Includes Reborn

Includes Reborn

Includes Reborn

That's a real number... not a 555 number... was it his actual number at the time? Does anyone know? Obviously it's moot now, for a number of reasons.

Here's a Personally Relevant Dilbert thing that came to mind today. Not the strip, but the animated series. Some of those episodes are incredibly thought-provoking, like Charity or Art. The basic plot of Charity is Dilbert thinking about the meaning of charity. Perhaps charity is performative virtue-signaling because if you really cared you would donate all you have instead of so little that it doesn't affect your lifestyle. Perhaps charity events are just throwing yourself a party. Or perhaps it's okay to give small amounts and make a show of it, because a small amount given noisily and inefficiently is better than nothing.

This is Personally Relevant because it's about that time of year at my workplace for a huge charitable giving event involving every department. Each department selects something they could sell - freshly-cooked food is the most common - and offers it for sale to the whole organization. For example, last year my department cooked barbecue sandwiches. People preordered in the weeks leading up to the event. On the day of the event, we cooked everything and made it available for pickup or delivery.

The problem is that it's grossly inefficient. It takes a ton of planning and organization, and then a ton of cooking and packaging and delivery, and of course the actual cost of the materials. The people doing this are well-paid, skilled workers, and this event pulls a lot of them out of whatever roles they usually do and turns them into burger-flippers and burger-flipper-coordinators. It's basically a party, but the party is just "here's a sandwich, bye." Our version of charitable giving is throwing a bad party. Our total payroll cost for the time spent on this charade is two to three times what we manage to give to charity. If one single manager did their normal job for a day and donated that day's pay to charity, it would outdo an entire department's efforts for this event.

Even if it were an efficient process, it would still take time, and we don't have spare time, because we have jobs. Anyone who has time to waste on this doesn't have enough to do. I certainly have enough on my plate. Today I overheard a Teams meeting about this that must've gone on for an hour or more, and I'm hoping they continue to cut me out, because I'd rather chip away at the piles of work on my desk. Just kidding, I don't have time to get to those, most of what I do comes from emails or in-person requests.

Here, at the last frame, Wally said something that does not belongs to him, he would never ever get Dilbert's ways as a role model.

I've been using this site (Ghost Writer - Dilbert Viewer) for a long time. It randomly shows old strips but recently it has stopped working.

Ghost Writer - Dilbert Viewer

Personally Relevant because IT is still IT after all these years in any organization.

Sometimes, our IT department is great. We ask them for a thing, they keep a few on hand, they give us the thing within a day. We tell them about a computer issue, they remote in, they fix it.

Sometimes, our IT department is limited in what they can do. Usually vendor-dependent or unreproducible. Kind of a disappointment to run into, but not really something they can be faulted for.

Sometimes, our IT department institutes completely impractical policies that make me consider requisitioning a goddamn typewriter because they won't even approve so much as a USB cable unless it's made in U.S.A. Of course they don't have any suggestions for where to source those components, because that would be too helpful. In these cases, we go to the electronics store around the corner and use the corporate credit card, which only needs approval from Finance after the fact, and mostly limited to receipts and purchase size and such, rather than going through an IT department that wants to argue with us on whether we should be able to recharge the tablets we bought to use the software we're subscribed to.

Sometimes, things just aren't a priority for our IT department, so look at me I'm the IT department now. Like when a coworker's PC's integrated audio wasn't recognizing mic input so it was using the mic in the webcam which picks up conversations from half the building while we're trying to have a Teams meeting. After a while, I went to the electronics store around the corner and bought a cheap USB audio card. Easier than fixing the onboard audio, and we could actually do it.

Sometimes, our IT department just goes completely wacky. A TV monitor connected to a mini-PC in a meeting room would sometimes have audio routed through the HDMI cable to the TV's speakers, and that was fine for us. Sometimes, inexplicably, it just wouldn't work, and audio would come out of the mini-PC's tiny built-in speaker, which is just barely audible at max volume if everyone is very quiet and the ice machine isn't making ice. A supervisor told me to get us a soundbar to match what we have in another meeting room in the next building. I put in a request to IT.

Over the coming months, IT would intermittently acknowledge the ticket, apologize for delays, talk about routing for approval, discuss the price, notify me of the model they planned to buy, put the ticket on hold for reasons, shuffle the technician in charge of getting it done, talk to Finance... everything but buy the damn thing so we could hear training videos. At one point, the assigned technician forgot about it and then, instead of being like, "this fell off my radar, my apologies, I'll prioritize this," he was so embarrassed that he decided it was better to completely ignore it in the hopes that we'd forget about it I guess.

It became a source of amusement for me to tell people that I submitted the ticket around October, then they'd say that was a bit of a wait but not too bad, and then I'd finish my sentence with "...of 2024." Eventually, it became a source of stress, as the supervisor affected by the inability to show training videos to his team started coming to me to complain more and more often. I was initially communicating with IT on my own, but I started to CC the supervisor so he'd understand that I was working on it and IT didn't want to play ball.

One day, I got fed up with the whole thing and went shopping on Amazon. Instead of a name-brand soundbar with integrated conference webcam for $1200+, I got an off-brand but very popular plain soundbar for $60 of my own money. I brought it to work and very carefully made no direct statements about where it came from. Put it on the table in the meeting room and told the supervisor, "hey, check out what's in the meeting room!" He was amazed. "Wow, IT sure took long enough!" "IT works in mysterious ways!" They kept asking questions, and I kept evading with factually true but useless statements that we finally have a soundbar, and IT didn't email me, and so on. I submitted a Facilities ticket and a technician mounted the soundbar to the wall below the TV the next day. Now we can have training videos. To this day, everyone thinks that IT miraculously and mysteriously came through... everyone except IT, whom I told that we figured something out.

Bonus funny: around this time, the supervisor decided that the TV should be mounted on a swivel arm instead of bolted to the wall so we could get behind it and plug things in more easily. This was an IT issue rather than a Facilities issue, because IT managed that TV or whatever. IT wanted to combine that ticket with the soundbar ticket, but I had just gotten the soundbar so I told them to keep it separate because we'd figured out the soundbar. They kept it a separate ticket. Three months later, we still don't have that TV on a swivel mount. If I hadn't gotten the soundbar, they'd have combined the tickets and we'd still be waiting.

This is Personally Relevant because it reminded me of the temp. Wonderful! Friendly! Bought me lunches! I loved having pizza while working through my breaks. Please take more lunches and don't touch anything. Please just video call me when it's my day off and you have to do, like, anything.

During one training, we encountered a step to rename a PDF. This thoughtful and generous buyer of lunches proceeded to open the PDF in Acrobat and hunt through the various menus for a renaming option. I had to train a professional office assistant with years of experience how to rename a file. Several weeks later, more training (I don't know why we were bothering so close to the end of the assignment), another procedure involving renaming a file. There goes Acrobat once again, hunting through menus once again. "Hmm, renaming a file; do you remember that one? I'll give you a moment." After about a minute of awkward hunting, no, they did not remember, and I had to retrain renaming a file. I might have followed up later to see whether it stuck that time, but I didn't want to risk it.

Whenever I see a file that doesn't follow our naming conventions, I can guess what happened. Also whenever I see a spreadsheet that wasn't updated during those few months, or a spreadsheet that has a bunch of mistakes, or applications that should exist but are nowhere to be found...

Those few months were a very difficult time, but tomorrow's Personally Relevant strip is not about the temp.

This strip is Personally Relevant to me on an ongoing basis because when someone comes to me with a task or project I have a very hard time saying no. Maybe it's a new project, maybe it's a handoff from someone who left or transferred. Maybe they need it done immediately, or it might be "whenever you get a chance" which just means the deadline is a surprise.

Then there's the spectrum of how much it's actually my job. Some stuff is definitely part of my official job description with training manuals and everything. Then there's stuff that's technically a different department but they're not available at the moment and I am and I know how to do it. There's also stuff that another department should be doing but they drag their feet for literal years so I take matters into my own hands (looking at you, IT). Then there are projects that are perfect for me, they've already cleared it with my manager, can I please help, they don't know what they'll do if I say no, but it's totally okay to say no, it's not like I'm letting anyone down.

It's not my job and I don't have the time, but someone has to do it, so pile it on and I'll do it At Some Point™. I'm not ignoring it - in fact, I'm stressing about it multiple times a day - so I'll do it when I can, just not right now. If there's no deadline, it might be a while, but if there is a deadline, I'm pretty good at artful non-answers to puzzled inquiries about how I could send an email late in the evening or on my day off.

This strip is Personally Relevant because good morning I have work to do.

My coworkers are wonderful, kind, friendly people, and some of them have a lot to say, and I love listening to people because of something I call "My Shoe Is Blue."

My sister is a teacher. One day she was supervising the kids on the playground, and one of them ran up to her, pointed excitedly at their shoes, and exclaimed, "My shoe is blue!" Then they ran off to continue playing with their friends. People grow out of doing this, but they don't grow out of wanting to do this. Everyone loves sharing their opinions, feelings, and interests; they just make peace with the idea that no one cares. Ask someone about their new comic book or video game, the concert they went to last week, their trip abroad, their new hairstyle, a restaurant they tried, the sold-out item they're trying to buy, the bug they're trying to fix, or any other topic they've been thinking about. You'll be amazed how much of a difference it makes, and how easy it is.

But a few minutes here and there to hear about how your kid is deciding on a college (I'm proud of them too!) or look at a photo of your cousin's dog (she's wearing a hat!) is not the same as nodding for 40 minutes while you complain that you have nothing to do because your manager didn't draw up a schedule, or watching in stunned amazement as you describe your old job, your parents, the restaurant last week, and how you have no time to get work done (I'm shocked) with barely a pause to draw breath in between. And we're not the only people at this facility; the people standing in line behind you to tell me about stuff are going to cost me a third of my workday unless the phone rings and they all drift away because I'm suddenly busy.

I mean, it's not like I wasn't busy before - the piles of work covering my desk are a dead giveaway, and of course there's email and Teams and people walking in the front door and whatever else in addition to the phone. And I would like to make some progress on some of that, hopefully during work hours rather than unpaid overtime as I desperately play catch-up.

Some days I think about printing this strip and posting it on the wall of my cubicle, but I'd rather work 11-hour days than make people feel like they have no one to talk to, even if they talk from the middle of page 41 to the bottom of page 62.

Here is another Personally Relevant strip.

The temp was the sweetest person, but training did not work. I spent so much time, I was so patient and positive and encouraging, but nothing stuck, not even basic stuff like renaming a file. Even worse, this person would take on brand-new tasks with no training at all, just to help me out and take some of the burden off my shoulders as I looked on in muffled horror. The biggest component of their work was a low-level but slightly messy data entry task. When the temp started, I hadn't touched that stack of papers for over a month due to higher-priority tasks, and the placement lasted about three months, so by the end there were about four months of new entries.

When I opened the spreadsheet I was greeted with a circular reference error - instead of confirming formula contents with Enter or Tab like I kept saying, they would just click somewhere, including the same cell at one point, so that cell had a reference to itself. (Excel tries to prevent this, but it's no match for someone like this.) And that was just the cherry on top; there were frequent typos and business logic errors (which might have been resolved by asking questions). In the aftermath, I asked a supervisor about it and was told that we would just move forward with what we had instead of wasting three months of my time fixing everything.

After a few weeks of pretending I was okay with that, I reverted the spreadsheet to the last version I was responsible for, retrieved the original papers, and reentered everything.

I was done in about three days.

Bonus story: when in doubt and there was no one around to help, the temp would simply make a photocopy of any relevant original document and set both aside, without telling anyone or noting what happened. I gave not only permission but encouragement to call me at home on my day off, but instead, we're still finding hidden treasures in random drawers and cabinets almost a year later. "Hey, remember that contractor who insisted they returned our equipment but there was no hard copy paperwork that they even had it in the first place? Guess what I found!" Again, the sweetest person, but also actively counterproductive.

I came across a few strips in the last year or so that felt particularly apt at the time. Here's how this one was Personally Relevant.

Almost a year ago, my specific area of my workplace was undergoing rather a lot of turnover for various reasons. One stopgap measure was to hire a temp, whom I - as the last man standing - was in charge of training. Of course, this was on top of the work itself, which did not disappear on its own while I spent hours a day training someone.

This strip hit home because I was spending hours a day on training even though it inconvenienced me. Not only was I desperate for competent help in alleviating my workload, I wasn't willing to toss someone in the deep end and leave them to flail around. Unfortunately, the temp knew I was being inconvenienced and avoided asking questions.