[ARaven0137]

I'm taking precautions, but I'm still living my life. I'm thankful that the office gym is still open even though all rec centers and private gyms are closed. I have to admit that when Starbucks stopped having sit in coffee is when it hit me that this is serious.

I feel another warped fairy tale coming on. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there lived a Jabba the Hutt. Jabba rose to her lofty position through complaints and lawsuits, never having earned her place. Jabba was blind as a bat and smelled bad so she insisted that we drive her everywhere. She would say that the higher ranking driver that she had gave her more status at HQ. Jabba was also as brave as a squirrel so it was natural that she be put in charge of a field group where decisions had to be made and made quickly. Jabba also thought only white men were competent and trustworthy, so we women and minorities only existed to serve her and the white males in the group. For months my sole function was to make and deliver coffee to her and the white men and to make birthday cards and that the millions of dollars spent training me to be a pilot were paying off. I begged for productive work, but Jabba was so afraid of anything going wrong, especially from a woman or minority that doing nothing was preferable. "Oh no...oh no no no. Oh no. Too risky, oh no, too risky." I did workout all the time and found all the best lunch spots. I learned that we were the laughing stock of the whole organization. By chance, I happened to meet some guys in a much better group and I just started tagging along on their work. Jabba didn't care. She thought I was using a Jedi mind trick on her. I took one thing from my Jabba desk every day and put it on a desk in better group. In just over a month I had effectively moved in and the boss there signed my paperwork and I was free of Jabba.

The moral of the story is that she got promoted yet again.

[Have Hope]

I received a shout out and a big kudos today from the CEO's son. The CEO, my boss, my manager, my boss's boss, and the account director were all cc'd on the email. I received a congrats and thanks from a few of those people. excluding my own boss and my manager, which tells me that they still are out to undermine me at work, regardless of the facade they put on. It pisses me off that neither can even say something congratulatory.

I don't understand my boss. He is a good guy but he seems bound and determined to get me and him coronavirus. We worked all week this week because we had to but this week promised to be a "week off". Instead he is putting things on the schedule left and right. It is annoying. I chided him a bit but he still seemed lost as to what to do. I have to tell you after this I think I am going to seriously start looking for another job.

[Mountaindewed]

I’m kind of worried about my job laying off people. I have seniority in my department so if they go by that then I’m fine. if they go by other things, then I’m not sure.

[Turtle_Rider]

(Not a strong gripes) I don't like my new coworkers at all...
I feel so bored despite just move in for one and half months.
I know, the stress I have here is less than I had in my last workplace. I don't know. I feel like something is off....

So tired of my boss. He wants me to go in at every turn. And he makes it like I don't want to.

1. I am not really allowed in. When we don't have something to do, we should be home.
2. He keeps wanting us to do stuff there, but, no one else will be with us. (so that is stupid)
3. It isn't so much a corona virus issue but 85% of my co workers are having a grand time working from home -- something they will take away from us as soon as this is over... and I am going to be one of them darn it. I am not going to spend the entire corona virus time going into work when no one else is.
4. The truth is that my boss hates his home life and refuses to ever be at home. This is becoming a serious problem.
5. We got trained on this new thing called Zoom and after telling us last week we should learn it, he now refuses to use it.

When out of the office without support he is like a childish baby who can't remember anything. He got a letter 60 days ago and even though I have explained at least 50 times that the letter was not for him he keeps asking about it. I suspect when he isn't at the office he is literally running from his home life and may even be out someplace that isn't home driving around.

This is sort of proven by the idea that he cannot get work done out of the office. We keep getting requests for things that he should deal with but he keeps having me set up phone meetings so he can deal with them at the meeting.

Why do I keep having to work with such strange people?

[downandlonely]

I've been working from home for two weeks due to the virus. It's pretty bad in my county. I know some people like to work from home, but I live alone so now I see no one. It's pretty lonely.

[Mountaindewed]

Not a gripe but I took a picture of myself and there is for sure a difference since I started T. Which is great I’m just not really sure what to say to them when I come back looking a different way then I left.

[Have Hope]

My boss is a very LAME leader overall.

He did not congratulate me for a major accomplishment, when the CEO himself emailed me directly to tell me "job well done".

Then every morning we have a team call, and our boss does not encourage us in the least, or say anything supportive to us, while working under the current situation. He sounds tense in general every single call.

And he stopped meeting with each of us once per week ever since we've all been working from home. I don't know or understand what that is about, but it's annoying since he's our voice to the CEO, and he's the one who tells our CEO how each of us are doing. So how can our CEO know if he does not meet with us every week?

I just think he's seriously LAME. My opinion of him worsens every single day.

[puzzclar]

Boss are you actually going to assist in any least talking to me!!! The owner does, why can't you??

[Have Hope]

My boss is now taking over a presentation I am supposed to give. WTF. Now it's HIS presentation. It's a power play at its best.

[downandlonely]

I'm sorry to hear that.

How many of you are working from home now?

[Have Hope]

Thank you ... I am working from home full time. My husband is not. He is still working in the public, part time because his hours were cut.

nope..still going to the store...getting paid more and the store has added 2% to every item in the store as hazard pay for us.

[Have Hope]

Here's the whole story and my personal gripe.

I have my monthly reporting meeting with an important client coming up, and their Company CEO wants to join the call for the first time. He wants to see what I've been working on and the data that speaks to my success.

However, somehow, and I don't know if my own CEO decided this, but my boss is pulling together a 15-page Powerpoint presentation to present to my client's CEO in this upcoming meeting. So, yesterday, I asked my boss to allow enough time for me to walk the CEO through my monthly report. Well, my boss tells me that he's pulled data from my report and will add it to his presentation. Then he tells me we will not run through my monthly report. So, basically, my boss is taking over MY meeting, he is running the show and I have NO say in it whatsoever, even though it's MY client, I'm the one who must deliver and report on results for this client, and my boss hasn't been present in any meetings to know what specific data to pull from my report in order to truly show the success of my work! It's MY work, it's MY client, and he's taking this meeting over? I am livid!

And I don't understand why or how this happened. My husband thinks it's a power play on my boss's part. My boss and I have an underlying conflict, he is very clearly threatened by me and by my success, and he has been trying to secretly and very maliciously undermine me at work for months now. IF he screws up this meeting and we lose the client, I will blame him entirely for not showing the right data to their company CEO.

I am beside myself. This really irks me to no end, and there's absolutely nothing I can say or do about it because he's my BOSS, and I have to go along with whatever he says. Grrrrrrr.

he is the boss... and at some point the ceo must have said it was ok...to me it doesn't seem that strange that management would pull work from all sources and make the presentation. in theory all the work produced by everyone should be on the same "page" and represent the same points the company is trying to sell.

not to sound stupid but I would imagine the boss could go thru the project and figure out which talking points are the essential ones..knowing the type of business you do and the type of business they are trying to represent ion this presentation. when I worked for the government this was a fairly common way of presenting information. upper management or a specific person presented info, not usually the creator of the study.

if the presentation goes well, and it should if your document is correct and they are pulling info from it, then there should be no need for drama..your work was used to help the company out. either way you helped to benefit the outcome.

[seesaw]

Not so much a gripe as a challenging situation, but I've been drawn in to a conflict, to resolve a conflict, I mean, for a client who is having some struggles internally between people at their organization. I'm doing this work for them, and they all have different ideas of what they want, and some of them are actually knowledgeable and some of them are not. I have found over the past week I have had to play "therapist" quite a bit with my clients - giving them extra time to talk to me about whatever their current dilemma is (even if it doesn't involve any work I will do for them) and finding out how I can help or providing some context/insight to help them deal with challenges.

The only problem is that it's eating significantly into daytime working hours so I then am working well into the evenings and night to get work done, since that's the only time I am undisturbed. It's okay; I know this will calm down as they get their bearings with how to operate right now, but man, I miss sleep right now.

[ARaven0137]

I'm feeling another twisted fairy tale coming on.

Once upon a time, the Kingdom of Dysfunction was ruled by a distant and uncaring king and a domineering, punitive queen. King Weasel and The Red Queen reigned, hand in hand to destroy their own subjects and destroy their own land. King Weasel cared only about himself and his golf game along with chasing skirts behind his wife's back to pass the time so as not to have any interaction with the peasants. King Weasel would pressure his subjects into giving him free things such as concert tickets or airline upgrades. He would deny people work trips and take them himself and then never show up to the conferences or workshops held in distant provinces so he could go on tours on the company's dime. King Weasel would also corner women in the workout room, their office, or in the parking lot and try to hit on them, saying that he was the boss and he could make things happen for them. These women included yours truly. Once, when the air conditioning was malfunctioning in the building, King Weasel had the technicians close everyone's vent and route all AC to his office. That was sticking up for the people. King Weasel loved to make people feel welcome too. When a friend of mine transferred in, King Weasel greeted him by shaking his hand while never looking up from the sports page and not even knowing my friend's name. After I had rebuffed King Weasel and The Red Queen on a couple of occasions, they had me transferred to another section without warning or any input. When King Weasel told me this I had just come off of a midnight to 8 shift, but he insisted on seeing me at 10am even though I knew the transfer was coming. I got ten seconds of his time and he never even looked at me to tell me that I was being transferred. I kept looking back over my shoulder where he was focusing, thinking maybe there was a ghost there. King Weasel eventually had to abdicate because the Red Queen stabbed him in the back and he told the truth. So, he was overthrown for telling the truth in a career full of lies.

Sitting at the right hand of King Weasel was The Red Queen. She was the perfect storm of sociopathic, power mad, petty and vindictive. She rose to the throne of the Kingdom of Dysfunction through guile, threat and seduction. Upon her transfer in, she was kind and magnanimous, but that only lasted until inspection was over. Then, it was open season on her subjects. She began accusing everyone not in her favor of being unethical. She would call people into her office for perceived wrongdoing, have them wait hours and then be subjected to interrogation until the person proved their innocence. Then, she would dismiss them haughtily. A friend of mine was under interrogation for hours for his travel voucher, which was all done to reg. I was called on the carpet because I took a work trip, which saved lives, and I mistakenly spent $0.47 on the wrong company credit card. You would have thought I had murdered infants by the way she came after me. I reached into my purse and pulled out some coins and said, "I got two quarters, you can keep the change." That went over really well.

During a flight mishap, I took the initiative to save a damaged aircraft and I was called into her office. I thought maybe, just maybe I would be complimented. I was castigated for not having run my actions all the way up the chain and getting approval, which would have taken too much time and resulted in the loss of an aircraft and lives. I sarcastically said that I was sorry for saving lives and The Red Queen said that I should be.

The Red Queen also liked to make random and sudden moves of personnel and sections. She refused to see any requests for her approval before a week out and always took two weeks to approve anything so nothing got approved unless you were a favorite. She stocked the managerial staff with incompetent but loyal toadies. She secretly recruited office rats to spy on people and report to her. People were getting jacked up for a 16 minute coffee break or a 46 minute lunch break. She created a rambling, 17 page mandate on how everyone should log their time to include over 50 color coded entries like lime green for family sick leave for your son and chartreuse for family sick leave for your daughter. She restricted eating times to between 10 and 2 unless you had written consent to eat outside of these times. If you worked a 4 to mid or a mid 8 you couldn't eat because she wouldn't be available to sign your approval. She had Bad Santa watching everyone's leave and reading everyone's email. Bad Santa would make a list and check it twice and then give the naughty and nice list to The Red Queen for offenders to be disposed of. I told an inspector that the organization was an orgy of favoritism and discrimination. She spent much of the budget on substandard office furniture that fell apart within a year. She once cancelled a two year project because she didn't like the font on the proposal. In 18 months, a thriving organization devolved into complete chaos and ruin.

The Red Queen could not be harmed because she was a favorite of a cabinet secretary. Thus, the Red Queen was elevated to become The Red Empress. Eventually, her cabinet secretary moved on and the new one told her she should find a new career and she retired in disgrace...but only after doing long lasting damage to the kingdom.

[seesaw]

Originally Posted by ARaven0137

I'm feeling another twisted fairy tale coming on.


Once upon a time, the Kingdom of Dysfunction was ruled by a distant and uncaring king and a domineering, punitive queen. King Weasel and The Red Queen reigned, hand in hand to destroy their own subjects and destroy their own land. King Weasel cared only about himself and his golf game along with chasing skirts behind his wife's back to pass the time so as not to have any interaction with the peasants. King Weasel would pressure his subjects into giving him free things such as concert tickets or airline upgrades. He would deny people work trips and take them himself and then never show up to the conferences or workshops held in distant provinces so he could go on tours on the company's dime. King Weasel would also corner women in the workout room, their office, or in the parking lot and try to hit on them, saying that he was the boss and he could make things happen for them. These women included yours truly. Once, when the air conditioning was malfunctioning in the building, King Weasel had the technicians close everyone's vent and route all AC to his office. That was sticking up for the people. King Weasel loved to make people feel welcome too. When a friend of mine transferred in, King Weasel greeted him by shaking his hand while never looking up from the sports page and not even knowing my friend's name. After I had rebuffed King Weasel and The Red Queen on a couple of occasions, they had me transferred to another section without warning or any input. When King Weasel told me this I had just come off of a midnight to 8 shift, but he insisted on seeing me at 10am even though I knew the transfer was coming. I got ten seconds of his time and he never even looked at me to tell me that I was being transferred. I kept looking back over my shoulder where he was focusing, thinking maybe there was a ghost there. King Weasel eventually had to abdicate because the Red Queen stabbed him in the back and he told the truth. So, he was overthrown for telling the truth in a career full of lies.


Sitting at the right hand of King Weasel was The Red Queen. She was the perfect storm of sociopathic, power mad, petty and vindictive. She rose to the throne of the Kingdom of Dysfunction through guile, threat and seduction. Upon her transfer in, she was kind and magnanimous, but that only lasted until inspection was over. Then, it was open season on her subjects. She began accusing everyone not in her favor of being unethical. She would call people into her office for perceived wrongdoing, have them wait hours and then be subjected to interrogation until the person proved their innocence. Then, she would dismiss them haughtily. A friend of mine was under interrogation for hours for his travel voucher, which was all done to reg. I was called on the carpet because I took a work trip, which saved lives, and I mistakenly spent $0.47 on the wrong company credit card. You would have thought I had murdered infants by the way she came after me. I reached into my purse and pulled out some coins and said, "I got two quarters, you can keep the change." That went over really well.


During a flight mishap, I took the initiative to save a damaged aircraft and I was called into her office. I thought maybe, just maybe I would be complimented. I was castigated for not having run my actions all the way up the chain and getting approval, which would have taken too much time and resulted in the loss of an aircraft and lives. I sarcastically said that I was sorry for saving lives and The Red Queen said that I should be.


The Red Queen also liked to make random and sudden moves of personnel and sections. She refused to see any requests for her approval before a week out and always took two weeks to approve anything so nothing got approved unless you were a favorite. She stocked the managerial staff with incompetent but loyal toadies. She secretly recruited office rats to spy on people and report to her. People were getting jacked up for a 16 minute coffee break or a 46 minute lunch break. She created a rambling, 17 page mandate on how everyone should log their time to include over 50 color coded entries like lime green for family sick leave for your son and chartreuse for family sick leave for your daughter. She restricted eating times to between 10 and 2 unless you had written consent to eat outside of these times. If you worked a 4 to mid or a mid 8 you couldn't eat because she wouldn't be available to sign your approval. She had Bad Santa watching everyone's leave and reading everyone's email. Bad Santa would make a list and check it twice and then give the naughty and nice list to The Red Queen for offenders to be disposed of. I told an inspector that the organization was an orgy of favoritism and discrimination. She spent much of the budget on substandard office furniture that fell apart within a year. She once cancelled a two year project because she didn't like the font on the proposal. In 18 months, a thriving organization devolved into complete chaos and ruin.


The Red Queen could not be harmed because she was a favorite of a cabinet secretary. Thus, the Red Queen was elevated to become The Red Empress. Eventually, her cabinet secretary moved on and the new one told her she should find a new career and she retired in disgrace...but only after doing long lasting damage to the kingdom.

Lord almighty. That's not a work fairy tale, it's a work horror story! I'm sorry you are going through that. It sounds very hostile and stressful.

[puzzclar]

Why does this virus have to affect so much?!

[ARaven0137]

Thanks Seesaw,

It is an absolutely great job in an organization filled with dysfunction and ruled by mad kings, bloodthirsty queens, scheming nobles and grasping climbers. In one climate survey I said we were like Game of Thrones with less blood and more paper. Because those who climb high can find themselves close to the throne in D.C., backstabbing and cronyism are common. Gals like me who just want to do the job and go home are usually roadkill for the blue flamers on their way to greatness.

And now, for another twisted fairy tale.

After the fall and abdication of King Weasel and the elevation of The Red Queen to become the Red Empress, The Kingdom of Dysfunction inherited Kendall the Simple and Tracy the Tremulous as the new rulers. Kendall the Simple rose to power on the platform that his IQ had settled at room temperature and that no one could understand him. Tracy the Tremulous rose to power on a platform of timidity in which nothing went wrong on her watch because nothing was ever accomplished.

Kendall the Simple would hold his subjects captive during folksy meetings in which he would ramble on about the free donuts and coffee that he could get nightly from the hospital while he chatted up nurses. He would frequently hold meetings to plan meetings and meetings could go on all day. Kendall would then demand to know what meeting attendees had done all day. I once had to go see him because of a mistake that I made on a voucher. My supervisor and I met with him for an hour, talking about food. In the last few seconds, he told me to change X to Y. My supervisor told me that my meeting was the fourth hour long meeting of the morning for the same thing. Kendall would frequently issue contradictory and often mutually exclusive commands and then demand to know why you didn't follow his directives. He once demanded that sections not talk to each other and only go through him. He later castigated those sections for overwhelming him and not talking to each other. I would have to show up at meetings with stacks of his emails to present when he contradicted himself over and over. This went over well. He would demand that we finish annual reports months ahead of schedule so he could tell HQ that we were way ahead and get credit, but all of the metrics would change and we would redo the annual reports over and over and over. I joked that why should we do something well once when we could do it five times, poorly. He also forced us to switch to a beta software for our records that was insanely buggy and was not yet approved because he wanted to be cutting edge. I became an expert in the software out of necessity and I had to teach a class that was very popular with the rank and file, but wildly unpopular with management. I said that the software designer quit in disgust before the software was done and numerous designers finished it, but never talked to each other. I told people that if you wanted to save your documents, pressing save would destroy your document and hours of work. You had to do several drop down menus to do it. If you wanted to sign your document, pressing, "click here to sign your document" would destroy your document. You get the picture. Work came to a screaming halt.

Kendall the Simple also developed a wild project. We would have to visit contacts and vendors in other cities, which was a good thing. However, he made every section visit the same people, over and over and over. I would walk into every contact, head held low to be told that the contact just met with another section of ours and then asked, "don't you people talk to each other?"

"No," I would always reply.

He wanted me to go to a nearly deserted island to research technology, where there were just goats and pigs and sugarcane. I told him there was nothing there but goats and pigs and sugarcane, but he wanted me to go anyway. I found goats and pigs and sugarcane. We burned through the annual travel budget in three months, whereupon he demanded to know what we were doing that burned through the annual travel budget in three months. "I's gonna be watching ya'lls," he threatened. I did get a gazillion hotel points though.

Kendall's butchery of the English language was legendary in our work circle and people would be howling in the back every time he spoke...not because he meant to be funny. We had a Kendall to English dictionary and bought him English as a Second Language lessons. He was born and raised in the US.

In mass meetings with multiple other professional organizations we would get gems like, "Ya'lls is repizenting da organizations so ya'lls needs ta behaves and mine yer professionality."

"I's juss here ta hep da pepple."

"We's needs ta papalate dose dacaments."

"Iss furly likely we's gonna needs dose tings."

"Dass machine is done obsolute."

"Ya'lls bettah makes sure dat infamation is accurage."

"Iffen too manys pepple do da same ting, dats duplicity of effert."

"We's needs ta be stroking da cat fer dis to works."

It would be laughable if he were not making close to $200,000 a year and making decisions that impacted thousands of people. It was here that I developed the managerial decision making challenge coin. On one side it said, do the right thing. On the other side it said, do the wrong thing. It would improve managerial decision making by 50%.

[divine1966]

Raven, you need to be a writer. I know it’s not funny how horrible this guy is, but the way you write made me laugh aloud. Goats and pigs and sugarcane 😂 Giving him a dictionary and he is a native speaker 😂

[ARaven0137]

Thanks Divine. All I could do to survive is laugh at it and put great stories in my pocket that were just too weird to be fiction. I still recall the remote island meeting:

K the Simple: "I needs youse to take yer team to dat island and conducts you surveys of tecnologies."

Alice: "Sir, I've been there. It's nothing but goats and pigs and sugarcane. There are no major businesses there. It's a farming community...completely agricultural."

KTS: "How you knows? You wen arounds da island? You saws it all? How you knows?"

A: I landed there. I caught a cab to the local diner to eat. I talked to the farmers. There's no technology there other than for farming."

KTS: "Well, I stills wants you ta goes down there and takes a look. Youse gonna takes two wid you and do ups a survey. I expects nuttin less dan dat."

A: "Yes, sir."

He had this bizarre speech habit of pluralizing singulars and singularizing plurals. Whenever he would hold the mass meetings with multiple other organizations, we would laugh and cry at the same time, mostly in shame. I had a good friend in a sister organization and he and I would sit way in the back, out of sight. This would happen over several iterations of mad kings and sadistic queens. Whenever they would start talking nonsense he would elbow me in the ribs and, without even looking at me, ask, "Is that the best you got?"

To which I would reply without looking back, "Yup."

If I have one skill it's that I do great impersonations and I had Kendall the Simple down to a T, just with a higher voice.

[Mountaindewed]

I wonder if anyone is actually going into the store while it’s closed. Like a manager. Would be pretty funny if someone went into the store a few months from now and something from the food section had expired and the whole store was smelling real bad.

[Have Hope]

My a-hole boss introduced himself in today's client call as the one in charge of strategy (when I am) and introduced me as the one in charge of the day to day (which he is). He made me seem like the peon, when I lead the strategy for this client and on all my client accounts. I am so sick of him and his denigrating BS! I really hope he gets fired. I told HR and I told his boss what he did.