h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't know if disastrous boss's behaviour is some kind of an epidemic but I was thinking that the time has come to open a thread, where all those having troubles with their bosses (all people but ultimate bosses. one can't suite everybody. ) can let their fingers free and write a charming complaint. After a while we can see if it's common or is it just me.

I feel there should be a rule of some kind, so let's just say for now - whining is not acceptable. All complaints have to be constructive and ...hm, righteous. Well, we'll see about that, but definitely NO WHINING! ? What's whining

Now let's see... what should I be complaining about...

My boss keeps organizing meetings that serve only one goal - satisfying his passion to talk. The latter he does extremely good, I admit.

I don't know how your company functions but where I work, meetings have an exceptional status. Some kind of a cult. The team cult. All people have to work as a team and therefore we organize meetings. They are even more important than the actual work. So my boss doesn't miss an occasion to comply with the ritual of organizing meetings. Nothing is being discussed. The whole point is to pick a team up - meaning to bring the poor people up to date with the current work. Some of the meetings are fixed, so most of the time we look bad at saying that we are not as quite advanced as we had hoped before the previous meeting, so now we're doing everything possible to catch up and perform better next time.

All of this reminds me of the management staff that starved on an inhabited planet because they hadn't been able to reach consensus the week before if the fish they had caught is edible or not. Where was this, in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", no?

Nah, I think it was after the Restaurant Somebody needs an update of the classics one might feel!

Meetings! I remember my previous job - we had this guy who was actually asking for meetings but nobody agreed to hold such. He wanted to discuss projects, talk science, swap ideas... I thought it sounded excellent! What's bad about exchanging opinions and ideas, right? Then I moved here. We have meetings all the time. Usually without any schedule or agenda, which, believe me, is worse! You never know whether there isn't a meeting lurking behind the 5 p.m. corner, waiting to jump on you and surprise you with it's strange agenda and what's worse - with it's out of proportion length!

One thing I totally agree on with you - meetings are meant to provide the bosses with talking opportunity! That's it! You are not supposed to get anything useful out of them. Unless of course you are the boss

And since you want us to be constructive here - how about listing suggestions about ways to spend the time during office meetings? Say - reading books, listening to your mp3 player, watching movies on the laptop... And this should definitely be accompanied by a "how to hide it" list

At my place they have stopped having meetings. Sounds good, eh? Well it's only because they call them workshops now

I'm not going to complain about my boss - I've done enough of that on my Journal to really annoy a lot of people. Sorry... nothing constructive to add, but I really can't resist a thread which has "boss" and "complaint" in the title.

Damn right you are Sho - no way to resist a topic like that! What's that, are we professional whiners?

Ok, here's my story from yesterday! Soon after New Year's Day (you know New Year's Day, don't you - that's 1st of January, almost 6 months ago) boss R asked me to take a look at the specifications of a computer system designed for lab management, meant to be used for a tender procedure. First thought was - what the h... do I know about lab management computer systems? But I am a good girl, I looked through the list very carefully and because I am not a computer wiz I put in a lot of comments and questions that in my mind needed to be clarified. And, since I am wiz enough, I corrected the formatting of the text so that at least we don't need to be ashamed when the companies that want to participate in the tender procedure find out that there are missing numbers from the list, since boss R can't use the automatic numbering in Word...

I send it back within a day. Nothing happened. And nothing kept happening till March, when she suddenly decided that we need to talk about the tender specifications and asked what happened to the list. I explained what I did and reminded her that I sent it back ages ago. That was that. Until two weeks ago when she remembered again about the list and asked me what happened. Yet again I explained that I have marked all my comments and questions and if only she could read them we may get somewhere. The only thing she said was "So you haven't found answers to your questions yet?" Hello! As I said, I am not a computer expert, I do have a PhD but it's in genetics not computer sciences (or management hint-hint!) and I can't decide what requirements to list for the tender since I am not paid for the responsibility! She is!
OK, there she goes, accepts all changes I made and sends the file back for correction. I looked through it extremely fast correcting few spelling and grammar mistakes to show that I did something and sent it back.

On Wednesday this week she left for Barcelona, asking me to take the tender specifications to the secretary. I did so. And yesterday I got a phone call from the University administration. They said they want to talk to me about the tendered procedure, they had some questions and boss R apparently told them on the phone I am the person to call. OK, I said, fire away. And they did - "Why did you need to wait so long with these documents if you want the tender procedure to be over by the end of July?"
Me??? I did my job in January!!!

Hope you drawn over there in the Mediterranean!

OK, that felt much better! And now that I am boss-less for a week AND because it's Friday I can go and get a with some , right?

Oh, we have workshops, too! It's a very popular term actually. I even tried to fugure out, when a meeting is just a meeting and when it's something more, i.e. workshop.

So here are my definitions.

Meetings are only meetings when only a small number of people is involved, generally 2-4. Moreover these people know each other and work together almost every day, so no pompous names are required. They all know that this is just the next boring status gathering that is held, because the boss wants to understand someting that was already explained numerous times before.

Now, workshops on the other hand, are held so that the "expertise" of another department or even another company can be squeezed out. In my experience, this never happens. Most of the time people work on understanding the terms used in somebody's speech, trying very carefully not to understand what the other person means. Sad and embarrassing picture! Yesterday I watched bewildered two teams while they were arguing about a concept's title. On the table for a discussion were the titles - Something 2013 and Something 2013+. Apparently, the guest team was afraid that the lack of a + sign poses a serious threat to its every day tranquility.

Generally, nothing's accomplished on workshops. Which leads me to the constructive ideas that night-eyes meant - workshops are the kind of meetings, when one can do all the staring through the window, painting the next office masterpicece on his/her notebook with a ballpen or even write his/hers memoirs. That's probably because usually more than 5 experts are involved.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Let's hope that the Mediterranean will not be contaminated for the next 100 or so years.

Whatever you do during meetings, do it in some foreign language, so that nobody understands what you really do.

I work in a foreign language so it's all strange for me

My boss was nice to me yesterday - I nearly fainted.

but back to his usual "merchant banker" self today to make up for it

things are back to normal, then! don't worry too much! the bad feeling will fade.

It will fade but not go away when he beams back to the mothership. I mean, goes back to company HQ. But I have another year of him until then. *sigh*

some cynics would be happy to add, that the better you'll feel afterwards

but we don't tolerate such wits, do we?

Of course not. We shun them.

And continue to moan about bosses. Mine wasn't there today, which was great. Unfortunately he has a cellphone and he's not shy about using it

Yes, that's another thing about bosses! Their love of mobile phones!
Of course this love is very erratic and senseless! They are always overusing the gizmos when you don’t need them to bother you and are always away when they actually can do something useful if only you could get them on the phone!

Like my boss, who (apparently still not drowned in the Mediterranean!) disappeared completely from the face of the Earth yesterday when the administration people needed to talk to her about the tender (and killed me instead with their questions, concluding yet again that we are dreadfully late and we shouldn’t have waited so long). And of course she started SMSing me frantically while I was being "electrocuted" at the physical therapist today!

Mine keeps asking for my mobile number - which I won't give. Nor my private home number (HR has that - if it's life or death they can reach me)

I very nearly caught a colleague giving him another colleague's private mobile number - and suggested that it's not a good idea.

I'm not paid to be on call 24 hours a day - they don't (and couldn't) pay me enough to do that. And when I'm not at work, I am so not on duty

Mine was getting all hysterical today about our customers' summer closing schedules for their factories. Information I have been updating on our server (and emailing round to everyone since they never check for themselves) since at least January....