The woman who sits at my four o’clock is earnest but not the brightest tool in the box. Give her a script that doesn’t offer the opportunity to deviate, and that is comprehensive enough that no questions need to be asked by the person on the other end of the line and she will knock that ball out of the park, every time.
Her manager realised this and made her responsible for briefing clients on this one thing for her entire team; once that explanation is necessary, they hand off the client to her and she gives them the preprepared script. She does it very well, gets excellent feedback and takes a lot of the work away from her colleagues, so it’s win-win for all of them.
…Except for the fact that I have now heard her give the exact same half-hour monologue more than 200 times. I work in an office where headphones are forbidden and if I weren’t leaving in a couple of weeks, I swear I would have already bludgeoned her to death with my keyboard.
We’re supposed to be “aware of our surroundings” so that we can offer assistance to each other and hear the phone ringing. It’s hell, especially given that my job is unusually translation-heavy for the company and I could get it done in half the time if I were able to block out the ambient English noise and code-switch into the target language completely.
The company I worked for previously was a dedicated translation company and gave us all over-the-ear, noise-reducing headphones. We’d turn up for work, one of the guys would send us all a link to the SoundCloud ambient drum and bass mix he had prepared for the day, and we would all sit their nodding away in blissful isolation until we actually had pertinent questions to ask of each other, whereupon the conversation would be between two people and everyone else could get on with their jobs.
Sounds kind of dystopian, now that I think about it, but it was infinitely more productive…
Ah! That makes sense to some extent then. Still a little dystopian, I suppose, but then again, I do think that having things like dress codes and behavior codes at an office is a bit infantilizing…
Given I have two weeks left of my two months’ notice period, I’m severely tempted to say “fuck it” and just start listening to music. Still, it’s a niche industry and I’m bound to bump into my colleagues again sooner or later if I stay in it, so I’m doing my best to pretend like I still give a shit.
Two months is waaaay too long for a notice period though; I ran out of fucks about four weeks ago and I really don’t have any to spare…
I once worked at a place with an internet code so restrictive that I had to pull out my smartphone whenever I had to look up something technical online.
This was the same place that had an open plan office, which I swear was designed to trigger agoraphobia indoors. Also, the chit-chat noise was so loud that I needed to wear ear plugs and noise-cancelling headphones at the same time, even though every online radio station to speak of (and YouTube) was blocked.
I’ve recently come to realize just how spoiled I’d become by having my work space mostly to my myself all those years; the very constancy of other people’s presence seems to annoy me.
I probably would end up assaulting someone with a piece of office equipment if I didn’t have my earbuds to block them out …
When I had to be at a desk after many years of telecommuting it just sucked. Too much unwanted noise and discussions going on and couldn’t crank up the music and people coming over and interrupting my work flow.
I can technically work from home one day a week (and probably could do two days without an eyebrow being lifted) but I rarely do.
Since my wife works from home everyday, that is more of a distraction than going to the office. (Granted - the perk of middle management is an office and door I can close. For 30 minutes before the room is too stuffy to breathe)
RAAR! errr umm… actually I kinda liked being able to run out for a nice lunch with the wife easily and if it went a little late I could just quit a little later than normal.
I’ve worked at home alone for most of the last 30 years. Lots of perks but it can get lonely, hence the online communities. I also go out for lunch most of the time, or I’d often never leave the house, especially now that there’s no kid carpool (yay!). My wife hassles on me about it, saying I should eat healthier, but mental health matters too!
oh every now and then… mostly just actually lunch cause I needed out of the house for a bit.
the one downside to telecommuting was going ‘Alright done for the day I can go… oh wait been staring at this all day already… sigh’. Still it was nicer than having a drive home that was between 45 to 75 minutes to go 20 miles.
Safari has an autofill function. Does it trigger the user_has_filled_out_all_fields function? Oh hell no. So I ende up manually inserting spaces and deleting them argh!
Working for a healthcare company, they try to organize little things that have benefits to charity and such.
They started a while back making the office socials monthly instead of quarterly. Then they decided maybe that seems bit selfish, so maybe also raise a little money for charity?
Nobody comes to my office, basically ever. Everyone works remotely, at least most of the engineers if not the sales, marketing and execs. Out of a couple hundred people, maybe 18 people came to the social.
They raised $34 for the local food bank, and in the process bought a bunch of wine and beer, and gave away $75 in gift cards in a raffle.
Such a waste! We could have a much better social just hosting the people at the foodbank for drinks and snacks, and donating the gift cards.
