dystop

[REPOST] Years ago, I was the CTO of a software company that was perhaps the worst run company I've ever seen. It was run by a "chairman" who used to be a flight engineer, and who had no experience at all in the software industry. One day, in his expansive wisdom, Mr. Chairman decided that we were going to give his friend (a local pastor) an office. I was ordered by Mr. Chairman to make it impossible for anybody ("Even you!!!") to access any of Mr. Pastor's files (because, y'know, privacy and stuff). I attempted to point out a couple of problems with that scenario, but was immediately shut down and ordered to do what I was told.

Now, this particular person had... well, let's call it a quirk. When anything went wrong with his computer, his solution was to format his C: drive. (Yeah, I know...) The inevitable happened, and Mr. Chairman ordered me to restore all of Mr. Pastor's files from the backup (which we normally did... ahem... religiously). I looked at him innocently and said "What backup?" It took possibly five seconds for steam to begin pouring from his ears, and for him to start screaming, "YOU MEAN YOU DIDN'T DO A BACKUP??? WHY YOU....!!!!" and so on. I waited for him to finish, and then asked him politely how he proposed that I do a backup of files that I'm not allowed to have any access to? The silence that followed was glorious.

[REPOST]

The car accident was of the side impact variety and it was brutal. This was in the days before airbags and seatbelt laws. One second I'm driving and the next I'm halfway out the passenger window watching blood run off my head to pool in the glass of a previously closed window. Another second ticks by and I'm in the ER receiving thirteen crude stitches for eleven inches of wide open scalp. I lost more than two pints of blood and a large patch of hair. I also lost my favorite white fishnet t-shirt, but that's a separate tragedy.

That Friday of a Labor Day weekend was how my name shows up in the newspaper list of "Labor Day Weekend Accidents." Tuesday comes and I go to class at the local college. Being a teenager gave me the gift of immortality. There I was, fully ambulatory, just four days after a serious car accident. For the sake of propriety, I'm wearing a hat to cover the fresh injury. It was a whitePanama hat with a bright 80s style hatband. As this was 1983, everything was 80s style, but that's a separate tragedy.

Hobbling along, I make it to Sociology just as class was beginning. I take a seat at the back of class and settle in.

The conversation went something like this:

"Excuse me? Could you remove your hat please?" The teacher had her own sense of propriety. My hat didn't fit with proper classroom attire.

"I was in a car accident," I replied.

Did she hear my words or was one of her rude students muttering another in a career-long list of excuses? Likely the latter was the case.

"Take the hat off. You cannot wear that in my class," indicated she was not happy with my hat. Not at all.

Well, okay then.

Off comes my hat. Roughly a third of my hair had been shaved off. The wound was pink and puckered. The seam had a line of dried blood in it. The wound began an inch beyond my missing hairline and continued back, branching into a 'Y' shape. The surgeon's instructions were to keep the wound clean, dry, and unbandaged. Lucky for all in attendance, my mother had washed my scalp the previous day. She used the word "gore" at some point to describe what was washing off.

Imagine you're one of my classmates. Whatever you would say at that point would be something I heard from my classmates and friends.

"Ahhh, you can put your hat back on," said the teacher.

Not before a little malicious compliance, I won't.

"But I can't wear hats in class," I replied. "I mean, I can do it, but not if I'm breaking the rules."

"Please put your hat on."

"Okay. If you insist," and the hat went back on my head.

My advice is not to engage in malicious compliance on the first day of class. Not in a course where the teacher gives essay questions. That was the only 'C' I received that semester, but that's a separate tragedy.

[REPOST]

This is a little long. Sorry.

When I was in college, I worked for a mobile carrier in a mall. For a young person, it was great money. I was the assistant manager, which was a fancy way of saying I was in charge of most of the store paperwork.

[A few months before]

One morning, I opened by myself and a guy approached me asking for a specific phone and kept balking at the price, asking if I could "cut him a deal though". I was confident we were BY FAR the cheapest in the area, so I told him "If you bring me a better deal, I'll be it!". The guy does another lap, talks to other stores, and comes back. "Come on, there is nothing you can do? Can I just get a case?". I smile and say, "Sorry that's the best I can do today, but can I get your number in case we get a sale that brings the price down? (This sometimes actually did work). His entire demeanor changed and he handed me paperwork out of his bag and showed me his Id. He was from corporate LP (loss preventions). Apparently my store ranked top in the state for "excessive discounts" and "excessive waste". He then hands me a document showing all of my "friends and family" discounts. So I flip open my phone (YES IT STILL FLIPPED) and showed him all the names on the list are in my phone, thus ARE friends and family. He thanks me and says he'll stick around to talk to my boss and one other team member.

Since smartphones aren't really a big thing at the time, the LP guy starts talking to me about my job, and I ask him a little more about what exactly flagged our store. Turns out the other two people he wanted to talk to had more than 30% of their transactions marked with that discount code and our store seemed to "lose" lots of inventory. Store practice was that if you open an accessory and it was damaged in shipping, you just throw it away and grab another one. Turns out there is a process you need to follow. He showed me the form and said "you really should be between x and x a month to be considered average.

He then interviews my boss and co-worker who couldn't prove that their discounts were accurate and they were let off with a stern warning. From then on, I took on the responsibility of tracking inventory and warning the team when we were getting close to the monthly limit. Like a miracle, cases stopped breaking for the rest of the month with these announcements.

[Fast forward]

I open by myself again one morning. I older gentleman approaches me and starts screaming at me about being a "heartless bastard" and asking "how the hell can you do this to people?!". I look at him puzzled. "Sir, I have no idea who you are, so you can't possibly be mad at me specifically. Lets go sit over there and have a quick chat". As soon as we sit down I look at him and he starts crying and shaking. "I don't know what to do. I'm gonna lose my house". He goes on to tell me his son had gotten 10 "free" phones from my store and the monthly bill was roughly $800 plus tax. "sir, if your son started an account with us, there is nothing I can do without him coming to the store." The dad shows me a photo in his wallet and explains that his son lives in a home because he's too old to take care of him. He's visibly disabled. He was already barely getting by paying for his house plus his son to be taken care of. My heart dropped as I figured out what had happened. My co-worker had sold the phones to his son while they were on a "mall outing" with his group home.

Furious, I go back to the store and void the entire order. I instruct the dad to bring me every phone he can find. Anything not in the store that day would be marked as stolen. I write up the inventory report and mark all of those phones stolen for the time being.

Co-worker comes in and I say, "don't bother clocking in. I saw your order from last night. Just know that it's voided. If you pull ANYTHING like that again i'll make sure you're fired. Take the rest of the weekend off". He argues for a moment, but leaves.

25 minutes later (and early for his shift) my boss shows up saying he heard what happened. I show him all of the paperwork and explain what I did to solve it. Irritated, he looks at me and says something like "you know you can't do that right?". He then argues with me that I had no right to void the order and "the contract was the contract". Confused and angry, I say "look, I will not sit by and allow people to be taken advantage of like that". To which he replies, "If you don't like the way we do things here, you can leave." Shocked, I walk back into the store where he tells me HE is taking care of all of the paperwork to "fix" my mess. Quietly I rip up my inventory report with a smile and tell him i'm leaving for the day.

I call a friend who said, "why don't you just get an IT job (what I was going to school for). He then calls a recruiter and sets up an interview for the next morning. Boss's little push gave me the drive to just go for it. I nailed the interview and get the job. My now ex-boss texted me shortly after and said "Hey OP, you're late." to which I replied, "no, I don't like the way you do things there". Silence.

[Fast forward a few months]

Both the boss and the co-worker were fired for theft. You see, with the unexplained "missing" phones and with no one watching inventory, LP quickly took interest in the store again. Turns out the "broken" cases were actually team members GIVING AWAY inventory to close sales. So when I was there "balancing" inventory and giving warnings, it was letting them know just how much they could steal and get away with it. Without me there they just did whatever the heck they wanted. From what I hear, they were escorted out by security and all.

So in the end, I was pushed to start the career of my dreams. They have a record.

Thanks for sticking with me, sorry it was so long.

[REPOST] I used to be an assistant golf course superintendent. One day my boss had me spraying chemicals on the fairways.

As I was spraying, some of our employees were having an issue with their machine. I stopped to help them and my boss pulls up and starts flipping out on me saying if I'm spraying fairways, that's all I need to be doing is spraying fairways. Not anything else. Okay, no problem.

A couple weeks later, the exact same scenario happened. I was spraying and some employees needed help. I ignored them and just kept on spraying. Their machine was broken down for nearly half an hour in the middle of the fairway during play before my boss rode around again and saw.

He came up to me livid and was saying that if I'm spraying fairways and I see someone needs help, I need to be able to break off and help them, that's part of being a manger.

I told him I didn't understand, because two weeks ago he explicitly told me to ONLY spray and reminded him of how he got mad when I did exactly that. He just stared at me for a second and then drove away in his golf cart. He came back a few holes later to apologize and says he did remember telling me that, and from now on I should just use my best judgement. uh-duh!!!

[REPOST]

Back in the 1980's I worked for a sporting goods company as a catalog designer. Small company, privately owned. I was the entire advertising department. I created four catalogs a year - these were responsible for most of our mail-order sales (pre-internet) to the tune of around $700K a year.

We sent the catalogs via bulk mail using a mailing service - this let us send them for a much discounted rate. To do this required the use of a bulk mail permit, and placing the permit info on the mailing area of the catalog. Technically it's called a "fiche."

Enter a new boss, call him Ron. I was #1 - the only one - in my department. For some reason the company owner hired Ron as a favor to a friend. From day one he was micromanaging, questioning everything, and screwing up my very tight schedule. This was BEFORE computers were common. EVERYTHING was by hand. Literally typing out copy and reducing it on a photocopier to fit. Developing the photo film myself, making prints, etc. The actual printer had to add screens to the photos so they'd print, burn metal plates, and so on. All time consuming and expensive. Deadlines could not be missed. So I was stuck with several 16 hour days come crunch-time.

I was complaining to the owner, but he really couldn't care less. I really wanted to stick it to Ron and the opportunity presented itself. Constant threats of "my way or you're fired" were getting to me. The latest pre-summer catalog was done (summer was our BIG season.) I had to give him my mock-up (photocopied sheets stapled together) of the final catalog for his approval - a new step added after he demanded it. He looked at it and sent it back with several pointless revisions. And a note to remove that "ugly permit box" because it was not needed. Where he worked previously stuffed their mailers in envelopes - the envelopes had the fiche, but their mailer did this last step. I simply asked him to initial the changes as this was the final approved version and was going to the printer the next day. There was no time to check it again. So he did. I knew it would be a total mess and it's something I would NEVER would have done in the past.

50,000 catalogs printed and shipped directly to the mailer. The day they arrive at the mailer the boss gets a call from the sales rep. "We can't mail your catalogs." Boss storms into my area of the building and is literally screaming. Ron is now pissed and yelling at me, joined by the boss. I swear - spittle and froth, vein bulging screaming. Minimum two week delay, wasted money, lost sales. I explain what happened, the threat to fire me, and showed the owner the changes to the final copy. Initialed by Ron. He was going to give Ron a 2nd chance until the bill came in from the printer. They had to stamp 50,000 catalogs by hand. We had to rent their permit, since that's what was on their stamp. Rental and labor was almost $8,000. Adjusted for inflation that's $20,000. Plus our early summer sales boost was off by almost $50K from previous years. Or $200K adjusted for inflation.

Ron WAS fired. I was left alone after that.

lai lai see which electoral district you've teleported to

[REPOST]

Way back in the early 2000's I found myself working freelance as a result of the dot com implosion.

I found a gig sub-contracting for a contract a large company in San Diego had acquired from another company. They wanted to build a reliable delivery platform for the cell network. In those days cell data was 2G & 2.5G at best, so this wasn't as easy as you might think.

The division of the large company ran a satellite message platform, and the CTO of that division had no interest in this project, which is how I ended up with it.

Interestingly enough in the dot com implosion I had been let go by a company building a VAN overlay on the internet, a very similar problem. Since the second version of a product is always better I just took the lessons I learned and applied them to this project.

That included heavily relying on this "new thing" called open source software. It took my small team about six months to build and deliver the platform and both the customer and the sales people were very happy with the result. But the CTO of this division was not.

He had turned down the project based on his assumption that it would be a long and arduous task. So he demanded a code review with me and my team. He was very explicit, he wanted to see every line of code in this project, and we were not to leave anything out. He was sure we were somehow faking our results and was going to "get to the bottom" of this, as there was no way we could have delivered in six months.

So we assembled our source into a zip for him. First the code we wrote. Then all the source for the open source libraries we used. Then the source for the libraries those libraries used, an so on recursively until we everything. We ran all that through a formatter (to make it easier to read) and ended up with about 800MB of source files. Which we sent off to the CTO.

The initial code review date got moved back, and rescheduled for a month later. We sat in the meeting waiting for him, and he arrived about 15 minutes late. He stood in the doorway and looked at us and finally asked his only question - what did we use to pretty print the source.

I started to say we used a script we wrote but he cut me off, said fine and left the room. We ended up doing work for that large company for 10 years and never again were we asked to a code review.

[REPOST]

This happened a little while ago, but I still think about it sometimes.

I was a supervisor of a small team (who were great at what they did) and one payday had three worried staff members thinking payroll had cocked up and given them too much money - they hadn’t.

One of my guys came in 5 minutes late and got “caught” by one of the other managers. Who told my boss and it got round to me.

“I want you to check their clock ins and clock outs and let me know so we can dock them any time they weren’t in on time”

Now - I don’t care, they were a great employee, got a tonne of work done and always stayed late if they needed to finish things off. Also - I don’t want to even think about if that was legal or not.

It didn’t sit right with me.

Two things weren’t in his favour right now - one - he was being a tool and two - I’d already got another job lined up which he didn’t know about. So I didn’t care.

What next? I did as I was told and I checked. Couple of minutes here or there, nothing major. I then checked all of the extra time they worked since they’d started and added it all up. Made sure to take out anything they’d already claimed as overtime. Logged it in the system and approved and sent it over to finance myself.

Then I checked my other guys times as well and did the same thing.

Turns out - my guys were damn helpful, and helped out other areas when they could. The Overtime went over certain time limits and tipped over from 1.5 times pay to 2 times pay.

It added up to a lot.

I delayed it a couple of days to make sure it all went through and double checked with finance to make sure all was good. Then I called a meeting with my boss to let him know everything and hand him a letter.

He was not pleased.

Worth it.

[REPOST]

This one is from decades ago, otherwise it would get me in deep doo-doo.

I worked as a truck driver in the mid-90s. The company I worked for (can't name them here, but their favorite color is orange), decided to try out a new pay package. The details were complex, but it basically replaced the standard pay-per-mile with a set weekly salary, and not a good one. The new package was instituted on a small scale trial. The company quickly realized that they could make a lot of money if they didn't have to pay their drivers, and the package became the company standard.

Because of the complexity of the package (please don't ask), it took the drivers a few weeks to figure out we were getting screwed. Then we started fighting back.

A couple of things you need to understand about a truck driver's work week. There are 4 lines on a DOT (Dept of Transportation) logbook. Lines 3 and 4 constitute the hours we can work daily, and weekly. 10 hours (Now 11) driving/day, 70 hours driving and other duties (line 4) / seven day week. In order to maximize our income, we put as little time as possible on line 4 (for which we normally did not get paid), and logged the maximum legal speed on line 3 (driving), even if we couldn't actually drive that speed (due to weather, traffic, terrain, etc). While this was of course, illegal (and impossible with current electronic logs), It wasn't a secret. As long as your logbook was neat, and showed you driving at or under the speed limit, the DOT inspectors wouldn't give you a hard time about it. They had more than enough work with the drivers who were wildly abusing the rules.

Once we were put on salary (weekly earnings drop of about 33%), We had no incentive to "cheat".

Examples: A run from Portland OR to San Francisco CA is 635 miles. You could log this as one day at 550 miles (55mph x 10 hours), leaving you 85 miles (85/55= 1.75 hours logged) the next day. That would leave you 8.25 hour to drive on day two, after your delivery. Of course the reality was quite different. There are some 300 miles of mountains along the route. With 45,000 pound load, you only averaged about 35 mph through them. And anyone who has lived in the San Francisco bay area can tell you how likely you are to be able to drive 55mph at 8 AM. Under the new pay package, we logged it as it actually happened. The result being that I would arrive in San Francisco in time to make my morning delivery, and be out of hours to run for the rest of the day, for which I had to be paid. Not only did the company have to pay me to sit for the day, They had usually booked a load for me for that day (it took awhile for the load planners to catch on) that either had to be covered by another driver, or lost entirely.

Now all those things we had glossed over in order to keep moving got tossed into the company gears. You lost three hours throwing chains and driving across mountain pass at 25MPH, and now you can't make a Friday delivery (so sorry, no more hours to drive) and the receiver isn't open on weekends? Not my problem.

Cargo receivers didn't care much for it either. A lot of them would use the threat of not being unloaded in a timely manner to force drivers into abusive situations. I can remember with great fondness, telling a number of them I didn't care if they EVER unloaded me. I got paid the same either way. THAT got back to the company, but as long as I was complying with DOT rules, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Also removed one of the big hammers the company would use to threaten the drivers, that is a reduction in miles dispatched. Fleet managers sure didn't like that aspect of the pay package.

All this occurred six months before my three year anniversary with the company. At the three year point my 401K vested, and I got my last two weeks of vacation pay. I figure during that six months I just about broke even on what I lost in wages. The salary pay package lasted about a year, before all the problems it caused forced the company to return to pay-per-mile. Writing this story out has reminded me of all the other things this company did while I worked there. I will save those for future posts.

Got lead certified recently, but I pretty much drop a grade when climbing lead - I'm not as confident and I overgrip.

I've done lead falls, I know how to do 'em well, and yet... as someone who's done top rope for many years, it's scary not feeling the tension (however small) of a rope pulling your harness up.

[REPOST]

About 5 years ago, I found myself as a 2nd shift supervisor at a small manufacturing plant. We had a line of 8 machines with 4 others that could be added to the end of the line with a series of pipes and blowers.

It all started when my boss (Plant Manager) said "I don't really read the report that you send to me at the end of the day." He was trying to get a 2nd, much larger, plant running to make our small plant redundant and increase our capacity by around 8 fold so he decided not to even be involved with the small plant. Okay cool!

Well, the company wasn't doing too hot. We had a ton of demand, but the orders were so large that we just didn't have to capacity to fill them. I, along with about 5 other people worked 8 weeks straight from the beginning of July to the end of August with only 2 days off during that 8 weeks and as salaried employee at $30,000 a year and not eligible for OT. I was not a happy camper.

With the plant running around the clock, a lot of preventative maintenance was being neglected. I went to the Plant Manager and said "hey, if we don't shut down for a day or two and replace the bearings in the rollers in the 6th machine in the line, they are going to freeze up and the motor that turns those rollers is going to burn up."

He said "just fix it, but don't spend any money."

So at the end of the night, I put in my daily report that if the motor burned up, I would ask Maintenance to pull an identical motor from one of the machines that were not connected to the current line configuration, and that way we could finish this order and to please respond if he wanted to do something different and CC'd the head of maintenance on the email.

I never heard back from him so after about a week, the bearings froze up and the motor quit working.

I put my request in to Maintenance and they pulled the motor of the machine not being used and replaced it to finish a major order.

The day we were finishing the major order that we had been working on for months, the plant manager walks up to me and the head of maintenance and says "you all need to hook those 4 extra machines up and start on the next order as soon as we get this one out the door."

Maintenance head and I look at eachother, then back at him and I said "sorry, we can't do that. We don't have a motor to run the last machine. I sent you an email about it a few weeks ago and you never replied that you wanted to do something different. It is probably around $10,000 for another motor and we can hook it up tomorrow if you overnight it."

Well, Plant Manager blew a major gasket because we all knew the company was on its last legs.

4 days later, the CEO called a mandatory meeting at 4 o'clock on the last day of the pay period and let the entire staff go.

I got unemployment and took it easy for a few months before starting my MBA and getting into data analytics.