dear old tracey
used to 'alter' my shifts on the rota sheet on the day if it was busy or she needed to make up staff. one day, i called her on this and she had a go at me for not reading the rota properly.

except i write down every shift on the day it is given out ... and she hadn't even bothered to rub out the old time properly. biznitch!
(ladyintheradiator, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 20:13, Reply)

Literally just got rid of one bad manager a fortnight ago thinking about it
This guy would commute from Cardiff down to Swansea just to torture us for 8 hours a day. He was a corner cutting illogical wanker, who was only interested in numbers.

We have all been advised in the office that we have an "average" handling time for any job that turned up in the office. This numpty would relish in the fact that his team were absolutely acing the average time, except for little old me, who was taking a bit longer. Now here's the logic bit. The guys on his team were getting 2/3 times better times than me. I however have been working here for 10+ years, so I think I've got a slightly better-than-most idea on how things work here.

So what is his approach on this? If I take my first call and it's slightly longer than the average time, he'd shout across from his desk demanding to know why I was taking so long. For fuck's sake, there's 8 hours in a shift, we're about 15 minutes into the and you need at least two times to calculate an average you twat.

Secondly, why are the rest of the team doing these jobs so quickly? Because they're not. They are finding any excuses possible to send the customers elsewhere so the numbers look awesome. Doesn't fucking fix anything at all, and more often than not it's left to Muggins here to clear up the mess.

Thirdly, and this pisses me right off, the other staff were being awarded bonuses for taking so many calls. It doesn't matter if they treated the customer like a complete twunt, as long as you've taken loads that's all that matters.

And fourthly, the management then organised to have some of these newbies listen to me to see if they could give me any advice on how to "speed me up a bit". How I didn't smash the cunt manager's face in is beyond me.

I was all set to walk out of the company that I've worked for because of this, but finally our Upper-Management have noticed the shite that was starting to happen here and have focused on what we're actually doing with customers, so thankfully the company is turning in the right direction. It was at this time that the manager decided to get the fuck out of dodge and hand in his notice to work back in Cardiff, but still upto his last day he was openly abusing me (which did prompt me to asking him "Excuse me, but haven't you fucked off to Cardiff yet?" to a lack of reply).

God help the company that fuckwit is working for now. I'll give you a clue, it involves credit cards (fuck that lots).
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 19:08, 1 reply)

Some people never learn...
At the company i work at we have many field engineers. So about 2 years ago some bright spark realised that we had no way of monitoring or properly controlling the work they did so it was time to get a proper system in. Despite the fact that the one we had was fine. Edit: Bright spark worked 200 miles away in another office.

Many meetings were had and people in suits wandered the offices looking at call centres and stats and job sheets. Then one day myself and one of my workmates were asked to have a chat to some bloke in a suit with a badly receding hairline and a ponytail of all things. Head developer i think his title was.

He asked how we worked and what we wanted from a new system so with no prior preperation (no one told us about this meeting), we throw up the basics. "we can do all that no trouble" he says.

So, the new system starts up where by engineers now have a PDA and jobs get sent out to them and they submit the jobs back for invoicing via PDA all in real time. Oh, someone in HR also made sure the system incorporated a GPS tracker system in the vans so they could see where they were in real time.

The system was shit. It was slow, badly put together and everyday would throw users out of it and bring up database errors and all kinds of crap. The PDAs were slow taking HOURS to sync up. The engineers hated it and refused to use them creating a massive backlog of jobs to be invoiced.

I suggested in an e-mail that the system was crap and was promptly given a verbal warning about misuse of e-mail (I did suggest that Terminal 5 used the system untill the found a much better one for the opening day!)

So, after all the hassle eventualy we worked with it to a limited fashion and we get told that the company that provided the system was getting taken over by a very large comms company. This happend quickly and we were then told that as our systme was unique to our company that it would no longer be supported and they had gotten rid of the old support team so basically "fuck off".

So, in light of the massive problem of having no system support, some bright spark decided to see about using a new company to design us a new system! Hooray we thought. Then we get told this new company consisted of all the previous people from the old company that had been disposed of in the takeover but with a new name. Alarm bells start ringing for me and my workmates.

So, new system ready to test and we get our first look at it and get asked what we think and come up with over 100 issues with it. "Oh, we can get them fixed before we go live next month" we are told.

So we launched this new system last week and its not doing as it is supposed to, the new PDAs dont work and the engineers hate them, the jobs are piling up, and to top it off we were shown how to use it by the same pony-tailed knob we met before except now he is the "CEO" of the new company.

So my company paid twice (a lot by all accounts) for the same basic system that does not work and they are still to tight to give us a pay rise this year.

But hey, as long as it can be used to generate those fantastic reports to make sure no engineer claims an extra half hour on his timesheet then its worth every penny. (They like a good witch hunt)

The moral of the story? Managers know fuck all about software and can be bamboozled into buying anything, no matter how shit, that can produce a graph.

Apologies for the length.
(Beaverman Opulence, I has it., Fri 11 Jun 2010, 18:53, Reply)

Working for a small computer store
we were invited to attend the ECTS trade show in London one year. We had all of our own passes created, and the management decided it would be best to pretend that they were the lackies and have us underlings as the management. It was initially a laugh, but it did kind of create some funny side-effects.

We received our personalised badges with different titles listed on the front. I kind of got away with it lightly with "Assistant Manager" being printed on it. Some of the thicker lackies had some much more amusing titles, ranging from "Retail Box Consultant" (meaning he cut the cardboard boxes up after a delivery) to the YTS boy having "Managing Chief Purchaser for the SW Regions" on his. That was comical as walking around a trade show he was pounced on by everyone with a product, and he had the intellect of a broken toaster. Somehow we managed to get another printed off with "Microsoft Managing Director" and give that to a guy on work experience. Even though he was about 15 years old people still approached him. Vultures the fucking lot of them.

Funnily enough the Managing Chief Purchaser is a manager in PC World, and I wouldn't trust him with a walnut let alone a £1000 PC.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 18:27, Reply)

I've mouthed off my ex-management in the past....
....now I get someone else to do it for me on time.

Now where's my fucking tea?
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 18:02, Reply)

far too many
Many moons ago I worked for a company that had some of the worst managers that ever lived, I worked there for three years and can honestly say dim witted fucktards were at every level, highlights include:

One department had twelve staff, nine of them had manager in their title.

The director of finance always getting the budget perfect, mainly because it was published in July and was achieved by doubling the figures for Jan to June.

A team leader who refused to talk to new starters or allow any other team members to talk to them, even going as far as loudly shushing people who tried to say hello, this would go on until they left or another team leader stepped in.

A manager who refused to do anything about a driver who was a chronic alcoholic, when someone else approached HR and informed them of the danger to the employee & public HR said it was nothing to do with them. So a total alco drove around in a company van for years, in the end the only person he killed was himself, liver failure in his late 30's.

The department manager who got a phone call during the Christmas party asking where he was, for three hours he had been in the wrong hotel talking to total strangers and failed to realise that he did not recognise anyone.

A fistfight between two mid level managers while in meeting with suppliers.

When a big international taking place early in the afternoon all staff were told to start work two hours early so they could leave in time to watch the match. The managers with keys turned up at the usual time to a carpark full of pissed off staff who had to then their usual hours and miss the footy.

A manager who misspelled her name differently on four consecutive letters to the same client.
(cname, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 17:48, Reply)

Pre-dotcom bubble
I worked at a small ISP, which had an even smaller hosting offering on the side.

The MD fancied himself as a massively technical guy, even going so far as to claim he'd hacked NASA or MCI or some such. Unfortunately, none of this was true. In any way. Whatsoever.

Nor were the claims he'd been an acclaimed consultant for various government and military organisations, or a security expert, or (insert fantasy-land role here).

He'd frequently throw an epi in the office for the smallest things, and took particular delight in relaying (read : smirking and gossiping) to the entire body of staff how someone he'd made redundant started crying.

Meetings were frequently started with the opener "I AM A GOD" as he described how he'd secured more work - invariably, a friend or relative who wanted a web page done.

In short, the man was a first-class cunt.

As luck / fate would have it, I also got made redundant and went on to better things (roughly 4 times better per month as it happened), his venture folded, but undeterred he went on to found another ill-researched money pit.

As I understand it, he's now remodelled himself as a management consultant.

File in : Fiction.

Cunt.
(mymilkshakebringsallthemongstotheyard poison hearts, poison minds - joining hate, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 17:06, 2 replies)

Backups....et al
I once had a manager who looked alarmingly like a 1930's German leader, and sadly, acted like it too.

In my early days as a programmer, I was asked to write a system to hold the names/addresses etc... of a certain firm's gas and electricity customers. This I did. I was then asked to "sort out some kind of backup for it".

I asked for a small amount of money to buy a tape drive so that I could back up the database to a tape every night and drop it off at another of the companies' buildings on the way home from work.

The request was refused.

I asked if I could at least copy it to my local machine. Refused on the grounds that it contained 'customer information'.

Short of sitting there zipping the bloody files across several hundred floppy discs every evening, I was flummoxed.

Deciding that this 'really' needed backing up, I wrote a little .bat file (this was back in my Windows 3.1 days) to copy the database to a network drive - a drive that I knew was backed up on to tape.

The Network Admin got wind of it, and stopped it from happening as "a live database like that should be backed up properly". I agree, but with the options I had 'properly' was seemingly out the window.

My colleage came in one morning, and royaly f***ed up the database by running a sql statement to update something-or-other and ended up changing everyone's telephone number to the same number (no 'where' clause I'm guessing).

I was asked to retrieve a copy from our backup. Groan.

EDIT: At least I wasn't asked to create more line breaks.
(dchurch bah, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 16:51, 3 replies)

Hedge Funds - no funnies, just weirdness
Ended up working for a hedge fund for a bit last year. The work was (initially) interesting, if morally dubious, but the perks were of the croissant-munching-on-a-balcony-type so I stayed much longer than I should have.

3 months in we ran out of work. I'd ask my boss but he had nothing to do either. No matter who we approached in the monolithic management structure there was nothing doing. At all. Nothing. Worse than that - nobody even seemed to care. It was clear our project was being axed, but nobody would confirm, nor deny. So we waited.

For 3 months we came in at 8am, had our free breakfast in the canteen, pissed about on the internet (the only bit of "work" I produced in that time was a proxy to bypass the restrictions on internet browsing), ate my free lunch in the canteen, went to the pub, went home. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This sounds idyllic but it was soul-destroying, so much so that we ended up taking it in turns to have days off. Not that anybody cared. I put on a stone, and would come into work stoned and reeking of booze from the day before.

Summer rolled by, my booze consumption was through the roof. We'd get indian takeouts delivered to the desk as an afternoon pick me up. I started coming in shorts rather than a suit. None of the faceless coke-snorting greased hair barrow boys in the massive open plan office seemed to even notice or care. Could it be that nobody even knew we existed?

6 months in we finally get an email. Apparently, our department has been marked as being "non-profitable". No shit sherlock. We're being made redundant.

I was relieved beyond words at this - I'd got myself into one of the weirdest ruts imaginable.

HR provided the parting gesture that embodied their management style: I wasn't entitled to any redundancy pay so I had two choices - leave now and lose the coming months pay, or "work" my notice for the next 4 weeks. I tried to reason "I have no work!" I implored, "you may as well let me go now and pay me".

Nothing doing.

I sat there on my own reading newspapers and ordering take away for the next 4 weeks.
( rofl harris, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 16:35, 3 replies)

Daily Dick
I used to work for a government organisation that rhymed with the Apartment of Meducation. I was in charge of the teleconferencing room, as I was the resident nerd. One day, I had to teleconference something to somewhere or somebody, and I walked in to find my manager sitting at the my server playing a game. Sir, I said, I’ve got to use this immediately.

One would assume that he would wind down his game, then slink away cloaked in the shame of being caught shirking. Alas, what he did instead was pull out his dick, wave it around a bit and shout, “Cunt, fucking suck on this and you can have your fucking server back." I actually think I managed to squeak out something politely lame like, “Hey, no thanks. I’ve had enough penis today. Sorry to bother you. Byeeeeee.”

After the initial shock of massively overstepped boundaries, I marched (is there any other method of walking that meters up with righteous indignation?) up to HR and immediately filed a complaint. There were waterworks. Yes, readers, I blubbed. I blubbed like the 19-year-old going-on-hamster that I was. Upon hearing the name of my manager, they put down their pen and proclaimed him an untouchable. He was the nephew of the governor, they said, so he could show as much soldier and submarines as he liked in the office.

Which he did. That cat was, so to speak, out of the bag. ‘Daily Dick’ does not create a happy working environment, we found.

Later, he decided to have a crafty fag in one of our server rooms. Seeing as he skipped out on fire training, the ensuing tornadic halon dump must have been quite the surprise. Imagine our displeasure when he escaped before the halon sucked all the oxygen out of his lungs. We stood by the door, eyes narrowed in concentration, breaking our brains to will at least a small amount of discomfort upon him.

I grew up in the two years that I worked there. I also doubled the number of penises I ever saw. Thanks, boss!
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 16:27, 2 replies)

il buono, il brutto, il cattivo
The Good

For a short time I worked for a company set up by some Aussies near reading. They had some half decent kit - GPS/GPRS units to fit to vehicles not only for tracking but for mobile internet too. The boss of marketing was called Colin and he was a top notch chap. He'd worked for the MD and money men before in Oz, and so was more than happy to sign p for a move halfway round the world - not least because it would leave him minted if it took off.

He already had some classical sales people (the "hit the phones", cold-caller types) and took me on from the dole because I was more your FMCG account manager type back then, and they'd paid six figures for some customer research that was going to give us solid gold leads.

The offices were in some converted farm buildings looking out over fiels - you could sit at your desk and watch deer, hares, and all kinds of wildlife, and the other people in the business were all diamonds.

The trouble was, they were late entrants to the market; a lot of the big logistics fleets already had similar (if lower-spec) kit installed, so we were very reliant on the research guy coming up with really good, hot leads that wouldn't need much hard selling before they signed up.

And after three or four weeks, it became very clear they'd managed to pick a fat ginger beardy twunt who'd basically charged six figures to re-type the Yellow Pages out. I'd forgotten more about research that this guy would ever know.

Colin kept me on for another couple of weeks to try the cold calling approach, but I hated it and wasn't very good at it, and it showed. We went to see one lead together, and afterwards we just sat down and - without a hint of bad feeling or recriminations - agreed to go our separate ways. I wasn't entitled to a pay-off, as I was still inside my probationary period, but he made sure I got an extra week's wages anyway. Alas, the company staggered on for another couple of months, then it all went tits up and I've no idea what became of Colin. I hope he's ok. (This is relevant because I think Colin's boss was the bad manager - he took a good idea but implemented it way too late when the market was already saturated.)

The Bad
Mark was a bright young thing brought in to head up a new style of product management team in the logistics business I worked for in Birmingham in the early 90s. He thought he had the gift of the gab, and it worked to the extent that he talked himself into this new and v high profile job (not just in our company, but the whole industry).

Our biggest customer at the time used to call their main monthly promotional vehicle their "Drive Brand". Mark had to give a presentation to their PLC board spent all his time on his creaky Compaq monochrome laptop (state of the art at the time) putting together something in Powerpoint. He wasn't a natural - I did most of the PC work, and another guy called Neil gave him most of the content. Critically, though, Mark kept the Drive Brand work to himself.

Two weeks later we all sat at a swanky boardroom, across from proper City directors (FTSE 500 at least) while Mark expounded on the best way to apply the "Dry Band". He didn't last long after that.

The Ugly

My current boss, Nick, is an engineer by training and mindset, and used redundancy money in the early 90s to set up business himself in his shed 15 years ago, and he has grown it to employ 25 people. Kudos for that.

But, in common with a lot of business founders, he's used to insisting on being involved in all the detail and taking all the decisions. He'll say stuff like "bring me solutions, not problems", but won't delegate any authority to exercise them without his say-so, and when you suggest the solution he wants all the details of the thought process used to arrive at it i.e. he wants to know the problems themselves.

He's fantastically inarticulate - meetings with him can take five hours to discuss the first agenda point, and anyone with something at or above GCSE English will end up frustrated and guessing what he means before he's finishes saying it, which in turn makes him angry and frustrated so he shouts and personalises his comments to make them, frankly, dangerously close to the type of bullying that'd have him strung up by the ankles at any industrial tribunal.

He flat out refuses to set any deadlines, which means it's impossible to use any kind of project management on any of the work we do; - customer deadlines are treated as mere aspirations at best and annoying constraints at worst. And, nobody in the business has had a development review for the past two years, putting him in breach of contract with every single staff member.

But over the past four years I've gone from finding him totally infuriating to seeing that, while it takes him forever to communicate something or even think it through, he does usually come up with a good answer/suggestion/solution. And he knows he's the main limiting factor on further business growth, he just can't quite steel himself to hire an Ops manager to run the detailed stuff for him. (He did try once but the guy he hired got so pissed off with having no authority he left after two weeks.) He's not an utterly bad boss, just terribly clumsy at dealing with people.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 16:08, 2 replies)

Banks
In June of last year I, along with 500 others in the bank (or should that be "Loan company owned by a bank" that we worked for, were told that 400 people were being laid off. My branch, based in North London, was one that was to be shut. We stopped seeing customers immediately, and within 3 days the branch was packed up and the contents were ready to be moved in their entirety to Head Office. As for the staff, we were all put on 3 months garden leave which, for those that aren't aware of the term, basically means that you are sent home and told that you're not required to attend work, but at the same time you couldn't start work at a new company.

Breaking this rule meant that the company would have grounds to dismiss you and you'd lose your redundancy entitlement, which was worth a few thousand to each person there.

So, the best part of 90 days doing nothing followed on full pay. I don't care what anyone says, the boredom that sometimes comes from doing nothing all do is outweighed by the fact that you are receiving your full salary for doing it.

I was in no rush to find a new job, preferring to wait for the right opportunity to come. I knew that after my 90 days had expired I had the best part of 3 or 4 months worth of salary being paid to me, which gave me time to look around.

On my 89th day of garden leave I received a phone call.

"SeasonTicketless," the call began, "this is the bank calling. We've got a vacancy in our East London / West Essex branch and wanted to know if you wanted it?"

It was closer to my home than my previous branch was, which appealed, but the downside, they revealed, was that it wasn't a managerial position as I had been in before. Instead it was a standard collections position, primarily field based, reporting to a manager who I happened to have worked with a couple of years previously, before we'd gotten promoted. Not only that, I would be covering Essex, which is where I live, rather than the ghettos of North London as I had done previously, with a caveat that I had to go to the East London branch every morning to collect a list of field calls that needed doing, and then go back every night to update the system.

"We would, of course, ringfence your existing salary and the likes."

In basic terms, I would be doing a far-less stressful job for the same money and benefits as before.

"Hmmm," I said, not believing my luck, but wanting to sound fairly apathetic about it all, "I suppose I could do, but in all honesty the area that you are asking me to cover is all around the area that I live, but that means driving 45 minutes out of my way to get back to the branch every day to update the systems so I don't really think it's worth me taking up your offer."

And I meant it. I wasn't overly fussed about going back, and was having interviews for other places, and was confident of getting a job.

A couple of hours later my soon-to-be ex-colleague called, the aforementioned manager of the East London branch.

To cut a long story short, she told me that she'd sort it so I could come in to the branch just once a week, and could self-manage myself.

Sorted. I started back in mid-September on exactly the same package as before having had 3 months off.

Two weeks into being back I got a call from HR.

"We can't find your old branch files. Have you taken any holiday this year?"

"I sent them files off to Head Office!" I exclaimed.

"Good, that's where they needed to go, but we have thousands of boxes here and can't find your holiday files. Have you got any leave left?"

"Yes," I lied, knowing full well I'd taken two or three weeks early in the year, "I had booked a couple of weeks away in the Summer but cancelled them when we were put on Garden leave as I couldn't afford it, so I still have all of my holiday entitlement left."

"That's not good." came the response.

Bugger, I'd been rumbled.

"Well," they continued, "that means you have to take 28 days of leave before the new year as you can't carry it forward."

I ended up working from mid September to mid November, and then having the rest of the year off, returning to the office in early January.

The day after going back in the New Year, we had heavy snow. Not bad enough to stop me from driving in it by any means, but once again HR were on the phone.

"Is it snowing there?"

"No," I told them, "it seems to have stopped, but there's snow that has settled everywhere."

"As we thought," they said, "for health and safety reasons you can't do any field calls until it clears as it's too dangerous. That also means you can't drive to the office."

Two weeks later, long after the snow had cleared, we were given the ok to go back to work.

I returned to the office on the first day back after the snow chaos, and within an hour of being there the manager held a team meeting.

"The company is laying off 80 of the 100 people that are left. As of now we're all on 90 days Garden Leave, full pay"

Eventually, in late April, I finally left the company with several thousand as a redundancy package, having worked apporximately four months in the past twelve, all at full pay.

And they wonder why banks get into so much trouble. Bad management that worked arm-in-arm with bad HR practice.
( SeasonTicketless is too often the statue, and rarely the pigeon., Fri 11 Jun 2010, 16:02, 3 replies)

My Dad's Story: Bad Management being defeated
My Dad's is a freelance graphic designer/director. Due to not quite having the right connections and having too much experience (people don't like hiring people who konw more than them and can do their job much better) he ended up working overseas, mainly turning design companies into good design companies.

He had one boss who loved details. Too much details. When giving presentations my Dads boss would insit on spending 30 mins to an hour just on design stratedgy's, then they would start showing the designs. My dad try to explain on mulitple occasions how this put off clients but his boss wouldn;t listen.

Then, one presentation, 10 minutes in of a 40 minute stratedgy explaination the "really arrogant fcuker" (my dads desciption) client stood up and said:

"blah blah blah, can we see the designs now?"

Dad's boss started going for shorter presentations after that.
( Crap Little Monkey Deathstar, so good they built it twice, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 15:53, 1 reply)

Managers...
My office manager threw up over my boyfriend after my job interview (as in, minutes after it had finished).

He was pissed as a fart.

Still working here after three years though, best job I've ever had. He was the one that introduced me to b3ta too.

HELLO BOSS, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!
(bomb, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 15:53, 1 reply)

At my interview my current boss quite rightly pointed out that I had quite a colourful work history
To which I rightly responded that yes I had - I had come out of university at the peak of the dot-com boom, and surfed on the very edge of it, as companies basically collapsed around me, causing me to move on about every six months for a couple of years.

It was a fun time - venture capitalists were throwing money at anything with a dot in the name, and things were getting really quite silly.

I think my favourite one was the company where each of the 70+ employees had their own personal desktop colour printer, and the senior management had a "all staff meeting" each month in the local pub, behind the bar of which was always enough to get us all absolutely bladdered.

Unsurprisingly, being one of the last in, I was one of the first to go, and it managed to limp on another three months without me before finally falling over and just lying there, waiting for the Great Administrator.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 15:32, 3 replies)

Bad management as a business practice
Until recently, I've been an employee (now self employed) in video games, as a programmer, at a handful of companies, over a decade or so.

And I hereby present a summary of a pretty standard project:

Pitching the project to a Publisher
Your boss asks you to write an exceptionally detailed design document for a system/task based solely on assumptions, because it is in fact for something mostly intangible. You give time estimates for the work, and add on ~20%, because your boss reduces the figure. This document is called a TDD.

Designing the project
Firstly the TDD is binned, well sort of, the publisher will use it to berate you over details, but you can't do the reverse, oh no. You write a proper design, while a "designer" does the same thing. The designers grip on the reality of what your target console can do, is tentative at best.

Making the project
After a month or so of working in good faith, the publisher will changes their minds massively. Requiring all designs to be redone.

Making the project (again)
Half way through the new project the publisher will acknowledge what you told them early on about features A, B & c not working together. Queue partial redesigns.

Making the project (yet again)
Just after half way through the project, the publisher begins testing the woefully incomplete, somewhat buggy game. Testers are given daily bug (something wrong) counts they need to meet, and so will submit the most pointless rubbish.

Nearing the project completion date
Owing to the lying schedule that your boss put forward, by this point the project is nowhere near complete. Your boss will now insist everyone works unpaid overtime to catch up.

Almost finished (after running late)
During a conference call, the publisher will ask for new features x, y and z. These features were never requested, designed or scheduled, will take extra time that you don't have and you are completely unable to say no. This requires even more unpaid overtime to achieve.

Almost finished (after running more late)
The game is feature complete, but still buggy. So the publisher begins cutting features to save time, features that people have spent lot's of time on, and they themselves have paid for. They also start looking at the bugs that are "not on the user path", i.e. are rare, and flag them as KS (known shippable).

Finished
In most cases you submit your game to whatever company you are aiming for (nintendo, sony, microsoft), so they can judge if everything is hunky dory and legal. At this point, they find n number of the KS'd bugs from earlier and as it would show their hardware in a bad light, reject the title.

Finished (again)
After fixing the problem areas, or more likely your publisher bribes/threatens the company they just flat out won't release on the platform if they won't be cut some slack (very, very common for a well known two letter publisher). So the title goes through, embarassing bugs and all.

The Comedown
Your game is released and goes on sale, and the first few reviews come trickling in. "It was in development for ages, and it still has bugs".

So next time you buy a game, and get angry at how bad it is and how filled with bugs it is. Remember how soul destroying it must be to have to spend your working day doing that stuff because you're told to.

The general public seem shocked when the EA spouses/Red Dead spouses stuff hit's the news, amazed at employee policies. The shocking thing is that it's like that most of the time, at virtually every company.
(ShiftyBastard won the World Cup on World Soccer Champs 2010!, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 15:32, 13 replies)

In my current role...
...(I say role as I don't actually get paid for it - it's really what I was born to do) I have a few people managing me.

They treat me like absolute shit - they perform surgery on me all the time, they poison me with noxious fumes, and they tear away at my skin like vicious vultures. Testing, they call it. What they don't realise is that if they would just give me time to heal before abusing me further, I wouldn't mind them using me the way they do - like I said, I was made to do this. It's in my nature. They don't understand that i'm eventually going to run out of stuff for them to fuck with. They'll fucking kill me with all this shit - then we'll all be in serious trouble.

I keep some animals as well, but they don't bother me at all - in fact, I hardly even notice them and they seem fairly happy...but these cunts that manage me just take and take and take without any thought as to my needs. I wish I could contact HR, but we are a small company and we don't have the resources to set up an HR department. I'm all alone in this shit, and no-one can help me except the people running things - and they don't give a fuck.

I've got lung cancer, i've constantly got a fever (and it's getting worse by the day), my hair is falling out, i've got hemolysis because they keep opening me up, and my immune system is shot to shit.

What they don't realise, is that without me, they won't have any premises - the lease is in my name. If they keep messing with me the way they do, i'll just shut down, go into a coma, and then they'll be out in the street with no hope for anything. By the time my body has fixed itself, they'll be dead and gone, and i'll be able to continue on as though nothing has happened with a clean bill of health.

But none of us wants that. That's no solution.

Someone help,

Regards,
Earth.
(god_is_a_ghoti Carpe Deum., Fri 11 Jun 2010, 15:15, 10 replies)

Biscuits
I'd been failing to get an academic job for a while, and was running out of money; I reached the point where I'd decided to consider another career-path.

A post was advertised with the local council. It paid well, and was so undemanding that, when I was offered it, my biggest stress of the day had to do with looking busy once the real work was over - that is, between mid-morning and 5pm. I would frequently go out to "visit sites" simply to give me something to do - my job had a vague project management aspect to it, and so my alibi was sort-of legit.

The council was divided into five or six big departments; the head of each department was answerable only to the Chief Executive. Hence the Heads of Department were really rather powerful. I got a call one day from the HoD of another department, asking me to come to his office. I was pretty sure I wasn't in for a bollocking - that would have been from my own HoD, surely? - so was curious to know what he wanted. Maybe he'd noticed my talents, and was going to offer me a promotion and a move into his (slightly more interesting) department.

Nope.

He'd discovered that I had a philosophy background. He was an autodidact - he'd left school at 15, and, since then, steadily collected degrees in his spare time. He'd just finished a PhD in philosophy. He, too, was massively under-employed.

And so, from that point on, we had used to meet for several hours a week simply to talk philosophy at the council's expense.

It would appear that senior management had a fairly generous biscuit budget, too.

Bad management? Naaaah. It was, from my point of view, ace.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 15:11, 2 replies)

I had one of those shouty managers once...
...you know - you're 10 minutes late, and she shouts at you in front of the whole open plan office.

I decided I wasn't actually that fussed about keeping the job, and started responding whenever it happened by shouting HER failings back.

Her: "YOU'RE 10 MINUTES LATE"
Me: "FAIR POINT. YOU'RE COMPLETELY INNUMERATE, SO I HAVE TO DO YOUR MANAGEMENT REPORTS FOR YOU"

Strangely, I wasn't fired, and we actually started to get on okay.
( prince-igor si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 15:09, 3 replies)

Chav beating boss...
When working as a mere grunt in a very large company, the team I was in at the time was given a shiny new boss. A real go getter, on his way up the corporate ladder, as fast as his little legs could carry him. He believed the best way to up get said ladder was to deliver staggering cost savings every year regardless of how he got them, and sadly he was perfectly correct.

Anyway, he spent a good year or so slowly destroying the morale of the team, by chipping away at staff levels, benefits, overtime, training, equipment, etc, all in the name of saving money.

Needless to say that by the time the next annual staff outing came about he was about as popular as a Nazis with syphilis. Which made it all the more satisfying when towards the end of the evening he ended up pissed off his face, in a fight with a local chav, whom he bested and celebrated by repeatedly punching the guy whilst he was on the ground shouting "Do you surrender?" over and over at the top of his lungs.

After dragging him off and checking the poor chav was more stunned than hurt, we lead him away and chucked him in a taxi. The next day was immense fun as he remembered what he'd done, and desperately tried to silence anyone that had been there. However we had him by the balls now and we squeezed as hard as we could.

He was transferred sideways rather than up about 6 months later, after we'd been getting things out of him in return for not mentioning the incident.
( repooc, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 14:34, 1 reply)

Only last month...
Our MD called everyone in to inform them that we hadn't paid any bills for around 6 months, including the landlord's.
"Don't worry though," he said "Head Office in the States have said that they've sorted it."
When the bailiffs turned up half an hour later and started taking our PCs away, we guessed that Head Office in the States may have told a fib.
I'm still looking for work btw, if anyone's got any going...
(Judgeysan Freakishly small hands, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 14:33, 2 replies)

Not me but my brother, the lucky bastard....
Big meeting of the big cheese. My brother - not in the meeting - goes to get a coffee. Out comes the biggest boss of them all, spots him and says:

"Three heads of department are currently fighting to get you on their team. Now would be a good time to ask for more money!"
( bierbelly, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 14:24, 1 reply)

I can't believe I forgot this one...
A new manager started in a manically busy cafe I used to work in. He called himself (and I swear this is no word of a lie) 'Benjamin Ethan Powers'. His real name, it turned out (after he was sacked for stealing the Princess Diana Memorial money to buy himself a camel-skin coat) was Ed Shrimpton. Prize prick. Anyway...

One day we were making drinks, trays and trays of orders stacking up, just the two of us to boil, froth, blend, slice and steam our way through the afternoon. Normally he'd stand and watch me, or click his fingers (yes really) to make me do something. Like the wet teen I was, I did as I was told until I begged him to help out rather than just standing and watching me spin plates. It was frantic, horrible stuff.

So he helped.

He got so confused, so stressed, and was so utterly clueless about what needed to be done, he had a fit and lay like a twitching plank on the floor, arms at his sides, feet pointed, foaming at the mouth.

I distinctly remember glancing down at him, glancing back at the mounting trays, once more back at him, then I stepped over him and carried on grating a flake onto a hot chocolate.

I still don't feel guilty.
(The Moop, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 14:24, Reply)

I'd love to answer this weeks QOTW...
... but the introduction of a new system that was supposed to cut our workload in half has managed to approx. quadruple it.

The only reason I have time to squeeze a few words in is because my computer is pdf-ing in the background which means I can't get on with my work anyway. It's been doing this for ten minutes now.

Click "I like this" if you want to hear the words I used most this week as well as a list of bodyparts I injured while venting my frustration.

Coming up to 15 minutes for a 15 page pdf, I might as well spell-check this post.
( bierbelly, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 14:20, 1 reply)

bad management with a positive outcome for me
first ever meeting with a local business who wanted a web site and email setup.

the meeting went well and at the end the guy asked me what my hourly rate was. I was stumped as normally i just set a fee for the job and dont hourly rate anything.

how about 125 quid an hour he said? I thought for a second pretending to mull it over and then casually agreed. The train journey home was celebrated with beer.

sadly they only lasted a few years before they went under, i cant believe their willingness to throw about money had anything to do with it.
(chiff_chiff, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 14:16, Reply)

Mike The Mincer
First Off, Am i allowed to use his real name and company? Fukitt.... he can sue me if he can fucking find me...

Mike, the new Customer Service Manager @ Sanctuary Housing Customer Service Centre ( about 5-6 yrs ago - maybe more, im old, i forget )in Hull....

Previous job - Interior Decorator ( How the fuck you got the Managers job i'll never know ) and it showed, turned up and ponced about like a fag on heat...listened to the female staff, accused all the males of having bad attitudes cos they wanted to know why things were being changed when they worked OK anyway... Couldnt work out why his daughter didnt bring any boyfriends home from college....rug muncher you twat!
This prick made my life hell for about 2 years before i finally trundled off to somewhere else .... but not before we were all gathered together one Monday morning before work by his second in command Sarah ( good god woman your fucking stunning ) Norton....only to be told he'd had a fucking heart attack whilst weeding the garden over the weekend ( much punching of the air and hushed "yesss...." from me being judged a naughty thing to do by all present...) but he was OK and would be off for a few months...

If i'd have had the money, he'd be at the bottom of the North Sea with conctrete wellies right now....
(phils1969, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 14:14, 14 replies)

I always fancied myself as a manager..
I used to work in an internet cafe, it was an easy day job, which filled in a gap until the weekend arrived, so I could return to my regular job as a DJ in the many nightclubs in my hometown of Halifax.

As it happens, my gaffer ran into a few financial problems and needed to sell the business. I came up with some cash, courtesy of a really good friend, so I bought the company, and although costing a small fortune, aquired a business, and in the process, kind of saved myself from losing my job.

Everything went great, I made a decent amount of money, and became quite a reputable businessman in the process. Unfortunately, I let it get to my head, started to grow an ego, binned staff that I should have kept, took on too many projects, and became too lazy - relying too much on my so-called mates to run the place while I was away (which was quite a lot..)

They stole from me, became lazy, and just generally took the piss and as a result the place fell apart. I lost my regulars, and eventually the business fell into debt, I had to close before I became so crippled with debt it would effect my financial future forever..

I'm sat at home now, wishing I had'nt fucked it all up and I can't even walk down the street where my shop used to be, as I am so ashamed of my downfall, I had the busiest internet cafe in town, some great customers and a very successful little business, and I fucked it all up. Not only is it my own fault, but I'm also responsible for the loss of 3 jobs, and it kills me every time someone comes into a club where I'm working and they ask me about my cafe.

That said though, I learned a lot about myself, about money, and who my real friends are.

However, if I ever had the chance, I'd do it all again tomorrow - and those jobs would be offered to the guys I got rid of in the beginning, accompanied by a grovelling apology for being a complete arse.

And as for my mate who gave me the money in the first place to set it all up - he'd be the first person I'd call, when I'd make the money back.

In general, I became a complete fucking idiot, I let my ego get the better of me, and not only did I let myself down, I became a complete and utter cunt, and I lost some of my real friends in the process.

I learned from the experience though, I'm a better person now, more realistic, and I select my friends more carefully, and value my new friends with an open mind and treat them with an equal amount of respect.

I'm also a lot more careful with my money, and I appreciate what people do for me a lot more.

Business Management - an experience I'll never forget, nightmares I'd hate to re-live, but given the chance, I'd still do it all again tomorrow...

Length: About 4 years of madness, late nights, and lots of stress, Sorry for the lack of funnehs, but it's something that's been bothering me for years.
(danniekavanagh did nothing constructive on, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 13:38, 7 replies)

Human Resources + research = failure
We just got an email round at work telling us that HR had done some research and found that of the 32 nations in the World Cup, 20 are represented by staff on site. The email thanked HR for their tremendous effort and sterling work.

It was immediately followed by several further emails from members of staff who are from the other 12 countries in the World Cup.
( ascorbate, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 13:05, 1 reply)

A group of six to seven year olds
have football training in the local park every Saturday morning. I was walking the dog through said park and saw that their manager had them all lined up, facing the goal.'Oh, shooting practice' thought I.

"Just hit the ball hard and low. Aim for the corners", I heard him say.

This led to 20-odd balls flying towards the corner flags. Maybe he should have been more specific, coaching kids of that age?
(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 12:50, 3 replies)

far too much time on my hands...
while i have had more than my fair share of arsehole bosses in my time, and the less said about the Dubai debacle the better, but on this occasion i have to put my hand up that i was in fact one of the senior staff at the time so therefore technically part of the so called management team...

Improvised flamethrower (PR)
I’m quite sure any rational bloke would insist when it comes to desirable gadgets an improvised flamethrower is right up there with a Jessica Alba Android and TeleportationTrousers, therefore not technically a pointless experiment. However, whilst pyrotechnical experimentation should always be nurtured in the young and reckless, the choice of firing range in this instance may be at best filed as ill advised.

Many moons ago I worked for a fairly rubbish ‘New Media’ company with a lot of bored, disillusioned staff. Jinks were always high. We had a set of steak knives in the kitchen, not sure why but they were perfectly balanced for my burgeoning knife-throwing act – until that is the semi-psychotic boss (same bloated buffoon as in my ‘Only 14 Hours to Bristol’ post) raged into the studio during an all staff meeting demanding to know who had been using his office door for 'bloody knife throwing practice'. Cue blank looks all round. I did find it indicative of our work ethic that he immediately (and rightly) assumed knife throwing had occurred. Other experiments included creeping up behind people on the phone and liberally wrapping parcel tape round their head – securing the phone to their noggin (this works best when they are also resting their chin on their free hand so you can cocoon that too) thus ensuring they must continue an (albeit muffled) conversation with Mr Self Important Client Tosser. Other japes involved cutting the corners off large boxes then arranging the boxes as crumple zones for stunt man ‘death’ leaps from filing cabinets. Using the wet & dry vac to hoover up peoples coffee from their mugs in one greedy slurrrrp always got a response too - usually ‘for fucks sake Spimf, fuck off will you, you fucking idiot’. Shooting out the bulbs on the desk lamps across the room with an air pistol tended to unsettle/enrage the occupant of the workstation a fair bit as well. So you get the picture – a committed and focused bunch of highly trained imbeciles.

One particularly slow day I spotted some large heavy-duty cardboard tubes lying there temptingly in a quiet corner. Like any right minded person my immediate thought was: Hmmm… Big Arnie-style RPG launcher i think! So I chose a fine sturdy tube about 4 foot long with a plastic end cap, then selected a slightly thinner tube that would fit nicely inside. A great big wodge of bog roll was taped around one end to make a snug and effective plunger for my makeshift munitions. Initially, this was simply ‘plunged’ to make the plastic end cap fly off with a satisfyingly low frequency ‘THHHONK’. Put simply i had fashioned the worlds biggest pop gun.

Soon my bodged bazooka sprouted a shoulder strap, side handle, plunger grip and nicely weighted cardboard ‘RPG’. Menacingly, I strutted around the studio attempting to shoot large things off high shelves and generally breaking stuff. With it's Kappa board fins and conical nose my ‘RPG’ flew surprisingly well. Boredom however, is a relentless staggering zombie that never lags far behind dear Spimfy. It was then I spotted the lighter fluid we used to clean Spraymount off stuff. I think I may have heard a small internal ‘ping’ as a little light bulb fluoresced in my head. A fist sized ball of bog roll was given a liberal soaking, lit to a near invisible Sambuca style blue flame by a willing assistant then rammed down the barrel with a broom handle, the plastic end cap was then popped on to provide a bit of back pressure. Clearly the restricted amount of air inside would only last so long, so launch had to be hasty. This however meant aim was a secondary consideration. I plunged the fucker with aplomb.

Fuck. Me.

It would be no exaggeration to say ‘a fucking great big fireball’ streaked from the end of my cardboard contraption with quite spectacular results. The pressure combined with a sudden rush of nice oxygen rich air produced angry red and yellow flames. It made a fantastic roaring noise as it soared across the studio trailing acrid black smoke and a deep thud as it slammed into the window recess resulting in an even bigger ball of flames. HOORAY! Everyone whooped and cheered - the few sensible ones (developers mainly) standing well back, shaking their heads and muttering about inadequate fire exits. The flames rapidly subsided to a little smouldering clump of blackened bog roll - the hilarity waned in harmony. Then, quite unexpectedly... Whoosh! The fabric window blinds went up in flames – big style, eagerly assisted by the dust and cobwebs around the ancient window frame (did I mention our office was a converted mill in a World Heritage site? Probably best not to). Dust and cobwebs and dead spiders burn like a motherfucker by the way, which I discovered while trying to ‘clean’ my garage with a blowtorch once.

In a blind panic I belted across the room and (with some difficulty) yanked the burning blinds down and proceeded to stamp on them with some considerable urgency. This had an immediate effect; being that it set fire to my shoes. I can honestly say the spectacle of me rain dancing with flaming feet did seem to lift the mood for a while.

A couple of days later the (increasingly psychotic) boss was eyeing the scorched, melted patch of fuzzy office flooring and looking for answers. Blank faces again. Good job he didn’t turn round to see the hastily installed non-matching window blinds stolen from another department.

length? fully extended about 5 foot mate.
( spimf ™ is whoever you want him to be, Fri 11 Jun 2010, 11:57, 10 replies)