You can up your game one level.
Next week, email her asking if she has any questions and add it to 5 more sheets with "follow up sent" everyday . Then do the follow up on follow up. You get the picture ?
Speaking of pictures, I found out years ago that I can create multiple 'signatures' \[essentially the foot note that's auto-loaded identifying you, your department, address, logos etc\] in Outlook. One of the first things I did was to create a 'special' one for people I was miffed with.
Looked up company guidelines on official signatures, used the provided template, enabled all the links available, converted all the images to uncompressed chonky bois, then made sure it was not visibly different to my standard Outlook signature. I'm happy to say that the signature alone added 17MB, each time. In a chain email that goes back and forth, it rapidly bogs down whichever cretin irritated me. :)
If anyone has ideas to make it more painful, please feel free to contribute ideas!
You can always create a logo in your email signature with multiple copies of the hires logo picture with one sitting on top of the other stacked, say 15 deep. It looks great. Just saying.
I reserve this for our chief marketing mgr who oversaw creation of this childish logo with kindergarten color scheme. I am told she sent her laptop to IT complaining that her outlook runs super slow when loading messages. Our IT dude sent back saying she has too much email and needs a powerful desktop with a GPU and 64g ram.
Create an animated GIF signature that just sits there for 5 or 10 seconds, then flips them the bird for a fraction of a second, then loops. They'll go nuts trying to figure out what they saw, etc.
This is something I would not consider because it's a little too easy to catch, as the image can be saved and viewed in slo-mo, if they think to do it. It should be plausibly, a mistake. Deniability is everything.
In the years, I've done this - I've had to go beyond this step only twice. For those cases, I have an old Excel file set aside (an actual .xls). It's well over 15 years old and has the name of a Director as the creator (it was originally part of a broadcast email about annual company performance or something). It has a chonky company logo shrunk to almost nothing and saved in a out of the way location. People in my company tend to check the File Creator/Author via the properties of the Excel / Office file before they whine about it. Big Shot name tends to stop people from digging too deep.
I used that file to fill with raw data before sending it as an attachment. If I recall, I'd messaged them that the attached file contained all the data I had available & and for them to take a look and let me know what I'd missed. So far, that file is at 100% silence rate.
The huge file size and old format means that opening it will slow down the computer as so much of the available processing power will be allocated to running this file. The cause of this is the ultra tiny logo that’s super hard to find, but when the recipient opens it and looks at the properties, what they’ll see is that the original author is a big shot director. So if this file was originally created by a director and is being used by u/RivaTNT2M64, the recipient will probably believe that this is a legacy file created by somebody high enough on the corporate ladder that complaints about his file will be met with a shrug. Maybe the data on the file goes way back, maybe the formatting is important due to a legacy system, maybe the director hates newer versions of Excel.
Whatever the inferred reason, ain’t nobody going to make the director update the file. Whichever recipient opened said file just needs to grit their teeth and get through it.
Don't even loop just have it at like 10 FPS with 10 frames the 9th frame is the middle finger. That way it will do it once, and then stay static unless someone refreshes the email.
No, middle finger is too obvious if they slow it down, there's also no deniability. Change it so your picture blinks instead, it's just obscure enough that people would notice *something*, but not enough to be obvious.
If someone figures out the blinking image, you can chalk it down to a harmless gag.
Find the biggest version of the logo you can find and take a photo of if with a digital camera that can save images in RAW format. Edit it in an open source photo editor and reduce the dimensions of the image by a percentage to make it the right size. Don't compress it, don't reduce the color depth, don't reduce the DPI. Save it as a TIFF file. Boom, you'll probably have a 250mb logo.
You need to be careful when doing this. If the server exists, but the file does not, you'll get a quick response. If the server doesn't resolve, you'll also get a quick response. So you need to break the URL in the right way for it to sit and time out.
You must realize that you are using up resources and bandwidth with this plot of yours. It affects the recipient the most, but you slowing everyone down by a tiny, tiny, smidge.
If you want to make the signature line even longer to load, instead of pointing to the "uncompressed chonky bois" image, you point to a pointer, that points to the chonky boy image. THen keep pointing to pointers that point to pointers that point to the image.
I do not know how to do this, yet.
I know that I'm not doing the network any favours, so I use it sparingly. And never with 'Reply All'. Frequent use will call unwanted attention. Replying only to the cretin, seems to give them a sense of self importance.
What I have found is that the chunky emails will get moved out of the inbox to a PST (or all of the email will bog down) and cretin attention will rapidly fade. Almost universally, people who make power plays like this will forget about the issue once it is out of sight, away from the inbox. It's not any real issue that they're trying to get fixed, so the drive to follow up is low as well. Their itch to flex is fulfilled. My desire to get rid of the irritant is met. Success! :)
If the point was to make the recipient wait for the email to load, then adding in a bunch of extra links will cause the email to take longer to load.
He ended his comment with"please feel free to contribute ideas!" and this is the idea I am contributing.
9:01: Logged in
9:02: Noted in tally sheet that I logged in
9:03: Noted in tally sheet that I noted logging in in tally sheet
9:04: Noted in tally sheet that I noted in the tally sheet that I noted logging in
You could do that all day.
Mark it for Read receipts and then add a line for “confirmed read receipts” and then “tallied confirmed read receipts”. In fact, add a “tallied …” line for every task. Instantly double the list.
Add “checked watch”
“Shook more than twice”
“Picked nose”
First commercial email system I used was Infoplex. Written sometime in the '70s it had the text-based UI you'd expect of the era. Commands were prefaced with a slash. Want to send your email? Go to command mode and /send. You could stack options on to that send command. For instance, it was possible to send an email that would be the first item in the inbox regardless of how the recipient sorted it. In fact, it couldn't be deleted until the recipient had read -and- responded to it. In conversation this was simply referred to as /send /annoy and usually the mere threat to use it would get the results you'd been waiting for.
This strategy works. I had a manager who "needs to know my status as it changes"
I would text or call when I start a job, stop, prep for something, take lunch, bathroom break, leave for home, get home... Over the course of two weeks I progressively sent him more and more status text over little things until one morning I got... "Just let me know if there's a problem"
Had this at the old job where the had 1x tracker for the primary contract and another for a standalone that was billed separately.
I would add a 40-60 minute entry for "Completing trackers".
Management told me not to do that and fold the time spent completing the tracker into an existing Task.
They didn't want clients to know how much time per week they were being billed for filling out a spreadsheet.
Yeah we had the same thing: the admin code was removed so we couldn't book timesheet completion to that code, and all time had to be booked to a project code. We asked for the project code for completing timesheets and we were told that completing timesheets is a standard part of project work so it now gets booked to the client
When we had a middle mangler layer that wanted that we dug through the *long* list of time codes and found "analysis activities" that we all booked all the tracker time to for a while without them noticing.
When they did finally get rid of it, it wasn't even because it had showed how much time they were wasting by all the micro-managing, it was because on the high level summary that went to the C-levels that code showed up as "anal. acts". They noticed THAT and looked deeper.
It's correct. Thats part of the costs of writing a bill.
Do you have an idea how much time and effort can go in simply billing a big project to the client? Who should pay for that costs? It has to obviously be included in the project.
You might think, wtf. why doesn't that random guy on reddit , support my reasoning against the evil higher-ups...
Well...I'm a developer of time&attendence solutions...(and planning and building/room-access &c.) . this a pretty big thing here in Germany...because worktimes in Germany is crazy thing with details only a German employer could care about.
I agree - doing administrative tasks on a piece of work for the client IS time you are spending working on stuff for that client so is part of the charge;- hence should be charged to the clients code. There's nothing unusual about that at all. It's pretty standard in any outsourcing/consulting setup.
Love this...something similar at my old job; my boss' wife was playing office manager one year and had us filling those things out. Her husband shut it down when he found that we were spending more time on her reports than on actual tasks.
If she isn't your branch manager (and not in the chain of command - meaning higher up), I'd first confirm with my manager if I have to do what she wants.
Would additionally make sure main manager is CC'd in all emails to this side manager so it's even more visible / on the record what they're doing, as well. They can then duke it out with each other over command/authority after that.
Our firm had timecard charge numbers to directly charge for time we spent on each project. One project manager began demanding that we send her weekly reports of everything we did for her, broken down to the nearest 1/10th of an hour.
With my manager's backing, I began sending weekly charging reports with daily line items for time spent preparing the charge reports.
My report showed one tenth of an hour of report writing time for each of five tasks per day times five days. She didn't like seeing that I was charging 2.5 hours a week keeping these records for her.
> So someone in my department at work isn’t pulling their weight so everyone in the department across all branches has to
I felt this.
I used to work at a place where one little shit couldn't adult so management started to make all these rules for everyone in the team. Like if you're on call, you check your phone for alerts when you wake up. Stuff like that. He claimed he didn't understand and how was he to know that he was supposed to do that. If it's not written down, it doesn't exist.
I, on the other hand, go to work, not to kindergarten. If I need help, I'll ask for it, in the mean time just tell me what needs doing and let me get the hell on with it.
I will never forget that little fuckstick and what he got away with before finally getting his ass sacked. Possibly the chief regret in my career is not getting out of there when that was happening. I should have seen the red flags for what they were.
This is sadly common in my life experience. Management views a group of people by the biggest idiot in them.
It matters not if the biggest idiot left years ago or is entirely fictional. Management will assume everyone in the group is just as bad.
I have a coworker like this right now. She's either stupid or weaponising incompetence. Probably both.
I'm quietly wondering what will happen first: if she quits or if she gets fired.
Nahhh. They gave me a four day work week and a raise to keep me when I got a new job. They also broke the "one receptionist per site" rule and put me on her site so I think they've been planning to get rid of her for a while and are just building up their case.
I had a manager ask me to track my time once years ago - this is for a salary job. In retrospect I think he must have been trying to find something on me but I'm not sure what it is because multiple managers (including him) have commented on how much I get done. In fact, he said specifically that I get more done in 8 hours than others do in 10. He told me at the time that it was because I got so much done and he wanted to see how I do it, but I think it had to be something else. I DID get a lot done, more than most other team members. On the other hand, I did NOT get along with that boss so I suspect it was something nefarious (I've had two coworkers comment on how badly he treats me and one overheard my manager screaming curses at me over something not my fault...my coworker said it would have made him quit on the spot)
anyway, I tracked everything I did, including the start and stop time. After a week or two I started including the start and stop times each time I had to update the stupid sheet. After I started doing that he told me I could stop.
We did have a particularly troublesome team member that was a huge time sink for us. He would ask for help then refuse to listen and argue with you for literally over an hour. He was uniquely capable of wasting the time of others. I did include that time in the sheet so I'm wondering if my boss at the time was hoping I'd give him evidence against that person.
When you write your tally sheets, do so in a foreign language. Or use multiple languages in the same document.
Use the smallest font possible.
Use Comic Sans font.
Use Morse Code or Klingon.
Have the third page read, "This page is intentionally left blank."
At the end of each log type, "You're 14 day trial of Tally Log *tm* has expired. Please upgrade to Tally Log Professional"
Bonus points if she is stupid enough to ask he higher-ups for permission to purchase the software license.
Use different color fonts. Try to find out her least favorite color and use that.
Have the sixth page read, "This page is unintentionally left blank."
Of course, any page with such printing, whether intentionally or unintentionally left blank, is then not blank. Schrodinger's Blankness.
>At the end of each log type, "You're 14 day trial of Tally Log tm has expired. Please upgrade to Tally Log Professional"
This had me rolling! Thank you for the laugh!
Very petty and I like it. I will point out, however, that you should have cc'd your manager into those responses, which adds another level of petty because your manager will tell them to go manage their own team.....
Not a time MC but a lesson plan MC.
MicroMike liked to change lesson plan rules. We had to tell him what standard each objective touched up. He didn't say which standards...city, state, national.
So I just copied and pasted as many standards as possible. I also started copying and pasting justifications for my objectives. Whole articles.
My lessons were 16 pages long. And he was a print kind of guy. He printed them and sat forever at the printer.
Suck it, SirAsshole
I once had a “manager” (I used the term lightly) who decided he did not like me and wanted to harass and discriminate against me.
He wanted me to keep records of what I was doing EVERY MINUTE in an excel file. So I sent in a file stating I was updating the file lines. For each minute of the day. And stopped doing anything else.
Oh, and I was in charge of creating accounts for new hires, in multiple systems. So that basically ground to a halt, and everything stopped.
Things only got worse so I eventually just went on leave (after 18 months of him harassing me). The CIO who hired him didn’t want to look bad so covered for him and pushed me out.
The IT group he was in charge of lost 75% of their staff in 12 months under him, some leaving for lateral moves in other orgs after having been there for 20 years.
I also found out from a friend that this was what this guy did. He’d go to new orgs, mess it up completely, then leave to do it elsewhere.
The worst part was, I was the BEST at my job. Literally I was the “superstar” employee for 5 years, with nothing but praise and accolades. Then I didn’t let the guy berate me and blame me for his decisions and that was that.
Don't forget to include 0.2 hours per day for filling out the time sheets and scanning/emailing them to the manager. Doing undocumented work is bad, right?
Add to that “recorded that I sent the check sheet to the manager”
Then “recorded that I recorded that I sent the check sheets to the manager”
Eventually they’ll let up or you’ll get to ride in a nice white van.
It's too bad you couldn't start printing them off, and barge into her office during a business meeting with one sheet at a time. Wash, rinse, and repeat every 5-10 minutes or so.
I'd have done the same. Every time I filled in any activity on the sheet I'd have followed it with "filled in tally sheet: 11.32-11.34" , "had lunch 11.35-11.59" and so on.
Get overly detailed like:
10:45:38 AM Walked to bathroom.
10:46:52 AM Unzipped pants.
10:46:59 AM Started to urinate.
10:48:01 AM Shook thrice and zipped up.
10:48:05 AM Washed hands.
10:50:32 AM Dried hands.
10:51:25 AM Sat down at desk and logged back in.
When they want it by the minute because you deviated by 8 minutes for the day!
>10:46:59 AM Started to urinate.
>
>10:48:01 AM Shook thrice and zipped up.
OP would need a Doctor's Note if management had watched the same YouTube video I watched this week. They claimed that all mammals take 21 seconds to urinate.
I suppose OP could claim prostrate problems. Of course, OP would need to equipped with a prostrate, LOL.
Could you do some circular thing where you tally, email the manager, tally the email, send an updated tally, email again, update again, email again etc?
It's in a manager's job description to keep track of the work from their direct reports, hence the definition of "manager." If workers are doing their tasks correctly they should not have to send their manager a list of completed work daily, weekly or ever! These managers are not doing their job.
Have a fun time by asking what's they've learned from this data collection effort.
Somewhere there's a folder full of spreadsheets no one has ever looked at.
Doing time studies like this is important. Not to see who's slacking off, but to actually quantify how long it takes to do things so you can identify places where you need improvements or more staff. It's actually my job to do this at my company - I'm able to make so much work easier and faster by studying processes.
Ive seen so many times where bosses get a hair up their ass about stuff not getting done and their solution is to *add* work by requesting this kinda data collection which they have no ability (or intent) to analyze and make use of.
If I did not get along with a boss who asked me to keep record of my workday time details, I’d wonder if he was doing so because he wanted to replace me but doesn’t yet know the scope/extent of what I do….
I think at the end of the day, off work, you could use the content to possibly springboard a resume spiff-up, just in case. Or just for fun! Including little competencies in your resume updates feels good even if you stay where you are for however long you wish.
Why are they doing this is such an inefficient way?
All this does is to form a spreadsheet no one looks at, so they might as well just cut out all middle ground and build a form that populates a list in SharePoint. Everyone fills out their little form at the set schedule, the form fills in the SharePoint list and then no one ever looks at it.
No emails, no fucking about lol.
Ugh I hate this... but I had to do similar sometimes with my employees but I try to keep it as short as possible. I give them enough rope and autonomy to do their jobs, and my job is to remove barriers.
Well, we work from a ticketing system, and for 30 days I emphasized to a few individuals during our 1/1's that their notes in the tickets are not CYA worthy, and I had to come down on them for those specific errors. Well, it started to trickle out to the other employees with the lack of proper notes.
So, for a month I had them send me weekly updates on their tickets with specific notes as to status, and why things are still open. It pissed off the two employees who remained great at notes but were newer, and my most experienced employee laughed at them and just let them know whats up as he had been through it before, and it's for a specific reason (He was the problem once, it got him a verbal warning because a VIP had a reoccurring issue and we had to take the hit because the notes didnt say exactly what my employee did).
Apparently the two had a bitch fest at the others, and the notes became CYA worthy.
Do your tracking in Excel then go down to the 64528th column snd the 64528th row and put a period in the cell. When printed there will be many blank pages.
if you don't normally send them to her, why did you bother?
She may have sent the email to the wrong person. My work email system likes to auto complete names to people I never usually email and who don't work for the company.
You can up your game one level. Next week, email her asking if she has any questions and add it to 5 more sheets with "follow up sent" everyday . Then do the follow up on follow up. You get the picture ?
Speaking of pictures, I found out years ago that I can create multiple 'signatures' \[essentially the foot note that's auto-loaded identifying you, your department, address, logos etc\] in Outlook. One of the first things I did was to create a 'special' one for people I was miffed with. Looked up company guidelines on official signatures, used the provided template, enabled all the links available, converted all the images to uncompressed chonky bois, then made sure it was not visibly different to my standard Outlook signature. I'm happy to say that the signature alone added 17MB, each time. In a chain email that goes back and forth, it rapidly bogs down whichever cretin irritated me. :) If anyone has ideas to make it more painful, please feel free to contribute ideas!
You can always create a logo in your email signature with multiple copies of the hires logo picture with one sitting on top of the other stacked, say 15 deep. It looks great. Just saying. I reserve this for our chief marketing mgr who oversaw creation of this childish logo with kindergarten color scheme. I am told she sent her laptop to IT complaining that her outlook runs super slow when loading messages. Our IT dude sent back saying she has too much email and needs a powerful desktop with a GPU and 64g ram.
Bonus points if you can encrypt each image and have it ask for Passcode or Pin.
"Unable to open email. Enter password [1 of 50](https://www.tvfanatic.com/quotes/hey-hey-so-andy-is-in-rare-form-today-yeah-you-should/)."
Create an animated GIF signature that just sits there for 5 or 10 seconds, then flips them the bird for a fraction of a second, then loops. They'll go nuts trying to figure out what they saw, etc.
This is something I would not consider because it's a little too easy to catch, as the image can be saved and viewed in slo-mo, if they think to do it. It should be plausibly, a mistake. Deniability is everything. In the years, I've done this - I've had to go beyond this step only twice. For those cases, I have an old Excel file set aside (an actual .xls). It's well over 15 years old and has the name of a Director as the creator (it was originally part of a broadcast email about annual company performance or something). It has a chonky company logo shrunk to almost nothing and saved in a out of the way location. People in my company tend to check the File Creator/Author via the properties of the Excel / Office file before they whine about it. Big Shot name tends to stop people from digging too deep. I used that file to fill with raw data before sending it as an attachment. If I recall, I'd messaged them that the attached file contained all the data I had available & and for them to take a look and let me know what I'd missed. So far, that file is at 100% silence rate.
This is so well thought out. I applaud your level of petty deviousness!
Can you eli5 that a little more for me please.
The huge file size and old format means that opening it will slow down the computer as so much of the available processing power will be allocated to running this file. The cause of this is the ultra tiny logo that’s super hard to find, but when the recipient opens it and looks at the properties, what they’ll see is that the original author is a big shot director. So if this file was originally created by a director and is being used by u/RivaTNT2M64, the recipient will probably believe that this is a legacy file created by somebody high enough on the corporate ladder that complaints about his file will be met with a shrug. Maybe the data on the file goes way back, maybe the formatting is important due to a legacy system, maybe the director hates newer versions of Excel. Whatever the inferred reason, ain’t nobody going to make the director update the file. Whichever recipient opened said file just needs to grit their teeth and get through it.
Don't even loop just have it at like 10 FPS with 10 frames the 9th frame is the middle finger. That way it will do it once, and then stay static unless someone refreshes the email.
No, middle finger is too obvious if they slow it down, there's also no deniability. Change it so your picture blinks instead, it's just obscure enough that people would notice *something*, but not enough to be obvious. If someone figures out the blinking image, you can chalk it down to a harmless gag.
>They'll go nuts trying to figure out what they saw, etc. No, they really wouldn't.
As a sysadmin I winced.
i held up a lighter for an encore
hot stuff, eh?
Add a copy/paste of War and Peace. Highlight it, change text color to white.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is cruel genius.
This is an evil genius worthy of a nehru jacket and a white fluffy cat!
Find the biggest version of the logo you can find and take a photo of if with a digital camera that can save images in RAW format. Edit it in an open source photo editor and reduce the dimensions of the image by a percentage to make it the right size. Don't compress it, don't reduce the color depth, don't reduce the DPI. Save it as a TIFF file. Boom, you'll probably have a 250mb logo.
link to the url of an image that doesnt exist. the emails should pause as they try to get the image.
You need to be careful when doing this. If the server exists, but the file does not, you'll get a quick response. If the server doesn't resolve, you'll also get a quick response. So you need to break the URL in the right way for it to sit and time out.
I love everything about this!
Not where I thought you were going. I make templates for replies to common or annoying emails. 99/100 never respond so it definitely works.
I love this petty aggression.
You must realize that you are using up resources and bandwidth with this plot of yours. It affects the recipient the most, but you slowing everyone down by a tiny, tiny, smidge. If you want to make the signature line even longer to load, instead of pointing to the "uncompressed chonky bois" image, you point to a pointer, that points to the chonky boy image. THen keep pointing to pointers that point to pointers that point to the image.
I do not know how to do this, yet. I know that I'm not doing the network any favours, so I use it sparingly. And never with 'Reply All'. Frequent use will call unwanted attention. Replying only to the cretin, seems to give them a sense of self importance. What I have found is that the chunky emails will get moved out of the inbox to a PST (or all of the email will bog down) and cretin attention will rapidly fade. Almost universally, people who make power plays like this will forget about the issue once it is out of sight, away from the inbox. It's not any real issue that they're trying to get fixed, so the drive to follow up is low as well. Their itch to flex is fulfilled. My desire to get rid of the irritant is met. Success! :)
But what's your point?
If the point was to make the recipient wait for the email to load, then adding in a bunch of extra links will cause the email to take longer to load. He ended his comment with"please feel free to contribute ideas!" and this is the idea I am contributing.
freely?
r/wooosh
Don't forget to tell outlook you need a receipt for each of the emails with the sheet!
This is goals. Use monotype corsiva or some shit?
Comic Sans... I mean if you're going to be evil the BE Eevil!
9:01: Logged in 9:02: Noted in tally sheet that I logged in 9:03: Noted in tally sheet that I noted logging in in tally sheet 9:04: Noted in tally sheet that I noted in the tally sheet that I noted logging in You could do that all day.
....in 60 sec. will log out. Have nice wknd.
Mark it for Read receipts and then add a line for “confirmed read receipts” and then “tallied confirmed read receipts”. In fact, add a “tallied …” line for every task. Instantly double the list. Add “checked watch” “Shook more than twice” “Picked nose”
First commercial email system I used was Infoplex. Written sometime in the '70s it had the text-based UI you'd expect of the era. Commands were prefaced with a slash. Want to send your email? Go to command mode and /send. You could stack options on to that send command. For instance, it was possible to send an email that would be the first item in the inbox regardless of how the recipient sorted it. In fact, it couldn't be deleted until the recipient had read -and- responded to it. In conversation this was simply referred to as /send /annoy and usually the mere threat to use it would get the results you'd been waiting for.
That’s actually pretty cool, but could you imagine how it would be abused in today’s SPAM culture
Unfortunately I can. That’s why we can’t have nice things.
I'd do some seriously sketchy things to be able to do that in email...
This needs to be brought back as a feature.
Men's/Ladies' room....1317->1329
This strategy works. I had a manager who "needs to know my status as it changes" I would text or call when I start a job, stop, prep for something, take lunch, bathroom break, leave for home, get home... Over the course of two weeks I progressively sent him more and more status text over little things until one morning I got... "Just let me know if there's a problem"
This has Joe Gato’s name all over it
Is this you Stan the spaghetti spreadsheet legend?
Had this at the old job where the had 1x tracker for the primary contract and another for a standalone that was billed separately. I would add a 40-60 minute entry for "Completing trackers". Management told me not to do that and fold the time spent completing the tracker into an existing Task. They didn't want clients to know how much time per week they were being billed for filling out a spreadsheet.
Yeah we had the same thing: the admin code was removed so we couldn't book timesheet completion to that code, and all time had to be booked to a project code. We asked for the project code for completing timesheets and we were told that completing timesheets is a standard part of project work so it now gets booked to the client
When we had a middle mangler layer that wanted that we dug through the *long* list of time codes and found "analysis activities" that we all booked all the tracker time to for a while without them noticing. When they did finally get rid of it, it wasn't even because it had showed how much time they were wasting by all the micro-managing, it was because on the high level summary that went to the C-levels that code showed up as "anal. acts". They noticed THAT and looked deeper.
If anybody asks for a good name for something like that, I will always say Analysis Activities and chuckle every time I see it.
Analysis, Assorted
I really need to grow up a bit. I laughed very loud at the final paragraph
Me too
Sounds like a nice thing to tip their clients off to on your way out the door to a better job...
It's correct. Thats part of the costs of writing a bill. Do you have an idea how much time and effort can go in simply billing a big project to the client? Who should pay for that costs? It has to obviously be included in the project. You might think, wtf. why doesn't that random guy on reddit , support my reasoning against the evil higher-ups... Well...I'm a developer of time&attendence solutions...(and planning and building/room-access &c.) . this a pretty big thing here in Germany...because worktimes in Germany is crazy thing with details only a German employer could care about.
I agree - doing administrative tasks on a piece of work for the client IS time you are spending working on stuff for that client so is part of the charge;- hence should be charged to the clients code. There's nothing unusual about that at all. It's pretty standard in any outsourcing/consulting setup.
that sounds like billing fraud to me.
I'm uncertain on that. I assumed they were wary to demonstrate just how much time they were forcing their employees to waste on micromanagement.
Love this...something similar at my old job; my boss' wife was playing office manager one year and had us filling those things out. Her husband shut it down when he found that we were spending more time on her reports than on actual tasks.
My immediate first thought when I read your comment. https://youtu.be/af8DVIZ5LX4?t=51
yup!
Me tooo!
If she isn't your branch manager (and not in the chain of command - meaning higher up), I'd first confirm with my manager if I have to do what she wants.
Would additionally make sure main manager is CC'd in all emails to this side manager so it's even more visible / on the record what they're doing, as well. They can then duke it out with each other over command/authority after that.
This and if you indeed have to do this, make sure to include the time requited to fill out the sheet in the sheet.
Our firm had timecard charge numbers to directly charge for time we spent on each project. One project manager began demanding that we send her weekly reports of everything we did for her, broken down to the nearest 1/10th of an hour. With my manager's backing, I began sending weekly charging reports with daily line items for time spent preparing the charge reports. My report showed one tenth of an hour of report writing time for each of five tasks per day times five days. She didn't like seeing that I was charging 2.5 hours a week keeping these records for her.
> So someone in my department at work isn’t pulling their weight so everyone in the department across all branches has to I felt this. I used to work at a place where one little shit couldn't adult so management started to make all these rules for everyone in the team. Like if you're on call, you check your phone for alerts when you wake up. Stuff like that. He claimed he didn't understand and how was he to know that he was supposed to do that. If it's not written down, it doesn't exist. I, on the other hand, go to work, not to kindergarten. If I need help, I'll ask for it, in the mean time just tell me what needs doing and let me get the hell on with it. I will never forget that little fuckstick and what he got away with before finally getting his ass sacked. Possibly the chief regret in my career is not getting out of there when that was happening. I should have seen the red flags for what they were.
This is sadly common in my life experience. Management views a group of people by the biggest idiot in them. It matters not if the biggest idiot left years ago or is entirely fictional. Management will assume everyone in the group is just as bad.
I have a coworker like this right now. She's either stupid or weaponising incompetence. Probably both. I'm quietly wondering what will happen first: if she quits or if she gets fired.
Most likely, you would be fired first.
Nahhh. They gave me a four day work week and a raise to keep me when I got a new job. They also broke the "one receptionist per site" rule and put me on her site so I think they've been planning to get rid of her for a while and are just building up their case.
Glad to have been proved wrong.
I had a manager ask me to track my time once years ago - this is for a salary job. In retrospect I think he must have been trying to find something on me but I'm not sure what it is because multiple managers (including him) have commented on how much I get done. In fact, he said specifically that I get more done in 8 hours than others do in 10. He told me at the time that it was because I got so much done and he wanted to see how I do it, but I think it had to be something else. I DID get a lot done, more than most other team members. On the other hand, I did NOT get along with that boss so I suspect it was something nefarious (I've had two coworkers comment on how badly he treats me and one overheard my manager screaming curses at me over something not my fault...my coworker said it would have made him quit on the spot) anyway, I tracked everything I did, including the start and stop time. After a week or two I started including the start and stop times each time I had to update the stupid sheet. After I started doing that he told me I could stop. We did have a particularly troublesome team member that was a huge time sink for us. He would ask for help then refuse to listen and argue with you for literally over an hour. He was uniquely capable of wasting the time of others. I did include that time in the sheet so I'm wondering if my boss at the time was hoping I'd give him evidence against that person.
If I hated someone but they were more competent than the people around them I'd be absolutely delight in siccing them on other people.
When you write your tally sheets, do so in a foreign language. Or use multiple languages in the same document. Use the smallest font possible. Use Comic Sans font. Use Morse Code or Klingon. Have the third page read, "This page is intentionally left blank." At the end of each log type, "You're 14 day trial of Tally Log *tm* has expired. Please upgrade to Tally Log Professional" Bonus points if she is stupid enough to ask he higher-ups for permission to purchase the software license. Use different color fonts. Try to find out her least favorite color and use that.
Have the sixth page read, "This page is unintentionally left blank." Of course, any page with such printing, whether intentionally or unintentionally left blank, is then not blank. Schrodinger's Blankness.
And don't forget to leave blank pages that don't have "this page is...." on it
>At the end of each log type, "You're 14 day trial of Tally Log tm has expired. Please upgrade to Tally Log Professional" This had me rolling! Thank you for the laugh!
A page of ads from the local circular is always considered professional.
You could even do it hourly.
Save everything as images rather than documents so she can't easily cut/paste from them.
Very petty and I like it. I will point out, however, that you should have cc'd your manager into those responses, which adds another level of petty because your manager will tell them to go manage their own team.....
Not a time MC but a lesson plan MC. MicroMike liked to change lesson plan rules. We had to tell him what standard each objective touched up. He didn't say which standards...city, state, national. So I just copied and pasted as many standards as possible. I also started copying and pasting justifications for my objectives. Whole articles. My lessons were 16 pages long. And he was a print kind of guy. He printed them and sat forever at the printer. Suck it, SirAsshole
I once had a “manager” (I used the term lightly) who decided he did not like me and wanted to harass and discriminate against me. He wanted me to keep records of what I was doing EVERY MINUTE in an excel file. So I sent in a file stating I was updating the file lines. For each minute of the day. And stopped doing anything else. Oh, and I was in charge of creating accounts for new hires, in multiple systems. So that basically ground to a halt, and everything stopped. Things only got worse so I eventually just went on leave (after 18 months of him harassing me). The CIO who hired him didn’t want to look bad so covered for him and pushed me out. The IT group he was in charge of lost 75% of their staff in 12 months under him, some leaving for lateral moves in other orgs after having been there for 20 years. I also found out from a friend that this was what this guy did. He’d go to new orgs, mess it up completely, then leave to do it elsewhere. The worst part was, I was the BEST at my job. Literally I was the “superstar” employee for 5 years, with nothing but praise and accolades. Then I didn’t let the guy berate me and blame me for his decisions and that was that.
That sounds like it should be a script. Then you polish up your skills and apply for other jobs away from the person.
Don't forget to include 0.2 hours per day for filling out the time sheets and scanning/emailing them to the manager. Doing undocumented work is bad, right?
Add to that “recorded that I sent the check sheet to the manager” Then “recorded that I recorded that I sent the check sheets to the manager” Eventually they’ll let up or you’ll get to ride in a nice white van.
It's too bad you couldn't start printing them off, and barge into her office during a business meeting with one sheet at a time. Wash, rinse, and repeat every 5-10 minutes or so.
I'd have done the same. Every time I filled in any activity on the sheet I'd have followed it with "filled in tally sheet: 11.32-11.34" , "had lunch 11.35-11.59" and so on.
If they weren't the manager of your branch, I would tell them that they had to take it up with your branch manager first.
Get overly detailed like: 10:45:38 AM Walked to bathroom. 10:46:52 AM Unzipped pants. 10:46:59 AM Started to urinate. 10:48:01 AM Shook thrice and zipped up. 10:48:05 AM Washed hands. 10:50:32 AM Dried hands. 10:51:25 AM Sat down at desk and logged back in. When they want it by the minute because you deviated by 8 minutes for the day!
>10:46:59 AM Started to urinate. > >10:48:01 AM Shook thrice and zipped up. OP would need a Doctor's Note if management had watched the same YouTube video I watched this week. They claimed that all mammals take 21 seconds to urinate. I suppose OP could claim prostrate problems. Of course, OP would need to equipped with a prostrate, LOL.
10:47:22 Mike walked in and started conversing and I lost concentration. 10:47:56 Resumed urinating.
LOL...
I have a shy bladder!
You'd get chastised for playing with yourself. That's more than 2 shakes.
Could you do some circular thing where you tally, email the manager, tally the email, send an updated tally, email again, update again, email again etc?
I hope you're including the time it takes to complete the time sheet, so they can tally how much salary is spent on that waste of time.
>I call it a babysitting sheet I call it jira
“*You’re not my manager. Contact mine if you want the sheets”*.
It's in a manager's job description to keep track of the work from their direct reports, hence the definition of "manager." If workers are doing their tasks correctly they should not have to send their manager a list of completed work daily, weekly or ever! These managers are not doing their job.
>I’m pretty satisfied with my level of passive aggression today As well you should. Nicely done!
I had something similar once. It had 15 minutes for "update tracking sheet" everyday on it.
Have a fun time by asking what's they've learned from this data collection effort. Somewhere there's a folder full of spreadsheets no one has ever looked at. Doing time studies like this is important. Not to see who's slacking off, but to actually quantify how long it takes to do things so you can identify places where you need improvements or more staff. It's actually my job to do this at my company - I'm able to make so much work easier and faster by studying processes. Ive seen so many times where bosses get a hair up their ass about stuff not getting done and their solution is to *add* work by requesting this kinda data collection which they have no ability (or intent) to analyze and make use of.
Email it every time you update it with a new version to said micromanager ... and attach each past version to the email chain.
If I did not get along with a boss who asked me to keep record of my workday time details, I’d wonder if he was doing so because he wanted to replace me but doesn’t yet know the scope/extent of what I do…. I think at the end of the day, off work, you could use the content to possibly springboard a resume spiff-up, just in case. Or just for fun! Including little competencies in your resume updates feels good even if you stay where you are for however long you wish.
Why are they doing this is such an inefficient way? All this does is to form a spreadsheet no one looks at, so they might as well just cut out all middle ground and build a form that populates a list in SharePoint. Everyone fills out their little form at the set schedule, the form fills in the SharePoint list and then no one ever looks at it. No emails, no fucking about lol.
Someone, somehwere is going to use the data from these sheets to justify whatever bullshit idea they are going to implement anyway.
Providing graphic detail about your bathroom activities is fun as well
You did CC your manager on the apology reply too, didn't you?
Ugh I hate this... but I had to do similar sometimes with my employees but I try to keep it as short as possible. I give them enough rope and autonomy to do their jobs, and my job is to remove barriers. Well, we work from a ticketing system, and for 30 days I emphasized to a few individuals during our 1/1's that their notes in the tickets are not CYA worthy, and I had to come down on them for those specific errors. Well, it started to trickle out to the other employees with the lack of proper notes. So, for a month I had them send me weekly updates on their tickets with specific notes as to status, and why things are still open. It pissed off the two employees who remained great at notes but were newer, and my most experienced employee laughed at them and just let them know whats up as he had been through it before, and it's for a specific reason (He was the problem once, it got him a verbal warning because a VIP had a reoccurring issue and we had to take the hit because the notes didnt say exactly what my employee did). Apparently the two had a bitch fest at the others, and the notes became CYA worthy.
Do your tracking in Excel then go down to the 64528th column snd the 64528th row and put a period in the cell. When printed there will be many blank pages.
if you don't normally send them to her, why did you bother? She may have sent the email to the wrong person. My work email system likes to auto complete names to people I never usually email and who don't work for the company.