You know you work for Megacorp when...

[ziggy29]

diversity training.

Bingo!

 

[Rustward]

When the trainer and two students travel overnight from Dallas to Atlanta for a little 4 hour internal training session, and the class has a total of three students, one from Atlanta.

 

[Khan]

you see the word 'deleveraging' in an email.

 

[vicente solano]

I feel compelled to remind US corporations that theiy are to blame for diseminating/exporting all this HR nonsense all over us, bakward nation in corporate business that we are!

 

[REWahoo]

I feel compelled to remind US corporations that theiy are to blame for diseminating/exporting all this HR nonsense all over us, bakward nation in corporate business that we are!

It's a disease that respects no borders.

 

[HFWR]

It's a disease that respects no borders.

I.e. outside the box...

 

[KM]

- when you see a response to your request for service that says: "Our SLA for completing this type of request is 5 days. Our average time for completing this type of request is 8.79 days"

- when you read a status report that explains that the project is behind schedule due to a "leak in productivity"....and nobody thinks that is odd.

- when you have a problem with another department, you have to contact a Relationship Manager, who then brings in an Incident Manager, who will turn it over to a Problem Manager if it goes on for more than 24 hours.

And that was just in the last 2 hours of my day

 

[stevenst]

Unfortunately, this is more likely a situation that will cleave to the "no good deed goes unpunished" adage. There is almost no way short of quitting that I will get out of having to help on this one. Damn my professionalism and work ethic...

I see. So the stakeholders will be reaching out to.... you. My condolences. One a related note, 'reach out' is one of my favorite recent corporate-speaks. I guess that's because I most often hear 'I'm reaching out to you.....' which means I'm about to be asked to do someone else's job.


Steve

 

[stevenst]

I'm pretty sure there are at least 3 new Dilbert cartoons in this thread. Someone should alert Scott Adams

 

[bbbamI]

You have pens, mugs, coasters, caps, shirts, jackets, umbrellas, tote bags and clocks touting the company logo....

...and no I didn't steal them. They were 'awards'.

 

[Moscyn]

Another one from me - When there is a public holiday in my country, I have to set an Out of Office note stating that "Today is a public holiday in ....".

 

[travelover]

When the reward for winning a company contest is to meet Mr. Bigshot and shake his hand.

 

[brewer12345]

I see. So the stakeholders will be reaching out to.... you. My condolences. One a related note, 'reach out' is one of my favorite recent corporate-speaks. I guess that's because I most often hear 'I'm reaching out to you.....' which means I'm about to be asked to do someone else's job.


Steve

Well, the same superior who sent that wonderful glob of corpspeak recently read something that worried him (I read the same thing and concluded it was a rounding error magnitude issue). He asked me to set up a meeting with the authors of what he read and include him. Lo and behold, he was busy at the time of the meeting, so I found myself conducting a meeting with people I thought were idiot alarmists about an "issue" I thought wasn't one.

Heard another one yesterday: "risk stripes.". I had to ask what it meant. It refers to the various types of financial risk: credit risk, interest rate risk, etc.

Summoned to go "kiss the ring" of our VP at a different location today. Rooty-toot.

 

[skyvue]

When you have Corporate, Regional and Divisional "Director's of Compensation" yet everyone in the company gets the same 2% Merit increase.

 

[HFWR]

You have pens, mugs, coasters, caps, shirts, jackets, umbrellas, tote bags and clocks touting the company logo....

...and no I didn't steal them. They were 'awards'.

We once received (I'm talking the entire corporation) a "cell foam"; i.e. a facsimile mobile phone made from "foam". Went straight from my mail slot to the trash can...

Wonder how much of my nonexistent raise went to pay for that useless POS...

 

[bbbamI]

We once received (I'm talking the entire corporation) a "cell foam"; i.e. a facsimile mobile phone made from "foam". Went straight from my mail slot to the trash can...

Wonder how much of my nonexistent raise went to pay for that useless POS...

Yep...everyone was p.o.'d wondering about the cost of all that stuff. I unfortunately didn't have to wonder as I paid the bills.

 

[KM]

We once received (I'm talking the entire corporation) a "cell foam"; i.e. a facsimile mobile phone made from "foam". Went straight from my mail slot to the trash can...

Wonder how much of my nonexistent raise went to pay for that useless POS...

We actually got paperweights as an appreciation gift one year.

I could envision the board of directors struggling over that decision: "Hmmm.....improve health benefits or paperweight? Health benefits or paperweight? Yeah, let's do the paperweight, people love paperweights."

 

[jayc]

When all of the parrots and junior parrots use "reach out" and "leverage" in ever other sentence.

When HR passes out stupid books like "who moved the cheese" and tells you there will be no layoffs, rifs, or oursourcing. Just good reading.

 

[HFWR]

We actually got paperweights as an appreciation gift one year.

I could envision the board of directors struggling over that decision: "Hmmm.....improve health benefits or paperweight? Health benefits or paperweight? Yeah, let's do the paperweight, people love paperweights."

At least you could use a paperweight to bludgeon the idiot who came up with that stupid idea...

 

[IndependentlyPoor]

When all of the parrots and junior parrots use "reach out" and "leverage" in ever other sentence.

When HR passes out stupid books like "who moved the cheese" and tells you there will be no layoffs, rifs, or oursourcing. Just good reading.

It was "net-net" and "crisp" for us. And bullseye charts.

 

[IndependentlyPoor]

We actually had a week-long manadatory training for engineers to teach us to stop over designing products. There were lots of Leggo and TinkerToy exercises to teach us to design the absolute minimal thing that would meet the letter of the specifications. In other words, how to design the crappiest thing you could get away with.

Another time we had a major presentation by the management darling of the time. Sort of the anti-Demming, a few year before quality becasse the fad. His claim to fame was that he had saved Pontiac millions of dollars by convincing them that their body panel alignment standards were too tight. He got them to display several sneak-peak-at-next-years-models in a shopping mall and passed out questionnaires to the crowd. Almost nobody noticed that the hoods were poorly aligned. Voilà! Proof!

Much scarier, He also claimed to have convinced a major manufacturer of passenger jet engines that their testing requirements for turbine blades were much too stringent based on the statistics of blade failure. I remain convinced to this day that his result was off by several orders of magnitude.

 

[scrabbler1]

At least you could use a paperweight to bludgeon the idiot who came up with that stupid idea...

good one!

A few of the favorites I can recall from my 23 years of working:

When my company announced it was relocating from New York to New Jersey, thereby worsening the commute of most of its employees (including me), there was an article in the company newsletter by someone saying how "wonderful his extra walk was on a sunny and pleasant September morning." UMMMMM, how pleasant would that walk be in the middle of January or July or when it was raining

We all received, "I survived the relocation" mugs. When I retired in 2008, I left that mug at my cubicle. I guess it did not survive my final "relocation" LOL!

Employee satisfaction surveys, a waste on many levels. First, all the paper wasted on producing them (although in later years they were done eon line). Then, the time spent compiling them. Then, more paper wasted on printing up the results including comparisons between each department and the company average. Then, rounding everyone up by department to have staff meetings run by each department head explaining the results. Then, nothing would happen to change anything. Then, a few years later, the cycle repeats.

Closer to home, I became annoyed when my company would not offer me eligibility for its group health plan after I reduced my weekly work hours from 20 to 12 in 2007 (and I offered to pay 100% of the premiums). They told me it was for fiscal reasons, as I was now in a group of "high-risk" employees who work few hours per week. However, I pointed out to HR that the company provided subsidized health insurance for hundreds of older retirees as well as spouses and children of covered employees, none of whom actually WORKED for the company. And they cried poverty? I made sure to let the HR underling know this in my EXIT interview (another waste of time but good for venting) as a secondary reason for my resignation of this 23-year employee (the commute with its "pleasant" walk was the first reason).

 

[Emeritus]

Perfect. I guarantee that the stakeholders reached out and addressed the issue as a collaborative opportunity. Translation: Assigned the problem to someone else.

Steve

Actually a collaborative opportunity means you formed a committee

If you say the "stakeholders resolved to have the issue determined by party best placed to address the issue" that means you "Assigned the problem to someone else."

If you are "determining the facts which have evolved since the issue was first raised" it means you gave it to an unpaid intern

 

[Emeritus]

Closer to home, I became annoyed when my company would not offer me eligibility for its group health plan after I reduced my weekly work hours from 20 to 12 in 2007 (and I offered to pay 100% of the premiums). They told me it was for fiscal reasons, as I was now in a group of "high-risk" employees who work few hours per week. However, I pointed out to HR that the company provided subsidized health insurance for hundreds of older retirees as well as spouses and children of covered employees, none of whom actually WORKED for the company. .

I agree with you on the injustice issue, however we did find in our statewide survey that groups of employees who reduced their working hours were statistically far more likely to be incurring high medical expenses. Children are actually fairly cheap to cover. Retirees under 65 are expensive but the costs are fairly predictable.

 

[scrabbler1]

I agree with you on the injustice issue, however we did find in our statewide survey that groups of employees who reduced their working hours were statistically far more likely to be incurring high medical expenses. Children are actually fairly cheap to cover. Retirees under 65 are expensive but the costs are fairly predictable.

Still makes no sense to me.

So, a full-time employee who is 60 years old, for example, can receive subsidized group health medical insurance. And if he retires, he can receive subsidized retiree medical insurance. But if he reduces his work hours without retiring, he becomes ineligible for group health insurance altogether. How is he riskier if he works more hours or less hours than his part-time hours?

Companies can't charge their employees more or less for group health based on age, but even though I was only 44 years when I lost my group health eligibility, I was treated like those just under Medicare age because they were the ones who worked less than 20 hours per week, a much less healthy group of people than me, for sure.

I argue that working fewer hours and making fewer of those awful commutes to the office made my life less stressful and made me healthier. They did not agree, so I took a $300k stock payout and left, along with my 23 years of experience. It still felt like a no-brainer, my offering to pay 100% of the group health premiums (instead of 50% I had been paying when I worked 20 hours per week).

At least we part-timers were still contributing to our company's bottom line. Retirees don't. Neither do children of covered employees. Neither do spouses of any age of covered employees, a far costlier group to insure than children.

It all turned out for the best. I love being retired.