“We’ll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started,” like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.
I talk to the C suite and lab staff regularly, sometimes, you can’t duck out of front the muckity mucks, sometimes you can’t leave a conversation with researchers and partners. But, I’m frequently the one who say, we’re 5 minutes from close, 2 minutes from the end of our time, ok, we’re going to have to drop off. With either.
Yeah, I’m totally cool with being late sometimes, but I know various folks where it’d be an exception, if they’re not late, because they have meetings back-to-back all day long.
Always makes me feel like the official meeting start should be 5 minutes after or something, but I know that those folks aren’t late for the fun of it. They’d definitely overrun those 5 minutes, if they knew they had them.
My frustration is less with the people who are late and more with the meeting host making the rest of the attendees sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the late person. Unless the late person’s presence is the point of the meeting, just get started and let them catch up.
Have to agree with that, as I’m either hosting or presenting.
They tried to fix this at my work by changing the default values for an hour- or half-hour meeting. Half an hour would automatically become 25 minutes and an hour would turn into 50 minutes in the calendar.
The idea seemed to work at first, but people quickly adjusted and used those extra minutes to extend the meeting regardless.
My place of business has this dysfunction with meetings—Zoom being the biggest offender—where people just keep talking through the end of a meeting. 30-minute meetings become 35-40. 60-minute meetings becomes 65-70. And, with meetings frequently being back-to-back-to-back, invariably one or another person is late to the next one.
I think it’s because scheduling a meeting with all necessary parties is so difficult that if you don’t finish the thought, the next chance is at least a week away.
To top it off, we had a company-wide survey that spawned a working group to tackle the problem of meetings, whose suggestion was to update Outlook settings to automatically shorten meetings by X minutes—to allow people transit time, bathroom breaks, etc. Almost no one set that setting.
Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.
Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.
Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.
Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.
Just disconnect.
they don’t respect the meeting time, they don’t respect you.
If they couldn’t fit everything in, then that’s their problem for under booking the meeting.
That Edge is now the only “approved” browser anyone is allowed to use, per our admin (taking input from a third party security consultant). Most people in other departments don’t care, they use whatever gets put in front of them because their needs are basic and their tolerance for bullshit is too high for their own good. The rest of us in IT (well most of us) hate it.
I had to go uninstall Chrome and even a few Firefox installations, manually, from any workstation that had them. And I’ve never felt dirtier in my job. Like everytime I punched in my credentials to authorize the uninstall, Microsoft’s stock rose by the smallest amount.
Legitimately, the more of a Microsoft 365/Azure/Endpoint/Entra/Shithole/Power BI/SharePoint clusterfuck my workstation becomes, the less enthused I am about the entire IT profession.
Amen. Managed to ‘prove’ I was competent enough to run linux on my personal laptop due to a combination of needing me as an employee and that I was able to show why their RDS solution broke after an official windows update with xfreerdp.
I keep my windows workstation up to date and switched on - but all work is done from my laptop and no one’s questioned me so far.
Strictly according to the IT policy, Windows is not required - they just thought I wouldn’t be able to access anything without it. When I proved to the auditors that I met every checkbox on the requirements list, they said it was fine too xD
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Also, they don’t allow wearing headphones and it’s awfully quite sometimes and I have ADHD and have to fill that noise by talking.
This is the far far bigger WTF-moment for me. No headphones? In an open office?!
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Oh god, I feel bad for that guy. Like, also the rest of you, but a chatty six person office that bans headphones if you don’t like smalltalk? Torture.
As someone who has ADHD AND is an introvert with social anxiety, that office is my idea of hell! Definitely wouldn’t last a month, maybe not even a week.
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Sounds like you’re like me then: a personable introvert.
I’m good at faking being a social butterfly when I have to as well and generally treat people kindly and considerately but yeah, it really IS draining to deal with people for long periods of time and I tend to avoid it when I can do so without stepping on anyone’s toes…
See, that’s the main thing that differentiates introverts. A lot of introverts trend to being quiet and unsocial, but it’s because they’ve learned that it’s exhausting. Then there’s the lot of us who, for whatever reason, have been forced to push through and do it anyway.
Being social is a skill you have to develop, and since we’ve had to put in more work, we can be pretty good at it. When I’m in a social situation I can turn it on. My defense mechanism when I’m feeling uncomfortable is to shut my brain off and let that social muscle memory take over and I become super charming. Or I have to take over a meeting because I’m the only one who actually understands the topic and can communicate it. I can do it, and I’m good at it. But as soon as it’s over I can feel my brain deflate. Sometimes it uses all my spoons and I know immediately that I’m not going to get anything else done the rest of the day because an early surprise meeting showed up on my calendar.
I’m that guy. The phone next to me is ringing SUPER LOUD nonstop, ear hurting loud. Sometimes he has two phones and while talking they call him again. There’s people on the front talking about work, but talking. People at the back talking too. People come to talk to coworkers next to me… It’s hell, I’m lucky my sector doesn’t have work shortage so I’m just going to leave.
Now, they told me that I can use headphones when I said I’m leaving, but… yeah no, this kind of things have to be though beforehand, not given as the carrot so I don’t leave. Think about accomodating workers, not appeasing them when they complain ffs.
Same situation for me - only my desk mate plays accuradio over speakers like we’re in a fucking gym. I can barely keep focused on anything
Depending on where you live it and the job you do, you may be possible to get an exception to the rule against wearing headphones.
If you’re in the US or UK, I know it would be your right to request reasonable accommodation for ADHD - either under the ADA or the Equality Act.
Obviously if there’s a good reason to disallow headphones (for example, if there’s some danger that you wouldn’t be able to hear) then this wouldn’t help. But if it’s just the company being controlling, you can probably get an exception.
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It doesn’t need to be a confrontation - just have a chat with your manager, mention that you have an ADHD diagnosis and that you have been recommended some things to help improve your focus, attention and performance at work, and that one of those suggestions was listening to music or white noise through headphones, and ask if it could be considered as an adjustment due to your disability. If you frame it as a collaborative and positive action that you can take together, rather than something you’re demanding to be different, I don’t think there’s any reason for your manager to be offended by the request.
Could you use just one ear bud? I do that a lot so that I can still hear what’s going on around me but have some music or podcast going while I work.
Any microsoft application. Constant bugs, crashes and a tendency to break everything if you accidentally use them in any other way than microsoft intended.
Also, ads in a fucking operation system? I don’t see how anyone can find that acceptable.
I think MIUI was its pioneer. Even the settings app had ads.
At least they use that to sell you the hardware for cheap. Microsoft doesn’t provide anything of value like that. In fact, they charge people for the OS and then have the audacity to add ads.
Oh shit this makes me have flashbacks to the one - and only - time I got a phone with MIUI. I could not believe how bad that Android skin was. As in, even Samsung in their pre-One heyday could not even come close to this bullshit.
Linux includes ads built into Firefox in a lot of the popular distros.
I’d say firefox doesn’t qualify as OS but I get your point, distros do ship it by default.
The good thing is that those ads are just defaults, not permanently baked in. I can get rid of them in about 2 minutes. Mozilla doesn’t sell your usage data so they need another way of funding themselves and I don’t think there’s a better way to do it.
The same can be said about the Windows ads. It’s just a checkbox to turn off tips. Tips are useful a lot of the time so people don’t want to turn them off. The second a tip isn’t useful it’s seen as an ad.
First of all, tips will automatically get enabled during some updates.
Secondly, tips notifictions telling you to use microsoft crap are not the only ads. You get fullscreen ads for office after booting that are made to look exactly like an installer, you get edge literally spamming you with popups when you try downloading another browser (that’s closer to malware than an ad but I’ll let it count).
You get ads in the settings menu as well and if you try to edit a video like you could on windows 7, you get the “fuck you, pay a subscription”.
You also get ads in your start menu and of course, don’t forget the start menu search that will rather show you a bing page full of ads than actually search for your files.
Please stop defending this bullshit, it benefits no one but microsoft and is actively making the world a worse place.
I’ve literally not seen any of the ads you are talking about (besides an office 365 install prompt at the end of an install) but I run a windows debloater tool on every install since windows 7. I also never had an update mess with the debloater stuff or turn ads back on.
Everyone happily careening toward totally preventable catastrophe, then doing surprised pikachu face.
Omg… I have tried to sound the whistle on a major mistake no less than 3 times in the last 7 years and they have all been ignored. I have taken to doing what I used to do with my female friends who had poor taste in men, tell them what is going to happen and let them know the only reason I am doing it is so I can say “told you so” later.
Heh. I’ve grown fond of the phrase “My resume is up to date, anyway. Go for it.”
It’s as if thinking is shut down as soon as they enter the workplace.
There’s a high pitched sound coming from one of the air ducts. It’s driving me crazy but no one else seems to hear it.
They probably don’t. Congratulations! You’re either young or still have great hearing!
Or tinnitus
Tinnitus that only gets triggered at work?
At this time of year?!
May I hear it?
No
As much as I like to be flattered for still looking young, it’s probably the latter option :)
I don’t work at the moment, but here is a list of stuff I’m glad to be away from:
- That guy over there that grunts and coughs and clears his throat every 37 seconds.
- Having ten minute standup meetings every day, that take at least 45 minutes every day and could have been replaced by looking at the status page in the wiki.
- That other guy over there that raises his voice and yells and carries on every time he is on the phone, completely unaware that his phone has a microphone, and that anyone else exists
- People who eat stinky stuff for lunch at their desk, chewing with their mouth open while watching the football at full volume. Go and use the lunch room, you inconsiderate fuck.
- my boss over in the next cubicle who yells out someone’s name, expecting them to be there, and then yells a series of instructions whether they are there or not. I’m trying to think, can’t you just get up and walk all the way over to another cubicle to talk at a reasonable volume, like a normal person?
- The woman that just started, sitting in the next cubicle, that reeks of foul perfume. I know when she arrives and leaves by the smog cloud, the revolting stench that follows her around the office, and the trail of people vomiting and struggling to breathe after she goes past. I tried to do the right thing and talk to her and she conveniently can’t speak English, unaware that I can hear her on the phone speaking flawlessly.
We may have worked in the same office.
I’m sure you’ve got more, this is Dilbert-level stuff!
No doubt, I worked in large corporate offices most of my working life, and don’t I regret it…
People having video calls at their desks. We have soundproof booths and conference rooms but no, people will just talk loudly in the open space area. It’s like people talking on the phone on a bus. Hearing only one side of the conversation is super distracting. Sometimes two people sitting next to each other will be on the same video call. I guess more people are bothered but not enough to do something about it.
I sometimes send them quotes from their own conversation on chat.
Passive aggressive ftw 😁
That’s not actually passive aggressive, that’s just being sassy. The term “passive aggressive” refers to something completely different than what most people think.
Open offices are a mistake.
Having to reserve conference rooms to have a semblance of quietude is a terrible system. I don’t miss that shit.
We had a loud talkative guy at my place. Fucking deep voice that he was projecting like he was on a stage or something. It was not possible to have a conversation near him when he was on Zoom. We barely spoke in the open area anyway, but some people just wouldn’t shup up. I can still hear their stupid voice when I think about it.
I didn’t have an issue with open offices before the pandemic. We barely had any video calls (everyone was at the office) and people kept it down. Then everything switched to video and a lot of people are assholes.
I did not really mind when I worked at a ~10 people company, it kind of made sense. Working on a floor with over a hundred people in an open office was miserable. There was always someone on Zoom or people having live meeting in earshot.
Blow my mind that all those office managers and floor planners and supposedly expert at organizing a work environment think that it make sense to cram in hundred of people working on wildly different stuff together at earshot distance. How hard would it be to create big divisions so that you only get to hear the 10 or so people which you’re directly involved with. Anyway, there was clearly an “everyone must be an extrovert” culture thing going on. The higher ups sure seemed to enjoy hearing and seeing everyone everywhere all the time.
Do you have enough rooms from everyone at the same time ?
Yes, I keep seeing people shouting at their desk with a empty booth 2m next to them.
For our office we’ve had to resort to this and it’s pretty miserable. There are simply not enough conference rooms and phone rooms to handle all the meetings. People are unfortunately typically in teams with people across the country so every meeting is a video call. It’s really annoying so many people just end up wearing noise canceling headphones.
This is the one. I hate being in the office for this reason, unless I’m just there to socialise. I can’t bring myself to take a call in an open plan space. It just feels rude to the people in the office, but also those on the call who will get a stream of all the calls everyone in the office are on.
Sounds like the soundproofed rooms are for people who want privacy, and/or quiet place to work
The soundproofed rooms don’t have extra monitors or proper chairs so they suck for long time work.
When people message with a “hi” or “hello” and then say nothing more till I reply.
It annoys the hell out of me. Like, why can’t you just say what you want. It wastes so much of my time and mental energy to switch back and forth while I wait for your reply after replying to your utterly useless hello.
just answer them with https://nohello.net/en/
What’s worse, after you “hi” them back, some people (looking at you project managers) just ducking call without any explanation. Drives me nuts
Reject call.
‘why didn’t you answer’
‘I’m not available for calls right now’
‘why’
‘that’s not your business’
I’ve wandered down this road a few times now.
Got reported to my manager for doing just that. My rule was simple: if you’re not my boss, I need to know what the call is about in advanced.
I just explain the same as above.
If you’re not paying me for my time, you’re not entitled to it, nor an explanation of what I do in my own time.
If we’re talking about time on the clock, that’s a different story.
Or I think worse yet, I ask a question, and they don’t reply for a while so then when they do respond all they say is “hi.”
It infuriates me, I don’t need to be at my desk for you to answer the question I left you above! Ughhh
Especially infuriating when the other person is in a very different time zone. I once worked on a project with a partner company in a time zone 10 hours ahead of mine and it was common for trivial things to take days purely because the other person insisted on typing “Hi,” waiting for my “Hi, what’s up?” response (which they didn’t see until the next day since our hours didn’t overlap), and then replying with their question, which I didn’t see until my next day. Answering the actual question often took like 30 seconds, but in the meantime two or three days had gone by.
I came to believe they were doing it on purpose so they could constantly slack off and tell their boss they were blocked waiting for my answer.
I just wait until they say more things. Hello is nothing.
I have tried this. I’m often reminded the next day that they still haven’t received a reply from me.
I love that part.
I occasionally give people shit for this. Chat is asynchronous and I’m busy just ask me the question and I’ll respond back when I can. Some people just won’t learn though and I usually just leave them on read.
“Hi, we need to talk…”
My co-workers.
We have 3 (three. Three!!) redundant monitoring and alerting systems and have yet to detect the issues routinely found by our customers. Its not because we didn’t detect them, it’s because we have so many false positives we stopped looking (but still run the monitors).
Uuuuuugffhhhhhj
Who owns the monitoring systems? Are they accountable for the costs that they’re imposing on the rest of the company?
Teams! It literally never works on Linux and you cannot change a single thing about it. I’m so tired of having to tell people that today my teams cannot share shit, which worked flawlessly yesterday.
Teams is garbage. This comes from someone who used it on windows, both on the app and web versions.
In teams, people above you get reports on all of the time you’ve spent in teams and can see all of your “private messages”! There’s a whole-ass dashboard for it!
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Hmmm I hope that’s not also the case with private messages on teams some 5 years ago. Pretty sure there was some condescending chats about uni teachers over private messages.
Oh well, I’ve graduated anyway and never again used the messaging function after that.
Teams is shit. I use it at work on Windows, and it’s still shit.
Searching something in the chat? Complete dogshit. Half the times it just straight up doesn’t work, the rest of the times it shows only the message where searched word is present and not the point in discussion when this message happened.
Keybinds. Non-customisable. Keybinds. Who in their right mind does that?! I once heard that keybind customisation would confuse “normies”, which is complete moot. So-called “normies” won’t go to the settings (or at least, to keybinds) anyway and will be either satisfied with defaults or won’t use them at all.
It also cannot restrict how many notifications it displays in the corner - so when things are getting spicier at work, it spams whole right side of your screen (gods help you if you were working on the laptop with small screen atm, cause getting shit done will be impossible). So your 2 options will be to mute everything or continue getting spammed. And then the whole point that it is even worse on Linux. And it’s web version is crap, too. And that it is a bloted, laggy mess that is more in my way when I work than helps me.
Rant over, I guess?the rest of the times it shows only the message where searched word is present and not the point in discussion when this message happened.
Uh, I just click the message and it sends you to the conversation where you can check what was said.
So your 2 options will be to mute everything or continue getting spammed.
You can also mute only the chat that’s being spammy, but I agree with this one because I can’t mute it for X mins and such.
It’s curious how when the pandemic started people around me were super happy with Teams, comparing it to Google Meet and other meeting software, because it was one of the best services that simply worked, and over time they became more angry with it for all the bugs and weird decisions.
How bout the fact that everyone above you can see everything you do and all your “private messages”?
Can they? I don’t really care, I don’t use the corporate chat for personal things. I will act without regard to that, and if it comes to my knowledge that they did read them for the sake of controlling me, I’m going to fucking leave the company after talking to HR, that’s an issue with the boss not the tool.
I do find that useful in a corporate scenario, where if someone leaves the should be able to retrieve all the information shared on those chats, and if you suspect that someone is saying things they really shouldn’t to clients or colleagues, being able to check it is good.
I miss Teams. It was so bad, that anytime I forgot something, I was able to blame teams and no one questioned it. Since then I changed jobs, so can’t do it anymore.
I use Teams very sparingly at work, but it occasionally decides it wants to auto-start when Windows turns on (ignoring my settings that disable it on startup).
Teams also occasionally decides that it wants to disconnect/break my Bluetooth headset connection. I don’t always need Teams to do my job, but my Bluetooth headset is always required for what I do. The only way to restore functionality when this happens is to close Teams. I haven’t figured out why it happens only some of the times, but it’s annoying as fuck. I don’t have that issue with any other programs doing that to my input devices.
If I had to guess, Teams is getting small updates when that happens to you. You have it turned off on startup, but if it gets an update and the end of that update is a restart of the program. And poorly designed updates tend to reset connections or settings. And Teams loves its updates. I wouldn’t turn off the auto updates though if I was you. Usually they are security updates.
Don’t schedule a &$&% meeting during lunchtime without serving up lunch to us!
Don’t schedule a meeting at lunch time. Full stop.
My lunch time is me time. I’d prefer no lunch meetings ever. That’s my walking time.
People have died for lesser offences than scheduling a meeting over lunch time and not serving lunch.
I hear you, but given that my “lunchtime” could be anywhere between 11:00 and 15:00 (and that’s not even allowing for timezones), that’s pretty impractical.
In my last two jobs in two different countries the unwritten rule is to not schedule a meeting between 12-13. Not everyone has lunch at the same time, and everyone is free to have lunch whenever they want, but this guarantees that you will have some time to have lunch even if you are booked by meetings around noon. But it doesn’t really solve the timezone issue.
The noise. FML. If I have to listen to another coworker take calls at the top of their voice one cubicle over…
I’m not in the office frequently, but when I am, my supervisor and I just plan on getting absolutely no work done. It is soooo loud. We have cubicles and frequent teams meetings, and all that we can hear is everyone else’s conversations.
Neither of us can concentrate with the constant noise interruption.
The moderator of a daily web-meeting saying “Who wants to go first?”.
Followed by either:
- nobody speaking
- everybody speaking
…BECAUSE THERE’S A LAG AND BODY LANGUAGE DOESN’T EXIST ONLINE.
Seriously people, don’t ask everyone. Ask individuals.
I’m always the one asked first. Fuck that. Don’t at all. Just … stop
