Monday, March 23, 2009
Stress at Work
Hello.
For the last 2 months,I have been pretty swamped at work.
I am really getting stressed out working in that pee-pee soaked heck-hole.
This has lead to a decreased blogs, a general feeling of lethargy, and a bad case of the dropsies.
Most of my time has been spent trying to get a vendor to make a part operate in the limits that they said it would operate. They spec'ed a range where it would operate, and doesn't actually operate at the bottom of that range. In fact, they didn't even test it.
Ridiculous!
For those of you that are not engineers, this might not seem absurd, but it is. I'll use an analogy that everyone can relate to:
It is kind of like I went to a restaurant and ordered a shrimp cocktail, that on the menu, says I'd get 6-10 shrimp. Instead, I got 5.
Also, the shrimp cocktail is not for just me, it is for my entire dinner party.
Also, the waiter has about 20 other tables and they are ordering 20 shrimp cocktails a piece. The other tables are fine with their orders and he doesn't think it is worth his time to correct the mistake and gets defensive about it and claims things like the menu is wrong.
Also, the other people in my dinner party didn't really want a shrimp cocktail anyway, they wanted to order steak like they always do, and the steak is always pretty decent and is never screwed up. But, the shrimp cocktail is already at the table, and everyone is really hungry. To help get the problem solved, the other people at the table call more friends to the restaurant, and everyone is really pissed and covertly resenting me for ordering it.
Except instead of getting the wrong number of shrimp, it is more a more serious difference, like getting some shrimp that are not cooked, or getting hush puppies instead of shrimp.
Also, the shrimp cocktail gets bolted on a very complicated and expensive electro-mechanical doo-dad that sells for a very large fraction of my salary.
See? It is just like ordering a shrimp cocktail.
Oh! and Also, I have to fly clear across the country on the next delivery of the doo-dads to make sure they are working correctly, because the shrimp might have been chicken nuggets.
Although, there are things in life that make my life meaningful.
For instance, Television.
I am really getting into that show (stop me if you have heard of it) "The Celebrity Apprentice". The way this show works, is they take your standard washed-up celebrity, pit them against one another to complete trivial and unrealistic business tasks in a group setting, and are ultimately fired one-by-one by a overbearing, self-absorbed blabbermouth with no soul and who claims to be a business genius but really just inherited his fortune and managed not to piss it away.
You obviously can tell I don't care much for Donald Trump.
However, I really like this show because it makes me feel like nothing less than an evil business mastermind when compared to the likes of the celebrity dingleberries they brought on. I am confident they couldn't have found a more inept and detached group in all of Hollywood. While they bumble their way through projects I could do single-handily, I sit back and feel like Warren Buffet.
I feel very satisfied when one of them gets knocked off their Hollywood high-horse with a triumphant "your fired" at the end of each episode. Although, in real life, a more likely scenario is that their boss would lock the entire team in a bus and drive them into a river.
anyway, I think the worst of the problem is behind me, and I am looking forward to not wanting to throw myself into traffic on my way into the office anymore.
For the last 2 months,I have been pretty swamped at work.
I am really getting stressed out working in that pee-pee soaked heck-hole.
This has lead to a decreased blogs, a general feeling of lethargy, and a bad case of the dropsies.
Most of my time has been spent trying to get a vendor to make a part operate in the limits that they said it would operate. They spec'ed a range where it would operate, and doesn't actually operate at the bottom of that range. In fact, they didn't even test it.
Ridiculous!
For those of you that are not engineers, this might not seem absurd, but it is. I'll use an analogy that everyone can relate to:
It is kind of like I went to a restaurant and ordered a shrimp cocktail, that on the menu, says I'd get 6-10 shrimp. Instead, I got 5.
Also, the shrimp cocktail is not for just me, it is for my entire dinner party.
Also, the waiter has about 20 other tables and they are ordering 20 shrimp cocktails a piece. The other tables are fine with their orders and he doesn't think it is worth his time to correct the mistake and gets defensive about it and claims things like the menu is wrong.
Also, the other people in my dinner party didn't really want a shrimp cocktail anyway, they wanted to order steak like they always do, and the steak is always pretty decent and is never screwed up. But, the shrimp cocktail is already at the table, and everyone is really hungry. To help get the problem solved, the other people at the table call more friends to the restaurant, and everyone is really pissed and covertly resenting me for ordering it.
Except instead of getting the wrong number of shrimp, it is more a more serious difference, like getting some shrimp that are not cooked, or getting hush puppies instead of shrimp.
Also, the shrimp cocktail gets bolted on a very complicated and expensive electro-mechanical doo-dad that sells for a very large fraction of my salary.
See? It is just like ordering a shrimp cocktail.
Oh! and Also, I have to fly clear across the country on the next delivery of the doo-dads to make sure they are working correctly, because the shrimp might have been chicken nuggets.
Although, there are things in life that make my life meaningful.
For instance, Television.
I am really getting into that show (stop me if you have heard of it) "The Celebrity Apprentice". The way this show works, is they take your standard washed-up celebrity, pit them against one another to complete trivial and unrealistic business tasks in a group setting, and are ultimately fired one-by-one by a overbearing, self-absorbed blabbermouth with no soul and who claims to be a business genius but really just inherited his fortune and managed not to piss it away.
You obviously can tell I don't care much for Donald Trump.
However, I really like this show because it makes me feel like nothing less than an evil business mastermind when compared to the likes of the celebrity dingleberries they brought on. I am confident they couldn't have found a more inept and detached group in all of Hollywood. While they bumble their way through projects I could do single-handily, I sit back and feel like Warren Buffet.
I feel very satisfied when one of them gets knocked off their Hollywood high-horse with a triumphant "your fired" at the end of each episode. Although, in real life, a more likely scenario is that their boss would lock the entire team in a bus and drive them into a river.
anyway, I think the worst of the problem is behind me, and I am looking forward to not wanting to throw myself into traffic on my way into the office anymore.
Labels: work stories
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Dear Coworker,
Dear coworker,
I understand lableing the location of the utinsils, coffee filters, and creamer ....
....but did you have to label the can opener?
love,
Foo.
I understand lableing the location of the utinsils, coffee filters, and creamer ....
....but did you have to label the can opener?
love,
Foo.
Labels: work stories
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
bottle opener
I was admiring my friend mike’s bottle opener last night.
It is elegant in it’s simplicity. It has many features: keychain hole, beer tab opener, magnet for the fridge, and j-shaped thing for opening bottles. All of this fits unto something 3” long and is a single piece of extruded aluminum, except for the magnet. It probably is made of about 12 cans worth of aluminum. No space is wasted. There is no flashy decoration or gimmicky ergonomic handle. It is all there.
I covet it.
It is elegant in it’s simplicity. It has many features: keychain hole, beer tab opener, magnet for the fridge, and j-shaped thing for opening bottles. All of this fits unto something 3” long and is a single piece of extruded aluminum, except for the magnet. It probably is made of about 12 cans worth of aluminum. No space is wasted. There is no flashy decoration or gimmicky ergonomic handle. It is all there.
I covet it.
I am serious, I really admire it’s simplicity and functionality. I know a lot of other engineers / tech geeks read this blog. You guys may feel me. Any comments from you dorks?
There is a person in this very room who continuously choughs. It is next to impossible to concentrate when I hear her coughing every 20 seconds. I am about to lose my mind on her. Before lunch I was trying to read a very complicated paper on image reconstruction and it sounds like I am in a TB ward. I have tried passively-aggressively retaliating with counter-choughs and slamming my drawers loudly right after she coughs, but she isn’t catching on. I don’t see myself speaking to her, so I guess this will go on until I quit. She isn’t sick because she has done this for the 2 months I have been at my new desk. Maybe they are sympathy choughs and she wants someone to ask her if she is okay.
BTW, this is the same person who puked in the hall way, who I abandoned without pause. You can read about that in this blog.
When I was in another part of the building about a year ago I was trying to finish up my master’s thesis and I was writing my manuscript and finishing up a model or two. It was all somewhat new to me and difficult. There was a guy up there who also coughed about 2 times a minute. His choughs were about 100 times worse than this girls because it sounded like he was choking when he coughed. There were wet and gagging. You know, like when a small bit of food is resting in your throat and you have to hack it back into your mouth for more mastication? He did that 2-3 times a minute nonstop from morning until 5, when he left. After about 2 months of this I was convinced it was a nervous tick and not a pathological problem with his esophagus. He eventually went back to China, so I didn’t have to assault him after all. He also had his fingers in his nose quite a bit. He went way beyond normal booger extraction and would just kind of dig around in there for minutes at a time. I think he did it when he was deep in thought. I wish I were making that part up. He was a real piece of work.
In that area of the office, the desks were arranged without partition walls. I eventually got so sick of his hacking and fingering of his nose, that I started stacking stuff in between our desks in an attempt to block him from my view and muffle the hacking noise. I used file cabinets, bookshelves, and I even stood some ceiling tiles on end like a shield between us because I thought it would absorb some of the hacking sounds. It extremely obvious what I was doing, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Other people asked why I was doing that and I openly admitted I thought the coughing guy was a sociopath. Sometimes I did it within ear-shot of the guy, but I STILL don’t think he caught on.
That is all I got for now. Please check back later for a story about how annoyed I get when my pens fall out of my pen holder.
Labels: work stories
