to a long term freeway construction project that involved the interchange that I needed to get home from work, my 10-15 minute commute started taking upwards of an hour. It's a super high volume interchange because Qualcomm campuses are in the area (along with a LOT of other high tech - but they're the biggest for that part of town.) I know people who shifted their work hours to leave after 9pm because traffic was bad from 3:30pm to about 7:30-8pm. My husband joked that the construction would finish the day I retired. I looked it up - it's not due to end stage 1 till late 2016.

 

[Eagle43]

Meetings after lunch. Gawd, how I hated them. I would always find myself sleepy, listening to someone babble. These days, I take a nap, and attend no meetings, before or after lunch.

Sent from my AT100 using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

 

[Helen]

Another vote for being on call.

And those horrible, soul sucking computer upgrades that started Friday evening and went into Sunday. The following week was always hell week.

 

[jjquantz]

1) The total disrespect that morning people got. "Sure, we are happy to have you work from 7:30 - 4:00. That's how our non-profit helps you maintain work/life balance. Oh, we just scheduled another meeting that starts at 4:00 and will run until 6:00- you can make that, right?"

But if I EVER tried to schedule a meeting even as early as, god forbid, 9:00 AM I would never hear the end of it!

2) Meetings that were scheduled for 30 minutes that ran to 2 hours because: A) there was no agenda, B) the organizer had no idea what the purpose of the meeting was, C) the boss needed to ramble for 30 minutes before the meeting could even address whatever it was we were supposed to be addressing, and D) the action items were always, "let's meet again next week to talk this over one more time."

 

[EastWest Gal]

1. Power point presentations, where the presenter reads what's on the slide.
2. Workplace bullies. They're socializes psychopaths. They're the incompetent people who spend their time and energies sabatoging and trying to make competent people look bad and make their lives miserable in the process. Hospitals and schools and I'll bet corporations are full of them.

 

[PhrugalPhan]

I'm far from retired, but my gripes seem to be different from everyone here.

1. Co-workers that can't speak English. "You've been here 15 yrs. in a high paying job, yet you can't pronounce words or speak properly?" I worked overseas for 3 years and they could speak better than this group.
2. Getting put on important projects requiring new technology but get no training. "Oh, we know you can pick it up fast. Just look it up online." Spare me...

 

[imoldernu]

The beautiful girls in the office...
Lunch in the executive dining room...

Umm... come to think of it, didn't have either of these... so nothing to miss.

Nothing...

 

[powerplay]

1. Meetings and more meetings

2. Mandatory training

 

[robnplunder]

Psychopaths at work. Studies have shown about 4% of company CEOs are psychopaths. I am working for one now.

 

[MRG]

Psychopaths at work. Studies have shown about 4% of company CEOs are psychopaths. I am working for one now.

Never heard that, dont dought it. I believe if you go down a couple levels to up and coming middle management the percentage gets even higher.

 

[HFWR]

...D) the action items were always, "let's meet again next week to talk this over one more time."

"Let's have a meeting to decide when the next meeting will be..."

 

[EllisWyatt]

1) my 5 1/2 hour, 350 mile commute every Monday and Thursday
2) being on-call 24/7 for 32 years
2a) never knowing when the next 2 am emergency call would happen, and having to be ready to immediately solve a problem that 35 people on location couldn't figure out

 

[robnplunder]

Never heard that, dont dought it. I believe if you go down a couple levels to up and coming middle management the percentage gets even higher.

Saw multiple studies which said about 4% of CEOs are psychopaths. It makes perfect sense to me. They are ruthless in getting what they want, use others to get ahead, driven, smart, etc.. Steve Jobs comes to my mind.

Then there is another study that says about 9% of Americans have some type of personality disorder. I don't doubt that either although my observation at work is that about 1 in 20 seems to have some kind of personality disorder that drives peers, managers crazy. As a "middle management" myself, I had to deal with a lot of these cases over the years. I am not gonna miss that after RE.

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

I love the movie Office Space..it was a huge catalyst in me wanting to FIRE. In the movie, there is a whiteboard that is has the title ' Planning to Plan' with significant flow paths illustrated. I'm sure many of us can relate to this. And Six Sigma...ugh...That's the worst!

Sent from my mobile device so please excuse grammatical errors.

 

[M Paquette]

I love the movie Office Space..it was a huge catalyst in me wanting to FIRE. In the movie, there is a whiteboard that is has the title ' Planning to Plan' with significant flow paths illustrated. I'm sure many of us can relate to this. And Six Sigma...ugh...That's the worst!

Sent from my mobile device so please excuse grammatical errors.

But... but.... Six Sigma is key to following the One True Way to ISO-9000 certification, TQM, and the Baldrige Award! Plan, Do, Check, Act, folks! It's the One True Way.

And I've got the t-shirts to prove it. "This Friday's Beer Bash is sponsored by the Vice President of Total Quality Management."

(This was a hardware startup company, that got bitten hard by the TQM bug. The CEO decided that winning the Baldrige Award was just what our hardware sales needed. )

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

But... but.... Six Sigma is key to following the One True Way to ISO-9000 certification, TQM, and the Baldrige Award! Plan, Do, Check, Act, folks! It's the One True Way.

And I've got the t-shirts to prove it. "This Friday's Beer Bash is sponsored by the Vice President of Total Quality Management."

(This was a hardware startup company, that got bitten hard by the TQM bug. The CEO decided that winning the Baldrige Award was just what our hardware sales needed. )

Oh Lord help me. The Air Force goes through some new rendition of "quality" about every 6 years or so. TQM, AFSO-21, AhhhhH!!!!!!!!!! My latest and LAST w*rk assignment is w*rking with a VERY LARGE defense contractor and the quality madness is simply overwhelming. But..that's OK...only 43 workdays to go!!!! and one more

 

[aja8888]

Oh Lord help me. The Air Force goes through some new rendition of "quality" about every 6 years or so. TQM, AFSO-21, AhhhhH!!!!!!!!!! My latest and LAST w*rk assignment is w*rking with a VERY LARGE defense contractor and the quality madness is simply overwhelming. But..that's OK...only 43 workdays to go!!!! and one more

I suppose you don't remember "Zero Defects"...

 

[robnplunder]

I love the movie Office Space..it was a huge catalyst in me wanting to FIRE. In the movie, there is a whiteboard that is has the title ' Planning to Plan' with significant flow paths illustrated. I'm sure many of us can relate to this. And Six Sigma...ugh...That's the worst!

Sent from my mobile device so please excuse grammatical errors.

Date for a date meeting .... aaarrgh. And don't mention the dreaded 6 sigma. I believe all process improvement comes with more efficient way of doing things. After one of my past megacorps got through with 6 sigma implementation, what used to take 1 week took 3 weeks. 500 page documents on how to do things started to pop up.

 

[Corporateburnout]

But... but.... Six Sigma is key to following the One True Way to ISO-9000 certification, TQM, and the Baldrige Award! Plan, Do, Check, Act, folks! It's the One True Way.

And I've got the t-shirts to prove it. "This Friday's Beer Bash is sponsored by the Vice President of Total Quality Management."

(This was a hardware startup company, that got bitten hard by the TQM bug. The CEO decided that winning the Baldrige Award was just what our hardware sales needed. )

As if these so called quality system improvement programs were not enough to waste people's time in long useless meetings we also had to deal with ISO 14001 (environmental) ISO 22000 (safety) 5S and the new OSHA global harmonized system.

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

I suppose you don't remember "Zero Defects"...

Thankfully, no! I am hoping that when I turn in my badge and walk out the door for the last time, I can turn in all that useless QA knowledge too!

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

Date for a date meeting .... aaarrgh. And don't mention the dreaded 6 sigma. I believe all process improvement comes with more efficient way of doing things. After one of my past megacorps got through with 6 sigma implementation, what used to take 1 week took 3 weeks. 500 page documents on how to do things started to pop up.

We had a big "quality escape" issue going on for a significant safety of flight issue with the contractor. Of course, to all the lowly folks flying the planes (me), the issue was very simple and very easy to solve...but OH NO. They brought in a blue ribbon team to REALLY figure out what was going on. Several months later and many, many, many interview and meetings later (including several PhDs in quality..who'd a thought it?!?) they came to the same conclusion we had figured out about 10 minutes after the "issue" came to light. I have some pretty good pictures of the break out room where there were charts all over the damn place...it was pretty comical. I could never figure out why "common sense" has never been adopted as a quality improvement tool. And yes, this is yet another reason that I look forward to my escape!

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

OK..I have to add one more. They are getting ready to do a big video telecon next week, so they sent out an email to the ENTIRE organization (about 12,000 people) that had a link to a practice meeting. They asked that if anyone had issues with the link or broadcast, then they asked that they respond accordingly. Well, many idiots (about 518 at my last look) had hit the dreaded "reply all" button to say "Looks good here!". Really people?!?