>>12911
Happens to most of us sadly. It's only natural since we spend so much of our time there.
Everyone has their own way of dealing with it though, I usually become aware and essentially mind bleach myself and switch to think about something completely opposite to work to stop the thought in it's track.
I also space out while listening to music in the dark a few times a week to rebuild myself after work's eroded parts of my mind.

>>12911
I remember causing a bit of a shitstorm when my workmates 'found out' I wasn't checking neither the e-mails nor the work-related IM chats on my time off. Yes, they were really astonished.

Later I corrupted about half of the department into doing it my way. They thanked me for it; apparently, it never dawned upon these poor young souls that a time off is a time off.

>>12915
Some industries do. I have a few acquaintances who do web programming. I take it that they might be exaggerating; still, having to waste your own time to keep up with whatever other trendy framework of the day seems awfully unappealing to me.

>>12916
There was a period in my life when on my days off I would do exactly the same thing I'd been doing at work, only more or less for myself.
I find it interesting and moderately odd that despite being almost the same kind of activity, these two 'threads' never shared an intersection in my mind.

Self-sage for rambling and adding nothing of value.

>>12917

>Some industries do. I have a few acquaintances who do web programming. I take it that they might be exaggerating; still, having to waste your own time to keep up with whatever other trendy framework of the day seems awfully unappealing to me.

Software development pays well, but there's a general expectation that you should be doing a substantial amount of learning and experimentation in your free time.

That expectation has created rampant ageism, because everyone assumes that guys in their forties have better things to do than learn whatever fad is the flavour of the month. Younger developers might not have the experience, but they'll work harder for less money and retrain themselves for nowt. It means that software developers have a weird career trajectory. You're at the peak of employability about 10 years after leaving university; at that point, you need to move into management or consultancy before you hit 40, or you risk getting stuck in a downward spiral.

I know loads of really competent developers who have become borderline unemployable in the industry because they fell off that treadmill. They don't have much new tech on their CV, so everyone assumes that they're past it, so they get stuck doing crap jobs in boring companies, so they don't get any new tech on their CV.

>>12918

That is not always true in my experience. I work for a very middling software company (that generally doesn't pay all that well), and we have such a difficult time hiring people that we can't expect people to have programming as a hobby. We just want people who can program and communicate decently.

>>12917
I'm a department head and my assistant is good bloke, but sometimes he's too fucking eager. The other day I got a phone call off him during the evening to talk to me about an email we received from a contractor. I told him to fuck off and we can talk about it in the morning.

Neither of us gets paid to work from home and as soon as I get home I silence WhatsApp and turn off email notifications on my work phone. I'll accept phone calls in case of an emergency, but they're really fucking rare.

>>12920

You can't blame him, he wants to be in your position one day. It's easy to take this "time off is time off" attitude when you're not desperate for the chance to take the next step up the ladder.

Of course, none of this has ever concerned me because I'm one of those under-acheivers with the kind of job I forget I even have as soon as I walk out of the door. If I got promoted from my current position, I would have to do at least two nights a week on call, and fuck that. Fuck that to death in the eye socket.

No amount of money makes up for the fact I'd never truly have enough time to myself to actually enjoy it.

>>12918
> everyone assumes that guys in their forties have better things to do than learn whatever fad is the flavour of the month.
I could say that in my twenties as well.
> because they fell off that treadmill.
Aye, that's wot my m8 told me about it. And to me, it's a special kind of hell on Earth.
More so when he told me he makes x amount of money per month but the company profits from his work at about 5x-7x per same time period. It's sort of expectable and yet not the kind of thing one could be excited about.

>>12918
>Software development pays well, but there's a general expectation that you should be doing a substantial amount of learning and experimentation in your free time.
Yeah, I've pushed back against this as far as I can. If you need me to learn something new for the job, then you need to give me time to do it on the job. It's not my responsibility to cover the cost of doing business.

>>12919
Maybe stop being so cheap and shitty and people will want to work for you. Someone I know has had to deliver this exact message to a company whose dev team has shrunk from double digits down to two, and rumour has it one of those is about to jump ship.

I've had to point out to a public sector body that the reason they're having such trouble achieving change is that their wages are such that they're only promoting from within, and those getting promoted are seeing it just getting paid closer to what they're supposed to be paid. They're doing things the way they always have because there's no new blood. I joined when I was a bit desperate, and packed it in after a year because of all the internal bullshit (collecting a 25% pay rise to a middling salary on the way out).

>>12923
>Yeah, I've pushed back against this as far as I can. If you need me to learn something new for the job, then you need to give me time to do it on the job. It's not my responsibility to cover the cost of doing business.

Oh boy.

And this is why you'll never be in my development team.

>>12924

It's also why your dev team are all miserable sadacts.

>>12924
And that's why nobody wants to work in your development team.

>>12923 >>12924 >>12925 >>12926

Yesterday someone sent a joke email around most of the office because someone left their computer unlocked.

The admin bints are still talking about it now, going on as if it was the funniest thing that's ever happened and repeatedly reading the message aloud to one another.

>>12924
Can I be on your dev team? I don't know what you are doing but I would really like to be able to afford a haircut.

Each day the sub-department I work at issues a pack of work orders to be done over the course of the day. There are three of us on the shift usually, with the all basic checks it takes about 10 to 25 minutes to finish it depending on how many orders there are.

Yesterday two my workmates came late. It was 09:20 no the clock, no orders had been issued. They turn their PCs on and immediately leave for coffee. 09:35, not a bloody sight of them. I started to hand the bloody orders away myself. Working alone, it took about 40-45 minutes. At 09:45 the two show up. Five minutes later or something I still handle the paper shite; passing a casual glance over the screen of my workmate I see him playing some browser-based online bollocks.

Later one of them utters something about 'coming to work earlier' because 'goddamn orders weren't issued fast enough'. Well fuck me, perhaps because the 2/3 of the workforce had been sitting on their arses doing bugger-all?

I remained silent; his statement was issued in rather passive-aggressive tone that wasn't exactly aimed at me besides the rather evident allusion. Didn't qualify a proper roasting. Thinking about it now, I'm less sure.

Next time - I'm pretty positive there's more to come - I shall do fuck-all myself too.

Two separate grumbles from today:-

• Four people sent emails out today begging for money to fundraise for hobbies/things they've always wanted to do in the name of charity. It's not even that large of an office.

"Please help me raise £300 so I can pay a charity to go on a skydiving event they've organised. It's for a good cause."

• In a meeting today someone actually threw their Audi car keys on the table in what I believe was an effort to inspire us to be successful. They've got the car on finance.

>>12931

>In a meeting today someone actually threw their Audi car keys on the table in what I believe was an effort to inspire us to be successful

I remember very fondly an area manager telling me that if I got stuck in and kept my head down, one day I could have a company car like his, a BMW 316 estate. I had a Porsche 911 at the time. The poor lad looked very upset, though it was his own fault for being an area manager that didn't seem to know how much his direct subordinates were being paid.

Mine was second hand, admittedly, but I did buy it outright. I let him assume it was brand new, obviously

>>12923
> Maybe stop being so cheap and shitty and people will want to work for you.

Of course, this is the dream. In reality though the management don't care about anything except keeping the client just happy enough to keep paying for bums on seats. It is a body-shop, not a product company.

I have done what I can, and I will keep doing so for now, because actually they pay _me_ probably slightly over market rate. I would either go mad or stop giving a shit if I stay for too long though, so I plan to leave this summer.

Someone at my work seriously and unironically wants us to do a tough mudder. It costs £38 to participate. Someone's put a poster up next to it for a night out in town the same weekend.

I got a good laugh out of that, at least.

>>12934
>In reality though the management don't care about anything except keeping the client just happy enough to keep paying for bums on seats.
Like I said, cheap and shitty. It's probably better for you to go sooner rather than later. Remember the company whose team was down to two? One has left, and rumour has it that the other has also handed in his notice. If you're going to need a reference in future, don't be the last one out of the door.

Anyone who feels the need to copy in a number of people, usually senior management and directors, on an email to an individual just for the sake of being a cunt.

>>12937
I'm often one of the senior management brought into email threads like that. Love a work email cuntoff.

>>12938
>>12937
I always thought the subtext of those was

"I am going to ask you to do something but I don't think you'll do it, so I'm going to copy the bossman in to make sure that you will do it."

>>12939
It is a way for those who are both stupid and weak indicate that they are so to anyone who is paying attention.

>>12938>>12939>>12940
On Friday someone at work decided to copy myself in, all of the senior management and the company directors into an email giving a trainee in my team an almighty bollocking because of something that another team hadn't done and he hadn't bothered checking up on once during the past month. We rang him up and gave him a major dressing down; the trainee has only been with us a couple of months so he was quite taken aback.

It's a massive cunt move.

>>12941
What astounds me is people like that ever think they will come off looking in any way good.

I'm filling in an online application form. I'm invited to use the details from my previous application so I don't have to fill out the boring stuff again. It managed to transfer the reference contact details and nothing else.

>>12957
What do you know? It gets better. If you need to add a reference you can do an address search instead of typing the whole thing in. Only you then have to type the whole thing in anyway because it doesn't copy it over to the four-line "enter the address here" part.

>>12957>>12962
My girlfriend's recently applied for a job at our local council. The online application form was far too convoluted for the level of the role she's applied for and their recruitment process is so archaic that they're going to write out to candidates they wish to interview within four weeks of the closing date.

>>12962

I like the ones where it asks you to upload your CV, then gives you a load of boxes to fill out that are exactly what's included in your CV.

It used to be really basic entry level jobs that made you do this, now everyone's at it. I can't even bring myself to do it, most of the time.

I started a new job where all my supervisors are significantly younger than me and it depresses me. They're all really nice and quite relaxed with the rules (employee handbook says no phones on shop floor, young supervisors encourage me to go on my phone to entertain myself in quiet periods; not meant to have break on short shifts but they give me 15 minutes paid break during short shifts), so I have no reason to complain, but I just feel like such a loser being lead by people younger than me.

There's this lazy fat woman at work who is always throwing sickies or doing fuck all when she actually is in work, which she usually does wrong, but management are shit-scared to do anything about it because her husband is a HR manager; every time she is off sick she emails her line manager and also copies him in. I get the impression she's hoping they will sack her for gross incompetence because she wants to try and sue for unfair dismissal.

>>12965
It's a really hard mentality to shake out of, but comparing yourself to other people is unhealthy. There will always be people more successful than you are.

Corporate away days. For fucks sake, why can't I just go to work?

>>12967

I hate this shit but it does unironically work and for some reason it makes you more likely to relate to your boss when you've boss been stuck half way up a tree waiting to go on the zipwire.

I remember one job, when I started coincided with the team away day, we just got loads of nice food away from the office in a rented building and played Cards Against Humanity. It was absolutely brilliant because it just removed all awkwardness and formalities almost instantly and we all had a laugh and felt more at ease.

I also like a free lunch and a day out of the office so maybe I'm biased.

>>12967
>>12968

The part I don't understand is what happened to just going for a good booze up with your colleagues? If you are all something approaching actual mates and you've watched the lads puke against a wall and seen the lasses fannys hanging out of Primark knickers there's no need for mountaineering or fucking orienteering or whatever.

>>12995

There's certainly a lot of bonding to be had on a staff pissup. Even the management being there can be a good thing, though I reckon if you're a manager you need to have about four drinks and fuck off at 11, really.

Early in my career our area manager came out with us for our Christmas pissup. He was a good bloke but ultimately ended up surrounded by people complaining about their site at 2am, I remember distinctly standing across from him and laughing at him as he looked at me for help. He ended up sleeping on the floor of a flat shared by like four of the students that worked with us part time.

I identified a problem with a clients EPOS months ago and they appeared to take it seriously but never actually did anything about it - I just got a panicked email about exactly that and they've worked out the thing I predicted would happen has absolutely been happening. Some people are beyond help aren't they?

Don't give a solid 40% of your staff the privileges to alter the prices of stuff in your till, that's all I can say.

anybody else here an eternal neet?

>>13048

I'm not, though my cousin is. I know this is probably a daft question but don't you get bored? Not so much with not working, but with not really having money to go do stuff.

>>13049

I have money to do stuff and I do stuff with clever budgeting

A recurring theme across every office I work in is no matter where I choose to sit somebody will then start trying to sit in that place.

I make a conscious effort in this hotdesk (where we hotdesk but everybody sits in the same place every day) world to pick the least desirable seat I can find, the one where nobody sits for weeks on end, facing no window, away from the aircon, you get the deal.

I guarantee after about two weeks of me sitting there somebody will move a monitor and say they have to have that seat despite being perfectly happy for however long they were before I came.

Why?

>>13051
Perhaps you work in an industry that often features absolute cunts?

>>13051
I don't understand why hotdesking is a thing.

>>13051
>>13053
It never works - for the last 10 years I have worked for companies that "hot desk" and without exception, everyone sits in the same place every day, for good reason. If it means I can slope off with my laptop and find a place to hide on a sofa and do some actual work, I'm all for it, but the rest of the time, I (and everyone else) sits in the same place.

It's often used as an excuse to have an office that's actually too small for the number of staff you have - and that's a cast iron reason to work at home more (which such companies most usually support), but nobody moves around the office and changes places, like you might think.

I'M GOING TO USE THE LAST OF THE WATER IN THE COOLER BUT I'M NOT GOING TO REPLACE THE EMPTY BOTTLE.

>>13054
At one place I worked, they set a target of 8 desks for every 10 people. The reasoning for this was that lots of people were part-time or away from their desks for extended periods. This works across the organisation, but someone thought it was a good idea to apply it to each team, regardless of the work they do. This meant that when our heavily desk-based mostly full-time division was moved into head office, they insisted we could only have 8 desks for every 10 people we had. This meant that our dedicated hot desk bank was filled every single day with the people we didn't have space to assign desks to, defeating the purpose of having a hot desk bank to begin with.

This is food service so a horrible nightmare of overwork is to be expected, but it still gets on my tits when I get handed all the pans from the front, 10 minutes before closing the shop, and someone deigns to visit the one-man kitchen 5 minutes later to figure out why I'm taking so long.

It's because it's not a five minute job pal that's why. Half the dishes are sticky and baked in. This is after I've had to filter both the fry vats and tidy the kitchen, after having had to prep all the veggies for the next day while keeping the fried food going for the front the whole day.

I know I should probably get out of the kitchen if I can't take the heat but I'm keeping at it anyway because, for some reason, they can't hold on to staff! And there's no way I'd be able to beat the cash I'm making. I'm one of two kitchen assistants at the moment, for two stores that are open 7 days a week for at least 9 hours. The third assistant quit this Monday when he realised he had no days off this week.

>>13057

>but it still gets on my tits when I get handed all the pans from the front, 10 minutes before closing the shop

This happens in more places than it should and it's fucking daft. It's usually possible to explain, slowly and carefully, that if they could just give you pans as and when they're done rather than leaving them in a big cunting pile you'd be done a lot sooner.

When I was in that position I'd just barge in with a big bus tray and grab whatever they weren't using quite frequently. Though it doesn't sound like you can do that or you probably would.

Also depending how new you are and how shit the place is, they might just be surprised by the fact that you're actually trying to clean something properly.

These days I often find I get hunger pangs in the morning sometime around 10 or 11. It probably wouldn't matter so much if I was doing an early shift but I don't have to be in until 10 and can't exactly go to lunch an hour after I get in.

So obviously I do the sensible thing and pay outrageous prices for cake when I go on break.

>>13060
Take in some form of snack? I generally have nuts, grapes or an apple mid-morning.