Things I Will Not Miss

brewer12345 said:
Assuming I stay here long enough, I will be squirming in anticipation of "360 feedback" being rolled out to my level at some point in the future (has come as far as middle management). This is where not only do you get reviewed by your boss, but you also get reviewed by colleagues and subordinates. Quadruple your pleasure...
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I've heard about this but never experienced it first hand. Please know you are in my thoughts and prayers.
 
RunningBum said:
Then when an exec gets promoted, we see the storm of emails from all of the suckups who tell him "Well deserved!" and all that as they copy everyone on it.
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Just after I wrote this a promotion email came, and was followed with 12 "you're so wonderful" replies. And now our exec include their picture in the header of all emails so I get an extra 50-100K eaten into my email quota for each of them (because everyone has to include the original email) until I delete them. And don't get me started on email quotas.
 
Sarah in SC said:
Oh if there is a higher power, let me never work somewhere like that, Brewer. If I ever hear the words "team", "360 feedback", or "paradigm" I'm heading out the door! Ugh!
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Yet curiously the shaved apes running this place cannot figure out why people are leaving in droves and they have a terrible lack of competent, up and coming junior management talent...
 
brewer12345 said:
Assuming I stay here long enough, I will be squirming in anticipation of "360 feedback" being rolled out to my level at some point in the future (has come as far as middle management). This is where not only do you get reviewed by your boss, but you also get reviewed by colleagues and subordinates. Quadruple your pleasure...
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I've experienced both the good and bad of this. The bad, one year they really weren't helpful. Everyone went through the motions and pretty much approached it as, "I won't say anything bad about you and you won't say anything bad about me." Or some folks would give criticism which others felt unjust....don't get mad..get even :LOL:

The good. One year, we had this boss who should not have been in a position to manage. She would show up late, have temper tantrums, resorted to bullying to get her way. Well, with the 360 feedback time came along, we nailed her good (just giving our honest opinions). Guess her lesson was if she was willing to dish it out, she had to get ready to get hit back.
 
5AM alarm; shower & drive to work; wearing bra and shoes for 9 hours...
 
Purron said:
I've heard about this but never experienced it first hand. Please know you are in my thoughts and prayers.
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I've been through three of them. Medicine as a business. I tried to make the best of them but frankly they offered little I didn't already know.

Let's see: 400 physician-hours, at maybe $150/h plus consultant costs of $5K = $65,000 for the exercise. Gain? Undetectable.

Still, that's not the worst business BS I had to deal with -- that honor goes to role-playing and ice-breaking games at retreats.
 
Top of my list are the phone calls and e-mails which assume that I have nothing else to do with my life except hang around waiting for those phone calls and e-mails (24x7) and that I am happy to work through the weekend with no prior notice. Some weeks I end up doing more work on weekends and over night than I do during normal business hours. Getting a phone call at 3 am asking if I have received an e-mail that was just sent out is something I can do without (I now turn the phone off when I go to bed unless I am expecting something important).

Internal meetings are also high on my hate list. When I can't dodge them, I tend to take some work that needs to be done and sit quietly in the corner getting on with it and ignoring whatever it is that people are talking about.

Office politics and the unproductive admin aspect are inescapable parts of working life - I don't like them but have to put up with them.
 
Reading through this thread, I get that commuting, and the corporate/office nonsense issues become less and less tolerable.

For me though, I mostly enjoy my longish commute. I have my personable bubble (car) around me and have the music cranked up. It gives me some MasterBlaster time of which to reflect on and ponder stuff.

Regarding corporate nonsense, It rages in full cyclone force mode all around me. Yet mostly mostly I ignore it all and concur, mostly it just doesn't matter.

I don't hate my job or hate working. As I get older though, I have come to realize what a privilege having my job really is and how fortunate I am.

And best of all !!! ....

some of us are getting paid while we post to this forum, What's so bad about that ?
 
Self assessment checklists!

Employee opinion survey action plans.
 
Does anything happen as a result of the 360, other than a waste of time? Do you have to do anything? Are you obliged to discuss the results with anybody?

If not, just do it and forget it. I just had one. Everyone dreads negative comments, but it wasn't so bad. Although comments are supposed to be anonymous, I could have put names next to every comment, good and not so good...people cannot help sounding like themselves. The comments said at least as much about the people who made them, as they did about me.

Amethyst

brewer12345 said:
Assuming I stay here long enough, I will be squirming in anticipation of "360 feedback" being rolled out to my level at some point in the future (has come as far as middle management). This is where not only do you get reviewed by your boss, but you also get reviewed by colleagues and subordinates. Quadruple your pleasure...
Click to expand...
 
dilbert+360+appraisal.gif
 
Meetings. Long, boring, and virtually useless meetings. Especially when some suckup is trying to impress the boss.

Performance Reviews. Usually an unpleasant experience for the reviewer and the reviewee. I always tried to keep a straight face when my areas of improvement were noted.

Management lies. Ex: "The corporation is not planning any layoffs at this time." When that's said at one of the useless meetings mentioned above, get your resume updated.

Mandatory training (annual or semiannual or some such silliness)... on-the-job harassment, age/sexual/racial discrimination, privacy issues, OSHA, Drug abuse, yada, yada, yada.

Anyway, It's been six years since I had to endure this nonsense. And the title of this thread was.....
 
Having a blackberry strapped to my @ss all wekend and sometimes even on holidays/vacations to be at an idiot's beck and call.
 
Demeaning employee ethics announcements that are obviously sent to everyone because one idiot got caught displaying a lack of common sense.
 
Brewer is live-blogging from the cube farm. Keep 'em coming--I expect your present environment will keep feeding the mill.
 
S.M.A.R.T Goals

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time Framed

My office leader at the tax office (12 hrs/wk Jan - Apr 15) asked me to submit my SMART Goals for next year, assuming that I knew what the heck he was talking about. I guess I should be expected to keep up on all the clever stuff dribbled down on us from the upper management.

Yeah, here's my goal - simplify the freaking tax code. Oh, that's not Achievable in my lifetime.
 
Commute is my problem. But ironically, the only work tasks I enjoy are project site visits that require even more travel. I can handle the train 3 or 4 times a month because I nap during the one hour commute. But I have to check Google Maps for travel problems before I drive anywhere. There is road construction everywhere. Yesterday I was in an hour long backup caused by traffic slowing down to watch an accident that happened off the road.
 
While the commute was the main reason for my retiring in 2008, all those other things mentioned by others (except for the bra part LOL!) I don't miss, either. Some of them, such as doing employee reviews, I was relieved from doing once I went to part-time work in 2001. I was also fortunate to miss many (but not all) meetings and group lunches in those 7 years of working part-time.

But I was not able to avoid all that silly Dilbert stuff such as mission statements and employee satisfaction surveys.
 
Lugging a monster laptop everywhere in the heat while wearing suit and tie. The frosting on top today is that my destination is a meeting/pinata party with the grand high poohbah who gets a dozen swings at the pinata (me and team) without a blindfold. Upside: nada. Downside: major career damage. This is why they pay me the Liliputian bucks...
 
My main “problem” was losing two weekends every month.

Since my boss(s)/HQ's were located in Europe (two different countries over the years), I would have to get the limo to pick me up noon Saturday, fly overnight, get to the hotel early afternoon Sunday, grab some sleep (can't sleep on any plane) and be "bright eyed and bushy tailed" for work Monday morning. That screwed the weekend before.

Usually did not get a plane back till late Friday, arriving home after midnight (Saturday morning). It usually took the rest of the weekend to get "in sync" with the local time. That screwed the weekend after.

Along with the "office antics" already posted, travel is what pushed me to the brink and why I retired before I originally planned...

The only positive to the travel was that it paid for quite a few trips for my DW/me over the years and some upgrades to business class when I was still on the j*b. However, it was a heavy toll to pay.
 
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