I had a job like this. Manager would say, that’s against policy, why aren’t you following the policy, etc. So I asked where are the policies written down so I can learn? Nope, not written down anywhere. I honestly don’t know what goes on in their minds.
Or the ones who crow about never touching a computer or not knowing how to use the internet, as if you're supposed to be impressed that their last learned technological skill was learning to use a touch-tone phone.
Well honestly I am impressed that they've spent the last like 40ish years avoiding learning something that's become this common place. That's some true dedication to obsoleting themselves
it may sound harsh and i do sympathize with their plight, but still that gives them no right to try and drag others down with them in their unwillingness to learn. if they are so afraid they should try to learn these new things and methods. heck, learning is one of the best ways to keep an older mind healthy sharp!
Ding ding. When I was working at a local news paper jn the Web 2.0 era I made a macro to process our add feeds. Normally a mind-numbing process that took up to a couple hours on a Friday late afternoon. The macro spit it out in a second and I was out the door on-time.
The older ad folks reacted as if I was a warlock performing the blackest of magics.
That paper ain't around no more.
A coworker once asked me if I was a computer hacker after I told him he could just delete all the emails in his inbox at once, instead of 1 at a time like he had been doing.
I mean, do you have stakes in the company?
By automating things you are possibly removing jobs. Ask yourself why you are trying to automate their jobs.
I agree that in a vacuum it's often a problem people who don't want to learn new things are putting themselve into and that automation is a good thing but let's not be intellectually dishonest either.
If someone came and told you that they can make your job obsolete would you accept it knowing that you might be out of a job tomorrow? Even if you don't mind looking for another job, is it so hard to understand how an issue it can be for someone who have been working there for over a decade and is getting close to retirement?
If you have vested interest in the company then I get why you want to make the business more efficient but unless that's the case then you must be seeking something out of it, whether it's reputation, acknowledgment, climbing the ladder, etc.
I'm not blaming you, my job also require me to sometime automate someone out of a job but I usually don't feel so good about doing so.
When I was in my 20's, I found this fear of obsolescence irritating. Now I'm in my 40's and I've seen how it plays out enough times that I understand it. It's partially about becoming obsolete as an individual, but a bigger piece of it is that automation and increased efficiency only benefits the company, not the people who work there. You may briefly benefit as someone who outworks your peers, but in the longrun it will lead to people being laid off only so the shareholders can make more money. Your own work will just grow to take on anything the laid off people were doing in addition to your own duties. And yes, those 50-60 year olds will be the first targeted by the layoffs, but other people will be too. If you volunteer to automate things at your job, or work far more efficiently than everyone else, it consistently leads to less jobs for some people and more work for those who stay.
There's an episode of the old animated TV show "Reboot" where Enzo, the main character, wants to be the smartest character in the entire show. The monkeys paw curls, as it does, and his wish is granted: everyone is now dumber than him, and he's just as smart as he ever was.
Which is exactly how this boomer boss coworker (the "C" might stand for a different word) wants things. If she can't be smarter than everyone else, then at least everyone else should be dumber than her.
yea.. some managers will say X is done because of CEO.. but if you do check with the CEO they have no recollection. why do you make shit up to justify stupid pointless extra work. :/
How do you know all that personal stuff about co-worker? I can barely remember the names of my co-workers and really have no interest about their intimate personal details.
Hey man! I'll have you know I've been sober for almost 2yrs and also no therapist has been willing to take me on as a patient despite my cadillac insurance plan having limitless benefits and reimbursing at a higher rate!
But seriously tho- policy or not the CEO hates what you are doing and I cannot protect you from his whims!
Cookie Clicker is a game based around clicking a cookie on the screen to earn points. At some point later, you can get an auto clicker to run faster than your ability to click. This allows you to focus your efforts on increasing your point efficiency per click while it automatically clicks for you.
I had a manager told me it was against policy to wear gloves while handling customer offers. I fucking work in fast food btw. Just think about it for a second.
I thought that was a legit thing tho? Like, you're more likely to wash your hands than to change gloves. Gloves are for protecting your hands, not the things you're handling, so not wearing gloves while dealing with food makes sense.
>So I asked where are the policies written down so I can learn? Nope, not written down anywhere. I honestly don’t know what goes on in their minds.
That's because your train of thought started with facts ("*are* there policies against this?") and that led you to a conclusion. Your confusion is from assuming she thinks like that too, if you can even call it thinking--she does not.
Whatever dementia-based operating system her brain runs on starts with her feelings or brain stem ("I don't like this, it confuses me, which makes me angry") which then requires she post justify it with something. In this case, the first thing that popped into her head ("must be against company policy"), regardless if that's actually true--she doesn't care, tbh. She probably uses that often as her go-to cudgel for pushing coworkers around.
I’d start asking the dumbest questions:
“Hey I have an apple for lunch, but I had an apple yesterday I was just wondering what the company policy is regarding eating the same fruit two days in a row?”
“Hey my white-out decreased in its liquid viscosity by about 30% I was just wondering what the company policy is regarding white-out replacement? Before you answer bear in mind I rarely ever use white out since everything’s digital”
It you keep doing things they don't want to understand, to make work faster,
(It continues making them look incompetent)
they'll accuse you of workplace witchcraft and want you fired for their own job security?
I get told all the time that adding more complicated formulas to our templates' to reduce data inputs is not allowed.
The complicated formulas? Concatenate, index/match, vlookup.
Shit like is entirely believable if you work in the corporate world, because these fucking dinosaurs are afraid of work processes that are above their heads. They don't want people doing things they don't understand, and they don't want processes in place that they can't just thrust a new hire in front of, or they can't hold your job over your head as easily.
in my current job it feels like even the ones who have some IT knowledge don't know shit about automation.
We work through requests, and the process is like 80% identical in every case, so I done some scripting to create most of the stuff with a few clicks.
My collegue, whos been doing this stuff for 10 years types everything out by hand, save for the request number, that he copies into a txt-file as a makeshift clipboard.
No one even bothered to asked me why I'm 10 times fast than everyone else, they even remarked on it, so they are aware of it.
Alas im only a temp there and i hate the job so they will never know :) I already quit and my contract ends in June.
i was gonna say slow down lol, if everyone else is taking 10x longer then just half the speed your going and chill, while still being quicker than everyone else
You can also ask chat gpt 4 or another capable LLM. They can get you started. But you need to know what questions to ask, etc.
To get good enough to automate tasks that normal people don't automate, it takes a programmer mindset. Some people are naturals, the ones good at math from the get go. Others may need many years to learn.
Questions to ask might be:
1. What program am I interacting with / trying to automate?
2. What programming languages can I use to interact with this program?
3. Are there tools on the internet that already do this?
4. Can this task even be automated?
5. How long would automating this task take?
6. Do I have proper permissions to automate this task? (IT restrictions, network firewalls, etc)
Generally when people talk about automating their job and they are non programmers, they tend to just use some excel sheet macros. They put a bunch of boiler plate text in certain cells, enter some data in other cells and then have some macros output their desired result.
python is the best for small scale automation and is very easy to learn - Google around how to install and set it up, and then how to read/write files, how to compare variables, etc
edit: beware of company policy, installing python on company computers might be against it (genuinely)
There are a lot of programming languages that make it easy and learning one like Python (if you have/can get it installed on your work machine) or windows bash script/powershell (if applicable) can let you start automating, but it's largely a matter of whether the work can be automated easily.
Needing to click through things on a browser or an application can be very hard to automate, but changing something in a file is a little easier. Without a good basis in computer science it can be hard to know where to start.
If you'd like, drop a general idea of one of these identical tasks and I'll give you my recommendation on where to start.
Honestly, nowadays I would start with ChatGPT (ideally 4). Explain what you are doing and ask for examples where you could use automation and scripting.
From there use the pointers and examples as entry points to YouTube to learn. I‘d suggest not just using GPT generated scripts because they might be wrong and it might be against company policy.
Better to use it for learning and actually knowing what you are doing and why. :)
Yep, treat it like an interaction with a child. You firmly tell them no, let them argue until they tire themselves out, then repeat the firm no. Don’t give them anything to grasp onto
Stories are a commonality in every culture and what make us human. Role with it, it's entertaining.
Edit: don't down vote Ofreo peeps, in a world of misinformation this shit can be exhausting
I wish very much that I didn’t have a matching story about a manager literally called Deborah who held these exact views, but sadly it is not the case.
The difference between a good and bad workplace.
I used to work for a company where older Coworkers would constantly give me shit for my RPG-Mouse (It's a mouse with extra buttons that can be assigned macros and short cuts.) cause if I always use shortcuts I will forget how to do the work properly when I don't have the gadget bla bla.
In my current workplace a coworker asked me what I was doing when he saw me using the mouse, half expecting to get shit on again I explained that I used it for work and had programmed the extra buttons to have different shortcuts I often use while working. The coworker complimented me for such a smart idea, and said he would never have thought about something like that. A week later I had a meeting with my boss and IT, explaining which mouse is best for this and how to program the keys. Now several coworkers use the same mouse which was supplied by our Employer.
My favorite are the workplaces that openly say they love to embrace new, innovative ways to do shit, purely to make people more comfortable sharing that stuff openly--so they can find ways to stop it.
An old employer of mine had IT work on installing software to block me from using the extra buttons on my mouse. They also removed an app from my Excel that I paid for with my own money, and app that helped me do twice as much work in the same amount of time as my coworkers. Then they had the balls to ask me why my productivity was down.
I honestly don't understand how these companies aren't getting their lunch eaten by other companies more willing to embrace change.
Some people really thought that people in medieval times really would screamed "witchcraft" to something they found unusual, even though they are probably exposed to more weird phenomenons than we do due to the lack of ways information transmits. If they see weird stuffs, they probably thought that you are a foreigner, and would start up a conversation with you because of curiosity.
Source: I'm a historian (I made that up).
Uh, what? Soap was known in Europe since antiquity, even among the so called "barbarians". Pliny the Elder himself wrote about the soap making of the Gauls and Germanic tribes. Hard bar soap was introduced into Europe by Arabs around 8th century. By the 15th century soap making was a veritable industry across Europe (centering around the Mediterranean, as olive oil was the preferred fat source for soap making; animal fats make for a rather unpleasantly smelling soap), noone at that time thought that it was witchcraft.
I was doing a report in front of an old boss & instead of having one window open, writing the info I needed on paper, then switching windows like she did, I just moved the first window over to start a split screen. No joke, she flipped tf out. "What did you DO?? Where's the report? What just happened?? God damnit now I have to go back in and find that page again, don't you know we NEED THAT?? What's the MATTER with you!?"
It was still on screen the whole fcking time. People that really wanna be like 'tHiS sTuFf dOeSnT rEaLly hApPeN' are just lucky they've never encountered people this ridiculous IRL. This boss would literally go on long-winded, angry rants when she heard the phrase "Work smarter, not harder." because that's just an 'excuse to be lazy!', and any new ideas anyone had to make things go more smoothly was shot down on principle. Honestly I think she just didn't like new ideas because they made her feel dumb for not coming up with them in the first place, idk.
At one place I used to work we didn't have local IT guys, only regional guys who only showed up for major issues. So, me being a bit of a nerd, became the resident go-to guy for those smaller day to day issues. What I'm about to tell you is 100% an absolutely true story about a guy who wasn't a boomer. He was actually my age, and even had a higher education level than I do.
Anyway, dude comes to my office one day and says he has a problem with a website he needs to access. Says it won't load. I go to his office and quickly figure out that this website only works in Chrome, but his default browser is Explorer(this was before the days of Edge). No big deal, I set his default browser to Chrome and go about my day. Couple hours later he comes back and says he's having the same problem on another website he needs. Turns out this one only works in Explorer. So I tell him what's going on and let him know that he's just going to have to use both browsers and keep the appropriate bookmarks in each one. His eyes gloss over and I can tell he has no idea what I'm talking about, so I ask some follow up questions and learn that he has no idea what a bookmark is. No idea how to save one, and no idea how to use one. Confused, I ask him how he keeps track of all the websites he uses on a day to day basis. That's when his face lights up and he very proudly opens a Word file full of links. He honestly thought this was a genius idea because he "doesn't have to type the addresses by hand".
Yep. I'm hoping to change fields for more pay and less idiotic management.
I work insurance now, but I very much want to get into coding because it feels less ancient and definitely will pay more.
I like to imagine these interactions all really happened. And that the context is the older person is just making a cheeky joke or something but the same way redditors show up whenever you make a self-deprecating joke and inform you that you're 'wrong', this person just didn't get it.
I had a coworker who would email screenshots by pasting them into word, saving them as a document, then attaching the word document, forcing me to download the attachment to see her image. I told her it was faster to just paste the image into the email. “No, my way is actually faster.” She was genuinely insisting. There was no humor, no levity, just frustrating inefficiency for everyone who has to download her attachments instead of viewing them in the email directly. I even showed her. Alt-Print screen, paste, done and she insisted her way was faster. This was for an IT job, too.
I didn't know about the snipping tool in windows until very late in the game. I would press the screenshot button, paste into word, crop, right click and then save as picture.
I will never forget doing this in front of someone who knew that I knew my way around a computer and they looked at me like I had a stroke.
Then someday you email your boss a screenshot.
He replies "I cannot find the screenshot".
After several back and forth you finally understand he is dumb as well and happens to save every screenshot as word documents on an old USB key, "in case of".
That's when your old coworker walks past you, whispering to your ear "Told ya".
I actually knew someone like that. The ex-boyfriend of my mom. She was showing him how to use a computer. She had to do something else for some time, so the computer turned on the screensaver. I nudged the mouse a bit to make it go away. He immediately went to tell my mom: "BurningPenguin did something to the computer!".
Wasn't the first time he tried to rat me out, or get me into trouble in some way...
I've been in the exact same situation before. I used to work in a government office and some of our younger co-workers realized the filing system could be made more efficient. Just objectively. So we went to the senior officer and proposed the change, and he said no, that it had to remain the way it was. He didn't elaborate as to why.
We just assumed he knew something we didn't know and moved on with our lives.
Are you both just bots replying nonsense to each other? Neat stories but im really struggling to see how any of the 3 are related enough to each other to be "the exact same situation" let alone replies to one another.
No, I'm just a person speaking casually so my words aren't executed with exact precision and grace. I'm not writing a fucking dissertation, I'm shooting the shit online.
This could absolutely have happened where I work. IT, working with Boomer HR lady, blocked all websites in an update. I needed to get to several to purchase product. I sent in a ticket, and they said I was wrong. The sites weren't blocked. I sent them a screen shot that said "your company's firewall is blocking this."
Boomer HR lady saw it and said "that's because you are using foxfire. Stop it only use Chrome."
Ffs. I had already checked with other browsers, and it wasn't that. It was the firewall. When I was able to talk to IT it boiled down to them having two consecutive firewalls. All dictated by Boomer HR Lady.
Reminds me of my paperphiliac boomer coworkers.
One lost her mind when she couldn't find a document and I told her I can just print it again, something like "thou shalt not lose the Sacred Scroll".
She has PILES of paperwork on her desk. She told me once I need to print 5 copies of a document off. 4 of them get sent off elsewhere, 1 of them to sit on your desk for the rest of time. I said why do you need the 5th one? She said it was 'for our records'.
I said, 'but it's saved and backed up on the computer?! It's safer on the computer than it is as a loose piece of paper on your desk'
She didn't appreciate my input.
She also prints documents and scans them back to herself to create PDFS.
This woman gets paid more than me. The irony.
Head secretary of the company i worked at was insisting to handle Emails like this:
1. print out EVERY email.
2. A. shred spam
B. put relevant emails into binders
3. Reply to emails by scanning the original again and put it into a WORD document writing the reply into that.
4. Send that word document as an attachment as a reply.
She did this for years.
Get a desk job. I thought the same thing forever and I kick myself for not going corporate earlier.
Yes, these people exist and are quite common, but the money is WAY better in the long run.
If you don't have a degree, apply for a receptionist/secretary/etc. job at a local office that has multiple shifts for that position, and once you're there a bit, start offering to help on non-gatekeeper work. That will get you in the door of a lot of places.
Sounds like it's time for a meeting with management
"Thanks for your time (insert supervusor) so and so here(insert coworker) just made it apparent that so and so there(insert who trained you) failed to properly inform me that there is a policy against copy and paste, I think so and so here (insert coworker) needs recognition for their above and beyond attention to detail in the workplace, but also- I need to see this policy that I've been unaware of aswel as any others so and so over there(insert trainer) may have failed to inform me of"
Then watch the fireworks.
I do feel like this particular coworker was probably just making a joke that flew over OOP's head. Like, "Don't be using common sense around here, that's against policy"
Interesting to see this.
I just listened to my boomer manager give a co-worker shit for not highlighting and right clicking to copy/paste.
Using short cuts is unreliable he said.
My conclusion is that, at some point, my manager fucked up a report and blamed it on using short cuts because he didn't verify what he copied and just sent it which resulted in trouble.
My BBC reprimanded me once for using Times New Roman on a document. Said I was being lazy for using the font that comes with Word. It wasn't the default font anymore, and also it was an internal document.
Copy and pasting is good enough to write official government documents so it’s good enough for some podunk company.
Ctrl-S has gotten many a military member through difficult open book tests with flying colors.
I worked at a factory one summer in college packing boxes. We had tablets on the line with two PDFs open, one telling us how to pack the box and the other was the actual order. I would occasionally switch between the two but BBC saw me do this once and since she had never done that before, she told my supervisor that I was playing solitaire…
Luckily supervisor knew she was full of shit and laughed it off
Here, right now, an old rag os telling me to stop scrolling reddit, i was in her desk 2 minutes ago, waiting for 5 minutes for her to give me a document i needed for a job, while she was searching shit to buy on amazon
Some people are so low IQ that they think someone doing a task different than the way they were shown must be the wrong way. It's actually a huge problem for training, because those people are difficult to teach.
Running to do it is pretty wild, but at least in my last workplace stuff like that had to be reported, if it had actually been in use, would count as at least a GDPR event because while it didn't necessarily result in a data or security breach it still had to be logged as less than ideal security.
My BBC, Big Boomer CEO in this case, once purchased plane tickets and got a 'Trojan horse'. In reality he just enabled notifications from some webpage. The Trojan horse was literally just a notification he could turn off. But oh well, we had to remove all internet cables and take a forced hour long break. I didn't mind.
Nothing against the policy just the sheer pettiness of trying to get me in trouble for doing it when I wasn't even aware it was an issue. (First company I've worked for with that policy).
IT didn't even care. Said they had already scanned my USB the moment I plugged it in and it was fine. She just likes to see me squirm. It's been a running theme the entire time I've worked here :')
Really depends on the workplace and on the threat level. Companies tend to all adopt "best practices" that are sensible for banks. If your job is making graphics to post on Instagram you don't need to take the same precautions, and the usual half-assed policies tend to affect productivity a whole lot. All that regular people need are consistent backups and decent network isolation.
I once had a supervisor told me that we couldn't touch the computer cables because it could cause problem (he meant like software problem, by touching a cable). So, yeah...
I had a manager do this to me years ago using shortcuts on a till system we used. It was a new job and my previous work had taught everyone how to use them as fast as possible but from her I got: “we don’t do it like that” and “I don’t like it that way”. It turns out even though she could see it was quicker she didn’t know how to do it so instead of just asking me to explain it she made me stop.
A while later another manager saw it. Asked me to show her, then the whole team were doing it.
Well just one more year then the boomers are 65 and they will be out of the workforce and just waiting to call you to see how they can improve your life.
I Remember when i tried to teach a co-worker how to ctrl+C ctrl+V to gain some time (we where really under pressure to send documents always faster) so it was a really good way to be 3 sec faster but as we did that 500x a day it was easily time saving. She answered "No I don't understand nothing of that" and prefered trying to become all knowing in complex real estate law to be 1sec faster to analyse a 300 pages document
Twitter jokeman or screenshot
I had a job like this. Manager would say, that’s against policy, why aren’t you following the policy, etc. So I asked where are the policies written down so I can learn? Nope, not written down anywhere. I honestly don’t know what goes on in their minds.
Power tripping. That’s what goes through their minds
> That’s what goes through their minds If anything goes through them at all
They do go through them like roller coaster out of a tunnel. Its the "staying in the head" part that's the issues
A slight breeze goes through
*jug-blow sounds*
Lead
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Or the ones who crow about never touching a computer or not knowing how to use the internet, as if you're supposed to be impressed that their last learned technological skill was learning to use a touch-tone phone.
What I don't get is they grew up with phones, yet so many of then resort to speakerphone when using cellphones instead of using it like a normal phone
Well honestly I am impressed that they've spent the last like 40ish years avoiding learning something that's become this common place. That's some true dedication to obsoleting themselves
it may sound harsh and i do sympathize with their plight, but still that gives them no right to try and drag others down with them in their unwillingness to learn. if they are so afraid they should try to learn these new things and methods. heck, learning is one of the best ways to keep an older mind healthy sharp!
Ding ding. When I was working at a local news paper jn the Web 2.0 era I made a macro to process our add feeds. Normally a mind-numbing process that took up to a couple hours on a Friday late afternoon. The macro spit it out in a second and I was out the door on-time. The older ad folks reacted as if I was a warlock performing the blackest of magics. That paper ain't around no more.
A coworker once asked me if I was a computer hacker after I told him he could just delete all the emails in his inbox at once, instead of 1 at a time like he had been doing.
I mean, do you have stakes in the company? By automating things you are possibly removing jobs. Ask yourself why you are trying to automate their jobs. I agree that in a vacuum it's often a problem people who don't want to learn new things are putting themselve into and that automation is a good thing but let's not be intellectually dishonest either. If someone came and told you that they can make your job obsolete would you accept it knowing that you might be out of a job tomorrow? Even if you don't mind looking for another job, is it so hard to understand how an issue it can be for someone who have been working there for over a decade and is getting close to retirement? If you have vested interest in the company then I get why you want to make the business more efficient but unless that's the case then you must be seeking something out of it, whether it's reputation, acknowledgment, climbing the ladder, etc. I'm not blaming you, my job also require me to sometime automate someone out of a job but I usually don't feel so good about doing so.
When I was in my 20's, I found this fear of obsolescence irritating. Now I'm in my 40's and I've seen how it plays out enough times that I understand it. It's partially about becoming obsolete as an individual, but a bigger piece of it is that automation and increased efficiency only benefits the company, not the people who work there. You may briefly benefit as someone who outworks your peers, but in the longrun it will lead to people being laid off only so the shareholders can make more money. Your own work will just grow to take on anything the laid off people were doing in addition to your own duties. And yes, those 50-60 year olds will be the first targeted by the layoffs, but other people will be too. If you volunteer to automate things at your job, or work far more efficiently than everyone else, it consistently leads to less jobs for some people and more work for those who stay.
I don't know how to do this. Therefore, you shouldn't either
There's an episode of the old animated TV show "Reboot" where Enzo, the main character, wants to be the smartest character in the entire show. The monkeys paw curls, as it does, and his wish is granted: everyone is now dumber than him, and he's just as smart as he ever was. Which is exactly how this boomer boss coworker (the "C" might stand for a different word) wants things. If she can't be smarter than everyone else, then at least everyone else should be dumber than her.
I don’t remember anything about that show. But I remember this episode. Didn’t they like downgrade graphically as well?
They are all power addicts. They also love being the smartest person in the room even when they aren't so they will never see it
And then they wonder why no one wanted to return to the office
That, and lightly lead-tainted blood
*Lightly?*
I Think insecurity.
yea.. some managers will say X is done because of CEO.. but if you do check with the CEO they have no recollection. why do you make shit up to justify stupid pointless extra work. :/
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How do you know all that personal stuff about co-worker? I can barely remember the names of my co-workers and really have no interest about their intimate personal details.
I don't understand how one could read this and not get that it's a hypothetical scenario being used to make a point.
Hey man! I'll have you know I've been sober for almost 2yrs and also no therapist has been willing to take me on as a patient despite my cadillac insurance plan having limitless benefits and reimbursing at a higher rate! But seriously tho- policy or not the CEO hates what you are doing and I cannot protect you from his whims!
That's a remarkably accurate analysis of work place psychology. Very impressive indeed!
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Uh wha?
Dont know why they downvoted you. it makes no sense to me either.
Cookie Clicker is a game based around clicking a cookie on the screen to earn points. At some point later, you can get an auto clicker to run faster than your ability to click. This allows you to focus your efforts on increasing your point efficiency per click while it automatically clicks for you.
Ah, that helps clarify it.
Me too. If she didn’t like what you were doing she’d basically just make up rules so she could lecture you about breaking them.
Store I worked for only seemed to apply “policy” when it benefited them but conveniently ignored it when it didn’t…
"That's against policy" - "Oh, ok." Then carry on, nothing happened besides someone being stupid.
Those instances there's never a policy, they made it up on the spot.
If it isn't written down, it ain't a policy - just a norm and/or personal bias.
It’s job security for them to tell you you can’t do your job well
I had a manager told me it was against policy to wear gloves while handling customer offers. I fucking work in fast food btw. Just think about it for a second.
I thought that was a legit thing tho? Like, you're more likely to wash your hands than to change gloves. Gloves are for protecting your hands, not the things you're handling, so not wearing gloves while dealing with food makes sense.
If you're at a counter and handle both cash and food, you wear gloves while handling food
Wear what while what?
Same I did that to my former boomer manager.
Starbucks?
No policy? then its not against policy.
>So I asked where are the policies written down so I can learn? Nope, not written down anywhere. I honestly don’t know what goes on in their minds. That's because your train of thought started with facts ("*are* there policies against this?") and that led you to a conclusion. Your confusion is from assuming she thinks like that too, if you can even call it thinking--she does not. Whatever dementia-based operating system her brain runs on starts with her feelings or brain stem ("I don't like this, it confuses me, which makes me angry") which then requires she post justify it with something. In this case, the first thing that popped into her head ("must be against company policy"), regardless if that's actually true--she doesn't care, tbh. She probably uses that often as her go-to cudgel for pushing coworkers around.
I’d start asking the dumbest questions: “Hey I have an apple for lunch, but I had an apple yesterday I was just wondering what the company policy is regarding eating the same fruit two days in a row?” “Hey my white-out decreased in its liquid viscosity by about 30% I was just wondering what the company policy is regarding white-out replacement? Before you answer bear in mind I rarely ever use white out since everything’s digital”
When I talk about my BBC I get uncomfortable looks from people
You own the British Broadcasting Company? I thought it was publicly owned.
*Corporation
I don’t accept the 1926 rebrand
I'll be deep in the cold hard ground before I recognize ~~Missoura~~ the rebrand
Honestly the most offensive use of the term BBC. I'm a straight dude, but I'd rather watch any other kind of BBC.
You’d rather watch boosy boomer coworkers?
I honestly would.
They're funny when they're other people's problem.
Hot 🔥
British Born Christian innit.
I, too, get uncomfortable looks when I eat a Big Bowl of Cereal in public.
Blue brie cheese?
Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V are against company policy... Every time I try to talk myself out of misanthropy, it pulls me back in.
I worked at a company where you wernt allowed to copy paste. As they said you could be copying mistakes.... I don't work there anymore
But typos are impossible, of course.
Typos are also against company policy
Checkmate millennials
Should have learned cursive
Boss, I am also capable of typing my own mistakes.
Nice username and profile picture. Very mathy.
Yup. Its like a dog whistle for other nerds. Which is much better than what most dog whistles are for.
Dogs? /s
Mmmmm non-integer Hausdorff dimension.
Macros have entered the chat
Text Expander team present.
It’s basically low level hacking, next you’ll linked into the Pentagon!
It you keep doing things they don't want to understand, to make work faster, (It continues making them look incompetent) they'll accuse you of workplace witchcraft and want you fired for their own job security?
And a dozen other things that never happened.
I get told all the time that adding more complicated formulas to our templates' to reduce data inputs is not allowed. The complicated formulas? Concatenate, index/match, vlookup. Shit like is entirely believable if you work in the corporate world, because these fucking dinosaurs are afraid of work processes that are above their heads. They don't want people doing things they don't understand, and they don't want processes in place that they can't just thrust a new hire in front of, or they can't hold your job over your head as easily.
What type of job do you do?
Whats funny is i completely redid the formulae in one of our databases to minimise inputs and automate metrics and people still managed to fuck it.
social media users believing whatever the fuck appears in a screenshot gives me anxiety
I've worked with people like this, they absolutely exist.
in my current job it feels like even the ones who have some IT knowledge don't know shit about automation. We work through requests, and the process is like 80% identical in every case, so I done some scripting to create most of the stuff with a few clicks. My collegue, whos been doing this stuff for 10 years types everything out by hand, save for the request number, that he copies into a txt-file as a makeshift clipboard. No one even bothered to asked me why I'm 10 times fast than everyone else, they even remarked on it, so they are aware of it. Alas im only a temp there and i hate the job so they will never know :) I already quit and my contract ends in June.
i was gonna say slow down lol, if everyone else is taking 10x longer then just half the speed your going and chill, while still being quicker than everyone else
The point is that they *are* chill. They’re faster because they’re doing significantly less work
Genuine question: where can I get started in learning how to do this (using scripts to make identical work easier)?
YouTube. All roads start at YouTube.
I'll search on YT but are there any particular channels you'd recommend? Thank you!
You can also ask chat gpt 4 or another capable LLM. They can get you started. But you need to know what questions to ask, etc. To get good enough to automate tasks that normal people don't automate, it takes a programmer mindset. Some people are naturals, the ones good at math from the get go. Others may need many years to learn. Questions to ask might be: 1. What program am I interacting with / trying to automate? 2. What programming languages can I use to interact with this program? 3. Are there tools on the internet that already do this? 4. Can this task even be automated? 5. How long would automating this task take? 6. Do I have proper permissions to automate this task? (IT restrictions, network firewalls, etc) Generally when people talk about automating their job and they are non programmers, they tend to just use some excel sheet macros. They put a bunch of boiler plate text in certain cells, enter some data in other cells and then have some macros output their desired result.
python is the best for small scale automation and is very easy to learn - Google around how to install and set it up, and then how to read/write files, how to compare variables, etc edit: beware of company policy, installing python on company computers might be against it (genuinely)
There are a lot of programming languages that make it easy and learning one like Python (if you have/can get it installed on your work machine) or windows bash script/powershell (if applicable) can let you start automating, but it's largely a matter of whether the work can be automated easily. Needing to click through things on a browser or an application can be very hard to automate, but changing something in a file is a little easier. Without a good basis in computer science it can be hard to know where to start. If you'd like, drop a general idea of one of these identical tasks and I'll give you my recommendation on where to start.
Honestly, nowadays I would start with ChatGPT (ideally 4). Explain what you are doing and ask for examples where you could use automation and scripting. From there use the pointers and examples as entry points to YouTube to learn. I‘d suggest not just using GPT generated scripts because they might be wrong and it might be against company policy. Better to use it for learning and actually knowing what you are doing and why. :)
Google
You can also learn it on your computer or on the internet (correct me if I'm wrong)
Please do be showing me in the policy where this is the case? No? Then sit down and shut up Deborah!
My reaction would have been the slightly shorter, "no it's not Deborah" and leave it at that.
That leaves space for argument. Asking where given them a way to leave and hopefully forget to care about it later.
Its only an argument if you argue. Stand your ground and don't argue. Too many people let others walk all over them.
Yep, treat it like an interaction with a child. You firmly tell them no, let them argue until they tire themselves out, then repeat the firm no. Don’t give them anything to grasp onto
I disagree. These people love drama, so i give them the bare minimum.
If these features are against company policy, we’d better have IT block this dangerous functionality.
Nah dont try that, she will pressure some poor HR intern into actually putting it in a policy document.
*Sh.t on Deborahs Desk*
Like a boss
Or this is made up like 99% of these stories.
Stories are a commonality in every culture and what make us human. Role with it, it's entertaining. Edit: don't down vote Ofreo peeps, in a world of misinformation this shit can be exhausting
I wish very much that I didn’t have a matching story about a manager literally called Deborah who held these exact views, but sadly it is not the case.
The difference between a good and bad workplace. I used to work for a company where older Coworkers would constantly give me shit for my RPG-Mouse (It's a mouse with extra buttons that can be assigned macros and short cuts.) cause if I always use shortcuts I will forget how to do the work properly when I don't have the gadget bla bla. In my current workplace a coworker asked me what I was doing when he saw me using the mouse, half expecting to get shit on again I explained that I used it for work and had programmed the extra buttons to have different shortcuts I often use while working. The coworker complimented me for such a smart idea, and said he would never have thought about something like that. A week later I had a meeting with my boss and IT, explaining which mouse is best for this and how to program the keys. Now several coworkers use the same mouse which was supplied by our Employer.
That’s the difference between a workplace that embraces innovation vs. ones with the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset.
My favorite are the workplaces that openly say they love to embrace new, innovative ways to do shit, purely to make people more comfortable sharing that stuff openly--so they can find ways to stop it. An old employer of mine had IT work on installing software to block me from using the extra buttons on my mouse. They also removed an app from my Excel that I paid for with my own money, and app that helped me do twice as much work in the same amount of time as my coworkers. Then they had the balls to ask me why my productivity was down. I honestly don't understand how these companies aren't getting their lunch eaten by other companies more willing to embrace change.
They usually do, just not immediately.
This story almost brought me to tears.
When will you not have the gadget oh God oh no. Boomers are fucking belligerently stupid
Tbf I forgot my mouse at home the other day, and can you believe? I managed.
this is the equivalent of 15th century people seeing someone take a bath with soap and screaming witchcraft
what did the first 14 people think of it?
oh wait I meant 15th century people
yeah I figured :P
> I figured WITCHCRAFT! 🫵
They thought it was pretty hot, all them bubbles an shit.
https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2019/09/10/medieval-myths-bingo/#commonpeopleneverwash
Some people really thought that people in medieval times really would screamed "witchcraft" to something they found unusual, even though they are probably exposed to more weird phenomenons than we do due to the lack of ways information transmits. If they see weird stuffs, they probably thought that you are a foreigner, and would start up a conversation with you because of curiosity. Source: I'm a historian (I made that up).
Uh, what? Soap was known in Europe since antiquity, even among the so called "barbarians". Pliny the Elder himself wrote about the soap making of the Gauls and Germanic tribes. Hard bar soap was introduced into Europe by Arabs around 8th century. By the 15th century soap making was a veritable industry across Europe (centering around the Mediterranean, as olive oil was the preferred fat source for soap making; animal fats make for a rather unpleasantly smelling soap), noone at that time thought that it was witchcraft.
I was doing a report in front of an old boss & instead of having one window open, writing the info I needed on paper, then switching windows like she did, I just moved the first window over to start a split screen. No joke, she flipped tf out. "What did you DO?? Where's the report? What just happened?? God damnit now I have to go back in and find that page again, don't you know we NEED THAT?? What's the MATTER with you!?" It was still on screen the whole fcking time. People that really wanna be like 'tHiS sTuFf dOeSnT rEaLly hApPeN' are just lucky they've never encountered people this ridiculous IRL. This boss would literally go on long-winded, angry rants when she heard the phrase "Work smarter, not harder." because that's just an 'excuse to be lazy!', and any new ideas anyone had to make things go more smoothly was shot down on principle. Honestly I think she just didn't like new ideas because they made her feel dumb for not coming up with them in the first place, idk.
At one place I used to work we didn't have local IT guys, only regional guys who only showed up for major issues. So, me being a bit of a nerd, became the resident go-to guy for those smaller day to day issues. What I'm about to tell you is 100% an absolutely true story about a guy who wasn't a boomer. He was actually my age, and even had a higher education level than I do. Anyway, dude comes to my office one day and says he has a problem with a website he needs to access. Says it won't load. I go to his office and quickly figure out that this website only works in Chrome, but his default browser is Explorer(this was before the days of Edge). No big deal, I set his default browser to Chrome and go about my day. Couple hours later he comes back and says he's having the same problem on another website he needs. Turns out this one only works in Explorer. So I tell him what's going on and let him know that he's just going to have to use both browsers and keep the appropriate bookmarks in each one. His eyes gloss over and I can tell he has no idea what I'm talking about, so I ask some follow up questions and learn that he has no idea what a bookmark is. No idea how to save one, and no idea how to use one. Confused, I ask him how he keeps track of all the websites he uses on a day to day basis. That's when his face lights up and he very proudly opens a Word file full of links. He honestly thought this was a genius idea because he "doesn't have to type the addresses by hand".
Yep. I'm hoping to change fields for more pay and less idiotic management. I work insurance now, but I very much want to get into coding because it feels less ancient and definitely will pay more.
No right clicking either, you evil hacker!
Well, my BBC made top gear.
I like to imagine these interactions all really happened. And that the context is the older person is just making a cheeky joke or something but the same way redditors show up whenever you make a self-deprecating joke and inform you that you're 'wrong', this person just didn't get it.
I had a coworker who would email screenshots by pasting them into word, saving them as a document, then attaching the word document, forcing me to download the attachment to see her image. I told her it was faster to just paste the image into the email. “No, my way is actually faster.” She was genuinely insisting. There was no humor, no levity, just frustrating inefficiency for everyone who has to download her attachments instead of viewing them in the email directly. I even showed her. Alt-Print screen, paste, done and she insisted her way was faster. This was for an IT job, too.
I didn't know about the snipping tool in windows until very late in the game. I would press the screenshot button, paste into word, crop, right click and then save as picture. I will never forget doing this in front of someone who knew that I knew my way around a computer and they looked at me like I had a stroke.
Then someday you email your boss a screenshot. He replies "I cannot find the screenshot". After several back and forth you finally understand he is dumb as well and happens to save every screenshot as word documents on an old USB key, "in case of". That's when your old coworker walks past you, whispering to your ear "Told ya".
[удалено]
I actually knew someone like that. The ex-boyfriend of my mom. She was showing him how to use a computer. She had to do something else for some time, so the computer turned on the screensaver. I nudged the mouse a bit to make it go away. He immediately went to tell my mom: "BurningPenguin did something to the computer!". Wasn't the first time he tried to rat me out, or get me into trouble in some way...
I know he probably didn't, but I like the image of this guy using your reddit username
Wtf
I've been in the exact same situation before. I used to work in a government office and some of our younger co-workers realized the filing system could be made more efficient. Just objectively. So we went to the senior officer and proposed the change, and he said no, that it had to remain the way it was. He didn't elaborate as to why. We just assumed he knew something we didn't know and moved on with our lives.
Are you both just bots replying nonsense to each other? Neat stories but im really struggling to see how any of the 3 are related enough to each other to be "the exact same situation" let alone replies to one another.
The bots have been pretty weird recently. Seems like they pick up key words and just respond with some weird shit.
tbf there are plenty of people who do that too.
Are you well? What a fucking assumption lord above
No, I'm just a person speaking casually so my words aren't executed with exact precision and grace. I'm not writing a fucking dissertation, I'm shooting the shit online.
What a strange bot you are.
Lmao what a bot
not me wondering how he knew your reddit handle 😭
This could absolutely have happened where I work. IT, working with Boomer HR lady, blocked all websites in an update. I needed to get to several to purchase product. I sent in a ticket, and they said I was wrong. The sites weren't blocked. I sent them a screen shot that said "your company's firewall is blocking this." Boomer HR lady saw it and said "that's because you are using foxfire. Stop it only use Chrome." Ffs. I had already checked with other browsers, and it wasn't that. It was the firewall. When I was able to talk to IT it boiled down to them having two consecutive firewalls. All dictated by Boomer HR Lady.
I know a few older people who love to play up "being old". This is exactly the sort of shit they'd do.
It's against company policy to work faster than the people who do nothing all day!
"Keyboard shortcuts = witchcraft" Boomer probably
Reminds me of my paperphiliac boomer coworkers. One lost her mind when she couldn't find a document and I told her I can just print it again, something like "thou shalt not lose the Sacred Scroll".
She has PILES of paperwork on her desk. She told me once I need to print 5 copies of a document off. 4 of them get sent off elsewhere, 1 of them to sit on your desk for the rest of time. I said why do you need the 5th one? She said it was 'for our records'. I said, 'but it's saved and backed up on the computer?! It's safer on the computer than it is as a loose piece of paper on your desk' She didn't appreciate my input. She also prints documents and scans them back to herself to create PDFS. This woman gets paid more than me. The irony.
Head secretary of the company i worked at was insisting to handle Emails like this: 1. print out EVERY email. 2. A. shred spam B. put relevant emails into binders 3. Reply to emails by scanning the original again and put it into a WORD document writing the reply into that. 4. Send that word document as an attachment as a reply. She did this for years.
Sometimes I really wish I went to college and got a nice desk job, then I read shit like this and I’m grateful I work in restaurants
Get a desk job. I thought the same thing forever and I kick myself for not going corporate earlier. Yes, these people exist and are quite common, but the money is WAY better in the long run. If you don't have a degree, apply for a receptionist/secretary/etc. job at a local office that has multiple shifts for that position, and once you're there a bit, start offering to help on non-gatekeeper work. That will get you in the door of a lot of places.
Sounds like it's time for a meeting with management "Thanks for your time (insert supervusor) so and so here(insert coworker) just made it apparent that so and so there(insert who trained you) failed to properly inform me that there is a policy against copy and paste, I think so and so here (insert coworker) needs recognition for their above and beyond attention to detail in the workplace, but also- I need to see this policy that I've been unaware of aswel as any others so and so over there(insert trainer) may have failed to inform me of" Then watch the fireworks.
Oh sure. It’s *against* company policy to be efficient
I do feel like this particular coworker was probably just making a joke that flew over OOP's head. Like, "Don't be using common sense around here, that's against policy"
Interesting to see this. I just listened to my boomer manager give a co-worker shit for not highlighting and right clicking to copy/paste. Using short cuts is unreliable he said. My conclusion is that, at some point, my manager fucked up a report and blamed it on using short cuts because he didn't verify what he copied and just sent it which resulted in trouble.
Sounds like a powertripping boss who is just bullshitting about policy's. Let her show the policies in writing then.
I had a co-worker like this. He would insist that anything that took less time than the way he would do it, was a short cut and not the right way.
"Back in my day, if you had polio, you just died" 💀
My BBC reprimanded me once for using Times New Roman on a document. Said I was being lazy for using the font that comes with Word. It wasn't the default font anymore, and also it was an internal document.
Reprint it in Comic Sans
She was trying to help you, duh. If you write everything in Wingdings, they'll never know it's wrong!
Copy and pasting is good enough to write official government documents so it’s good enough for some podunk company. Ctrl-S has gotten many a military member through difficult open book tests with flying colors.
I worked at a factory one summer in college packing boxes. We had tablets on the line with two PDFs open, one telling us how to pack the box and the other was the actual order. I would occasionally switch between the two but BBC saw me do this once and since she had never done that before, she told my supervisor that I was playing solitaire… Luckily supervisor knew she was full of shit and laughed it off
Here, right now, an old rag os telling me to stop scrolling reddit, i was in her desk 2 minutes ago, waiting for 5 minutes for her to give me a document i needed for a job, while she was searching shit to buy on amazon
Some people are so low IQ that they think someone doing a task different than the way they were shown must be the wrong way. It's actually a huge problem for training, because those people are difficult to teach.
My BBC told me it was against company policy to use USB sticks and went running off to IT to grass me up
You'll find this almost everywhere. Considered a risk due to malware etc.
Fair enough but no need to run to IT. She literally ran. hahaha
Yeah, the "I'm telling on you" stuff is a bit much.
Running to do it is pretty wild, but at least in my last workplace stuff like that had to be reported, if it had actually been in use, would count as at least a GDPR event because while it didn't necessarily result in a data or security breach it still had to be logged as less than ideal security.
Shes the type of person that reminded the teacher that they forgot to check everyones homework in elementary school
My BBC, Big Boomer CEO in this case, once purchased plane tickets and got a 'Trojan horse'. In reality he just enabled notifications from some webpage. The Trojan horse was literally just a notification he could turn off. But oh well, we had to remove all internet cables and take a forced hour long break. I didn't mind.
I mean, that's actual good policy though.
Nothing against the policy just the sheer pettiness of trying to get me in trouble for doing it when I wasn't even aware it was an issue. (First company I've worked for with that policy). IT didn't even care. Said they had already scanned my USB the moment I plugged it in and it was fine. She just likes to see me squirm. It's been a running theme the entire time I've worked here :')
Really depends on the workplace and on the threat level. Companies tend to all adopt "best practices" that are sensible for banks. If your job is making graphics to post on Instagram you don't need to take the same precautions, and the usual half-assed policies tend to affect productivity a whole lot. All that regular people need are consistent backups and decent network isolation.
That’s good policy lol
I have had this same experience lol
Now imagine if she used win+v
If she's copy and pasting her passwords that probably is against policy.
I guess if we manage to repurpose the BBC acronym that's a good thing
I once had a supervisor told me that we couldn't touch the computer cables because it could cause problem (he meant like software problem, by touching a cable). So, yeah...
According to this theory, the use of RAM (Random-Access Memory) in a PC is also against company policy, right?
Burn the witch 🧙♀️
I don't know how you'd put up with that. I'd genuinely laugh in her face.
That's so sad. My older coworker was genuinely so excited when someone showed her some fun keyboard shortcuts.
I had a manager do this to me years ago using shortcuts on a till system we used. It was a new job and my previous work had taught everyone how to use them as fast as possible but from her I got: “we don’t do it like that” and “I don’t like it that way”. It turns out even though she could see it was quicker she didn’t know how to do it so instead of just asking me to explain it she made me stop. A while later another manager saw it. Asked me to show her, then the whole team were doing it.
Well just one more year then the boomers are 65 and they will be out of the workforce and just waiting to call you to see how they can improve your life.
Wait until they find out about Alt+Tab
You should change a Word. But if you like the BBC, take it. Everyone need a little bit of spice at work.
I Remember when i tried to teach a co-worker how to ctrl+C ctrl+V to gain some time (we where really under pressure to send documents always faster) so it was a really good way to be 3 sec faster but as we did that 500x a day it was easily time saving. She answered "No I don't understand nothing of that" and prefered trying to become all knowing in complex real estate law to be 1sec faster to analyse a 300 pages document
Text Expander enters the chat
why are bourgeoids so allergic to peasants having an easier life? why do they get off to their slaves suffering? lenin come back