Rick's b.log - entry 2024/10/01

The joy of working with others: Four Tales of Woe

Part One: The Saga of the Trays

Now allow me to introduce a cow-orker, let's call her Joyce. Now Joyce goes off on break and I am covering for her. This is the usual state of affairs. When she returns, her partner (as in work partner) was to go off on break and I move to the other side of the machine feeding in the stuff that needs cleaned, where I shall stay until the end of their shift (which, as I'm a day worker, is about the middle of mine). This was all arranged.

I notice Joyce had returned, but she took the position of feeding the stuff into the machine. She doesn't like working at the reception end of the machine, so her doing that didn't really surprise me. And she might have gotten away with it if she actually put a little effort into what she was doing. But, alas...

Now with these trays we stack them as they come out of the machine and when there are between five and ten of them (it depends upon the person as to how much weight they are willing to carry) we pick up the stack and carry them over to a bigger pile on a plastic palette. This is where they are stored, nice and clean, for when the production team needs them next.

Unfortunately Joyce was sending the trays through all mixed up. Now the reason they were mixed up is because that is how we get them from the pick&pack girls. This isn't a surprise, if they are preparing a platter of, let's just say six different items than they will be six different production lines that come together for the final product. If you have trouble imagining this, just think about a box of luxury bisuits - there are the white chocolate ones, the dark chocolate ones, that weird pink wafer thing, and so on. Same basic idea.

Now I don't know whether it's because I'm neurodivergent or not, but I find context switching between the different trays to be extremely expensive, and at the reception end there is no space and no table so it's not as if I can make three separate piles. There's just "a flat bit at the end" that is large enough for a stack of trays.

So I go to Joyce and I ask her if she can please sort the trays. I should point out that this is something that I always do, even when it isn't necessary, because I feel that feeding stuff into the machine all higgledy-piggledy is extremely hostile to your cow-orker. I just will not do that. Basic respect.

Joyce says "No, we don't ever do that". Which is bollocks because when she was on break her cow-orker was sending stuff through sorted.
Can you please...?
"No, I don't do that me." (literally: non, je ne fait pas ça, moi)
So I told her to go to the other end of the machine and I will sort the things. It's a little more frantic as you kind of have to be a few steps ahead, but it's not as if I'm asking the impossible. As I said, it's something I do by habit.

Arms in the air, big dramatic sighing, I'm sure you can imagine it. And off she trots, perhaps knowing that it was her day at the receiving end anyway, so I wasn't exactly kicking her out of her place.

Within a minute, a single solitary minute, she trots back and tells the production worker who was helping out to go and do that and she'll switch jobs with her. Clearly she saw the result of her mess and didn't want to have anything to do with it.
The production girl was a bit slow to start, which isn't a surprise given the mess things were in, but once my sorted things had made it through, she picked up the pace as, like I said, it was "collect a small pile and then transfer them to the bigger pile".

Part Two: The Epic of the Breaks

I asked Joyce (surprise! it's her again!) when she was going on break.
"When I feel like it".
Excuse me?
"I don't have a set time, me" (she does like starting a sentence with "je" and ending with "moi").
Oh, okay then. And I walk away. I have something that needs done, so I'm going to go do it.

Now, I do not expect people to say something like "I'll be going on break at 9.47 exactly". But it wouldn't have killed her to think about it for a moment and say something like "We don't really have a time planned, maybe in about half an hour?" which would give me some guidance as to when I would be expected to cover and what I had time to do in the meanwhile.

But, of course, it gets worse. You totally saw that coming, right?

So I'm just starting cleaning the internal toilet. And she is there. She watches as I put the disinfectant solution on the floor and squirt the foul smelling chemical cocktail (I think it's supposed to be "citrus fruit", but... no, just no) under the rim of the toilets.
And then she tells me that she is going on break!
This is, like, literally (actually literally, not figuratively) about eight minutes after she had no idea when she was going to be going on break. What the hell? That's just getting abusive now...

So I clean the toilets, and then I change the disinfectant solution in various walk-on-this mats using what was left in my bucket. I feel bad for her partner who had to manage the machine by herself for a while, but sorry... no, actually I'm not sorry, I'm not at fault here. If I ask a perfectly legitimate question and get a response like that, I'm just going to walk away. I have things of my own that need done and I'm not going to spend my time hanging around when there's nothing pressing that actually needs done there just in case that's the moment Joyce decides to go on break. That's how my stuff doesn't get done.

Part Three: The Tale of the Teacups

The most amusing thing was that the place was a massive example of "all fur coat and no knickers". They were passing themselves off as a posh place and charging posh prices, but the owners were spending as little as they could get away with - to the point that they would offer branded icecream like Häagan-Dazs, but what actually turned up in the bowl was a couple of scoops of some generic Tesco budget range ice cream with a miniscule scoop of Häagan-Dazs on top. Or the special exclusive woodland fruits tea with Ceylon tea picked during the early morning dew? A Happy Shopper teabag and a soup spoon of Ribena. I am not joking, the place was insane, but for the owner it was possibly a get-rich-quick scheme.

The place had two sets of teacups with the home crest on them. Yes, the place had a crest, it was that pretentious. It reminded me of the Queen emblem. Anyway, one set was just your regular ceramic mug and the other was a fiddly how-the-hell-do-you-even-hold-this bone china cup. It's the sort of cup where you pinch between thumb and index finger and raise your little finger into the air. Just what you need for an eighty year old toff with Parkinsons.

I mention this as these oh-so-exclusive crested bone china cups, and the other toff tableware, had to be specially washed by hand. The home would tell you that everything was carefully and lovingly washed by dedicated personnel...
Reality: washed by the agency bloke because being middle class isn't good enough for these idiots so they're trying to hide him.
The actual truth: The crappy delicate bone china stuff wouldn't survive the inside of the dish washer.

The problem was that I am male, and stronger than most of the women, which meant that sometimes they needed me, but I was under a strict "don't talk" rule. Which was rather galling given that I knew two of them dropped out in fifth form (unexpected pregnancies tend to have side effects like that) but since they grew up in Berkshire they sounded the part.

For my final day I greeted Lady Something-or-other (I don't know if she was a real Lady or if it was some sort of ironic nickname) with "Wotcha doll, how's tricks?" in an attempt at a Cockney accent that for some reason came out sounding more like North East Coast Italian Mafia (think "The Sopranos").
She looked at me like I just spoke to her in Welsh or something, and the "nurse" (a carer that hadn't managed to pass the second level NVQs) looked like she was going to throw up. She tried to usher me out of the room, but Lady Something asked me to repeat what I said. So I did. And she thought it was hysterical. Like, nearly choking laughing. I am not that funny. I blame medications.

Part Four: The Chaos Chronicles

Anyway, the golden rule in this place was that we would be told when and where (as in what part) we were working, and any change from that had to come from our boss, not from anybody at the home. This is because their own staff would cross out what was written on the roster and write who they would like to work with. None of them liked working with me because being a carer for old people was "not a job for a man". Unfortunately when you're arguing with the gormless, you can't say "so if you are going to be all sexist about roles, you are going to agree that a woman can't be in charge of anything?" because they'll forget the first half of the statement and home in on the end. Yet another reason to not like me, I guess.
One of their favourite tricks was to intercept people at the door as they were coming on shift and tell them "Oh, sorry, your shift has been cancelled, did your agency not tell you?". Knowing that I wasn't ever going to be friends with that clique, I told her that she might as well let me in because if my boss didn't contact me then it means you're lying about the cancellation, and you know what? Even if I walk away on your so-called advice, you guys will still get billed for my presence and I will still get paid.

Suddenly my shift was uncancelled, and they sent me - alone - to a dark creepy loft with a bucket and rag to wash encrusted bits of poop from old wheelchairs.

Let's unpick this, shall we? That lot are a bunch of arseholes so being alone away from them was a definite positive.
I'm a goth at heart, so dark and creepy is absolutely not a problem - shadows aren't scary, people are. Yes, it had spiders. Yes, I said hello to them, it's only polite.
And they were actually expecting me to quietly pass my time wiping years-old-crap off of wheelchairs for twice their wage? Uhh... okay, if you say so... <shrug>

People. Ugh.

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jgh, 1st October 2024, 22:44

First saga: I've had way too many events like that.  In one of my "furniture removal" job, I would unbox the PC, put it on the desk, and pack the crap into the box; unpack the monitor, put it on the desk, pack the crap into the box; unpack mouses, keyboard, etc., pack crap into the box. Typically I'd use one PC box per four desks. But, mainly, everything was kept tidy, and you knew where you were, and where the bits were.    The other people I've worked with would ravenously grab everything out of half a dozen boxes and dump all the crap on the floor while they were setting up the desks. They would end up with a big pile of crap that was trying to escape into corners of the room, and they'd spend 30 ot 40 minutes at the end of the setup clearing it all up, and - because they were stuffing random stuff into random boxes - using more boxes for the rubbish instead of packing it neatly as it came out.    I gave up explaining why my method was better years ago, and now just do my bits in my way that keeps my working area tidy, and just leave them in surrounded by ever-growing piles of rubbish.

jgh, 1st October 2024, 22:56

Saga 4: In my current job we have been told we are engineers. Or rather, a slide in the presentation was headed "YOU are the engineer".    So, I mused: if we are engineers, why are we doing installations? And why have they recruited engineers to pay them installers' wages? Hmmm... I am on mute aren't I?

Rick, 1st October 2024, 23:26

Oh, my.    Putting the wrapping junk back into the box ought to be a lesson one learns as a *child* (particularly in the aftermath of Christmas or birthdays).    It's far simpler to gently slide the bits back into the box as the thing is unwrapped than to scatter them everywhere, as the scattering leads to a very uncool period of tidying up later on. And tidying up stuff sucks, so the simplest solution is to not make a gigantic mess in the first place.

Zerosquare, 2nd October 2024, 16:19

> she does like starting a sentence with "je" and ending with "moi"    For those not familiar with French, this is the equivalent of starting a sentence with "I", but with heavy stress on the "I". It's very passive-agressive, and definitely not something you should say in a professional environment.

Rick, 2nd October 2024, 17:34

Cheers Z! That's what I was thinking it might have meant, but wasn't sure enough to want to say so.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 2nd October 2024, 23:47

A few things:    1. It was Playschool that had different shaped windows. Rainbow had a camp pink hippo called George, a 6 foot tall bear called Bungle and a 'thing' called Zippy.    2. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.    3. Remember that orking cows is illegal in most jurisdictions.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 2nd October 2024, 23:58

*cough* anyway, back in the room...    I'm reminded of a job I did many years ago (actually the last full-time job I did before I went freelance). It was the early 2000s, we had a rather elderly Microsoft BackOffice server running on WinNT4 with Exchange 4.5. There didn't appear to be any way to configure that version of Exchange to prevent mail relaying, and port 25 on the router was open to the outside (to allow mail to be delivered).    Needless to say, spammers found the open relay.    I'd come up with a solution, namely to have another server running some flavour of *nix sat between the Exchange server and the interweb, running Exim as an internal relay. Whilst this was in place, it worked perfectly, emails could be sent and received reliably, there were no problems with open relays etc etc.    Until the boss found out what I'd set up. He knew enough about IT administration to be dangerous. And demanded that I remove the "unauthorised device" from the network, with the comment "we're a Microsoft company here, not a unix company".    Of course I wrote back a fairly lengthly email describing exactly what would happen if I carried out the request, outlining the risks, and stating that this was against my recommendation as an IT professional and that I would not accept any liability for failure if the change was actioned, ending the email by asking if the boss still wanted me to go ahead with the change after I'd stated what the consequences would be.    He said he did.    So I reverted back to the previous setup as requested.    Within less than 24 hours, the system had fallen over in a big steaming heap, exactly as I had predicted.    The following day I was called into the office and the point was made that "it went wrong in exactly the way you predicted", but rather than realising that I actually knew what I was talking about, I was then accused of sabotaging the system.    It was at that point I handed in my notice. And as I had some outstanding holiday entitlement, I took it over my notice period.

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