last week i posted an opening for my current position, as i was in negotiations with my (now) new employer for a part time position in close proximity to my new home (something i had been working towards for a while). i posted this position, prior to notifying my current employer, when i was in the final phase of bonus negotiations and therefore listed identifying (but realistically unnecessary) information in the most vague manner possible. i posted in a myriad of locations; one being craigslist – as i have done before with previous positions and have received qualified candidates for a measly $25.00. today, i received this email in response to this posting: subject: 08212014 executive assistant position to whom it may concern, if you want any qualified applicants (as myself) to take you seriously, then you would name the company in the ad. craigslist is a shady way to advertise for c-level positions in the first place. the least you could do is name the company to make one feel like they are not going to get scammed (which is what i find most happens with an ad like this on craigslist). just trying to help and good luck, you'll need it to get someone qualified! sincerely, cuntface mccunterson ph | 666.666.6666 "don't tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon!" my initial reaction was to fire back a snide email to this bitch stating that the only thing she was qualified for was a kick to the cunt but i have, so far, managed to refrain. i just stared at the screen for what felt like an eternity waiting for a pop up ad or something to tell me i am being trolled. i could not believe that some “applicant” would take the time out of their unemployed day, in between watching maury and eating funyuns, to reply to my posting and scold me. focus: have you ever received something in a professional or personal setting that was so inappropriately brazen that you were, literally, at a loss for words? did you ever find the words? alt focus: help me respond to this before i e-stalk her and things gets out of hand.
Re: Cunt got your tongue? what a horrific response you received. an executive assistant isn't even c-level. what would that be exactly? chief assistant to another c-level? and craigslist is a fine way to do it, but what did this person expect? why is she on the craigslist job postings then? bump.
if you go fishing in the shallow end of the swimming pool don't be surprised when you find more dead squirrels than [insert any of dewercs awesome fish here].
focus: this was from when i was working for the shittiest politician ever. now, when you work for a political office, the government job and any campaigning have to be 100% separate. it's to the point where if during election season if someone called the political office and told me they wanted to donate/volunteer time/put up a sign i couldn't do anything for them, just tell them to call the campaign office, hell, officially i couldn't even give them the phone number to the campaign office. but, conversely since we served at the discretion of the senator it was expected of us to use our free time to "volunteer" and help him campaign and help other politicians campaign. this was to the point where at one point they expected everyone to leave work friday night, go on a 6 hour bus ride upstate, go door to door saturday and sunday, come back really later on sunday and then go to work monday morning. of course, this was all without any compensation at all. needless to say a lot of people skipped out on volunteering or half assed it. we are in a staff meeting one morning after several newspapers published multiple articles about said politician being corrupt, practicing nepotism and accounting fraud. bosses are freaking out, passing around a letter they got ahold of that was sent to every government agency, politician and big backer of the senator. we were told don't answer any questions, don't talk to anyone and if anyone gets any phone calls or inquiries report it immediately to the bosses. they go on to say that they think there is an "informant in the office" so don't even talk amongst ourselves. this is immediately followed by "by the way. a lot of you haven't been showing up to volunteering events. we would like to remind you that you serve at the discretion of the senator and that if you don't volunteer for the campaign you probably won't have this job much longer." yes, so right after freaking out about someone being an informant they blatantly commit election law violations. this was immediately followed by the bosses calling me into their office and asking me why my father hasn't donated money to the election campaign that year. of course done in the rudest manner possible of "we didn't know he was hurting for money,"(he wasn't he was just disgusted with them) and them asking me to tell him to donate money. i responded "you know considering everything going on, you really shouldn't be talking about this in the political office. and, if you want money from him you should talk to him." i was laid off 2 weeks later. oh! and this gem also from the office. some guy was trying to dump a whole bunch of work on me, when i refused he responded with "do you know who my daddy is?" it should be noted that this was a grown ass 30 year old man saying this in a whiny girly tone, his father was another state senator. i just hung up the phone on him.
this is minor, i'm only sharing it because i happened to get this e-mail this morning. it is not directed at me, i was one of the ones copied on it. the sender (a coworker) was asking the recipient (someone high on the food chain) several questions, and tacked this on the end: i mean, i get frustrated too when i send out questions and then my inbox collects crickets and dust, but dang.
i was just at a conference and on the bus back from the conference tour location, i got propositioned by a married man. he knew that i knew he was married and he knew that i have a long term boyfriend. this is a guy i've known and worked with on the occasional project for about 7 years, and is probably 10-15 years older than me. the lead in before the "do you ever stray from home?" completely floored me. it was "did you get a boob job? i just can't stop staring." i had no words.
in my professional life, i just tune it all out. in my personal life i can distinctly remember one circumstance. one kid i knew in our college was from india and his name was arnan. arnan was a huge puss and would cry every single time he would drink so girls would pay attention to him and feel sorry for him. one time it was because his parakeet at his moms house back in india had a heart attack and died or something. i had been drinking and made fun of it by making some reference to dumb and dumber and he quite literally ran away crying about it. so him being super emotional, i had the perfect premise to call him out on all of the bombastic claims he would make. one time he claimed he had a pet tiger named cynthia that he bought from a zoo keeper. the tiger was housed in a pen in oklahoma while he attended school in connecticut. he had only seen cynthia (or cindy as he loved lovingly would refer to her) twice, but he paid "like $30,000 dollars" for her despite the fact that his previous crying fits would sometimes be spurred by his lamenting about how poor his family was back in mumbai. so of course, taking all of this into account, i called him out on it on the spot and told him that he didnt own a tiger. he quickly whipped out his phone and showed me a grainy picture (this is pre-iphone) of him petting a tiger cub. i told him that him petting a tiger cub at a zoo for five minutes doesnt mean he owns that tiger and that her name probably isnt "cindy." i sealed it up by bringing up his claims of financial hardship and that he was lying about either one or the other. he told me he was going to go into his bedroom to find a receipt for the tiger purchase. i told him (on behalf of myself and the audience that was now witnessing this) that we would happily wait to see his tiger receipt. he never came back out of his bedroom. about 20 minutes later, someone went to check on him and found him crying into his pillow and carrying on. everyone got upset and told me i was a jerk.
i'm currently in the middle of a similar situation. last month i was offered a position contingent on the company winning the contract and in the offer letter they listed an anticipated start date. well the start date was a week away and i had heard nothing from the company so i started making some phone calls and emails asking if the job existed, etc. i've yet to have any email replies or returned phone calls. one guy did randomly answer his phone but blew me off rather quickly; telling me he would get back to me in an hour...never did. when i called back two days later he then told me i should expect an email from hr later that day...still waiting six days later. a bigger company bought the company right before they made the offer so i'm assuming that's the main problem...people getting shuffled around, let go, etc, but i do wish they were at least be up front with me and either tell me they're in flux and don't know or shit's changed since the initial offer letter and the job's no longer mine. ordinarily, i'd write it off and never entertain an offer from either company in the future, but it's more than a little frustrating when unemployed.
not necessarily a professional setting and i was unknowingly a dick but i was communicating with the high school president of the swim team about an upcoming invitational and my signature at the time was a line from psych "have you ever been tested for idiocy". she thought i was asking her that. really? it was alllllll the way down at the bottom and in quotes. so i explain and she was okay about it, but the first time we saw each other afterwards was a kind of stilted. seriously, who would ask anyone that question ever? i have no signature now.
i refuse to pander to the lowest common denominator. mock and shame the stupid, it's the only way it will change.
my first year at this school i was working in the library. somehow word got around that i had a minor in creative writing (salacious news for a small town i guess). a couple weeks into school the 50 year old female janitor came in asked said she heard i liked poetry. i have long known the rule of never pissing off a janitor, so i said yes when she asked me if i would like to hear some of hers. she then launched into a 10 minute poem depicting a relationship that could have been if she had not married her husband. it ended with the line "so i bared my butt to him." i remember not knowing what to say that i would a. not piss her off and b. never put me in the position of never hearing her poetry again. whatever i said accomplished a, but not b as i had to hear a few more and had to leave written commentary on one before she stopped. there was also the time i was working with headphones on and she walked up behind me and stroked my back to get my attention. it wasn't even on the shoulder. a stroke in the middle of my back. it still creeps me out. and another story from today. i had students email me to request i approve their book for their book report. a female student decided to request that i approve selling scarlet by ella james. here is the short synopsis provided by the publisher: i'm currently trying to figure out the best way to handle it. i don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but this isn't okay. i'm not sure what her thought process was when requesting this one. i'm hoping she is oblivious to the situation and didn't mean anything by it (not that she is trying to send a hint, but rather just messing with me as she would know it makes me intensely uncomfortable.)
when i was 18 i spent a year working in tokyo for a japanese company. i worked closely with a japanese man who was very nice, but had a rather short temper. he was also the largest and most muscular japanese man i have ever met. we were trying to arrange with another american company in the same field for a week long mutual exchange of workers across offices (theirs in ny and ours in tokyo). we were talking to a woman from the us company on the phone and she was being quite forceful with how the trip would be arranged and not picking up on my colleague's very subtle japanese hints that the terms were not acceptable. i could see the guy getting more and more frustrated until he suddenly hung up on her and then silently walked into the bathroom. from the bullpen area we all heard him start screaming at the top of his lungs which was followed by a loud crash. he came out of the bathroom nursing his fist and when i checked in the bathroom there was a huge hole in the wall of the toilet stool where he had punched through it. he just sat back down at his desk and called her again and said they must have been disconnected. it was like nothing happened. he never got into trouble either, it being a japanese company, i think people were too afraid to confront him about the issue.
i don't know if this counts, but my position was eliminated today for what i was told was budgetary reasons. i even offered them the chance to do a salary adjustment, but they declined. just five minutes ago they called me to ask about how a certain process was handled. now, maybe i'm being oversensitive, but i know if i had terminated someone i would never then call them - let a alone the same day i terminated them - to ask them about something they did in the course of their duties. i mean they can't even wait a day after firing me before calling me at home to ask me for help with something that was in my scope of duty.
i had something similar happen at the politicians office. so it might be something common, or just something common in poorly run offices. they lay off this girl working in the office now for some reason they can't lay you off the day of, they have to wait 2 weeks for it to go into effect. it is probably a state law for government offices. when i got laid off i just took 2 weeks of comp time and stayed home(funny story about that actually at the end.) now, this girl didn't have any vacation, sick or comp time left and the office being retarded insisted she come in and work those 2 weeks...because you know she is totally going to do a good job. whereas even if they still had to pay her salary i would have just told her not to come in. not only do they make her come in and work they give her new projects to work on for the next 2 weeks. you can see where this is going? not one aspect of those projects get done. her 2 weeks are up, she leaves, they give all the work to me and tell me to call her to find out where she is at on the project. that went as well as could be expected: "hey, its longvin from the office. they gave me some of your stuff to do, can you fill me in on where you were at? did you mail out the invites?" "do you know what fucking happened over there?" "umm...they said you quit." "i got fucking fired. fuck you, i'm not giving you anything." that was a fun conversation, even more fun was talking to my boss who was like "well why didn't you insist on her giving you the info?" funny post lay off story involving comp time: i get laid off on a wednesday and get 2 weeks of comp time. the next day i go with my dad and his buddy to help them with their work and we stop at a really upscale steakhouse for lunch. not counting the senator there were 3 bosses there. 1 was really chill that i was friends with and the other 2 were assholes. in particular the office manager was a paranoid nut that liked seeing everyone miserable. the guy i was chill with calls me while i'm eating lunch asking how i am. i say i'm fine, and tell him where i am. in the background i hear paranoid boss going "is that longvin? how is he? is he upset?" he wanted to hear that i was devastated. chill boss asks if its cool for him to tell paranoid boss where i am. i say go ahead. chill boss says "he said getting fired was the best thing that could happen to him. he's eating steak and lobster right now at <steakhouse>." with this all i hear is screaming coming from paranoid boss over the line "fuck him! fuck him! who the fuck does he think is!" chill boss starts laughing hysterically and says he has to go and hang up the phone. was told later paranoid boss bitched about it for 30 minutes.
the owner of my company likes to incorporate anything she finds from clients that we aren't doing by copying it in its entirety. basically any time she sees a document set up, excel, word, etc, she likes she'll take the files they send us, put our company logo on it, and use it from then on as our own. some of the excel set ups are pretty elaborate and you can tell the client had them professionally done. im not sure of the actual proprietary nature of these documents but fuck does it feel unethical. though i wasn't present on the most egregious incidence, but she has been called out for obvious age discrimination at our office. she supposedly once told a supervisor a couple of employees were way too old to work on a outside project and to put our new hires on it, who were all younger. it must have spooked her, she probably talked with her lawyer as well, but for the next few weeks after the call out everything the owners said was framed in non age discrimination language. she still likes to hire fresh from college, hot, females as the "face" of our company. which im not complaining about. in college i worked for a bar/night club that did not have their liquor ordering/delivering in order. there were a number of times we'd run out of top shelf liquor and the manger would say fuck it and fill empty top shelf liquors with off brand liquor to sell to people wanting bottle service. we weren't filling them with wells, but if someone wanted to pay 120 bucks of a bottle of patron and all we had was some off brand top shelf promo tequila, they'd get that in a patron bottle. i brought this up at a meeting as an example of our lack of logistics in liquor ordering and was immediately told never to say it out loud again.
i'm sure it varies from state to state, but unless you're fired for cause they have to give you a couple weeks notice. i'm not sure if it's a federal policy, but my last place gave everyone 30 days notice. i agree it's retarded giving new projects to someone who just given two weeks notice. i spent the time wrapping up and handing off everything i was working on. i have to ask; why did you take the two weeks as comp time? they have to pay you for any unused vacation/sick time earned when you leave. i even cancelled some vacation plans when i was notified i was getting laid off so i'd have as much as possible on my last day. it ended up over a month's salary.
agreed. in my experience with bc employment, you have to give people at least 2 weeks notice by law, but can increase that as part of the employment agreement. for instance, my current employment contract states 1 month notice plus a bit of a golden parachute clause. in reality, when i've let people go, that two weeks notice translates into "here's a box for your shit and a cheque for 2 weeks + any outstanding vacation pay or other cash owing... thanks for coming out, i'll wait here with you while you pack up your stuff, and let me walk you to the door". no way in hell would i allow someone who was fired to stick around and vent their bitterness with my staff... that's just bad management. sounds like your management are idiots.
yea, god bless bc labour laws. it is almost like having a union type regulations for the entire province.
where i work, they can just fire people at their whim and for absolutely no reason at all. it happens all the time. its a great way to make your people never feel comfortable and that their job is never safe. we also have a 6 month probationary period where they make you feel as though you are on the thinnest ice ever.(constant threats and reminders of how good they are to you) my last manager, who was a fucking retard and barely able to communicate on a professional level was fired without warning 3 days before her 6 months was up. didn't pay out her vacation or earned sick time either. because on probation, they don't have to.
not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but i actually like the labour laws, for the most part. for instance, i was part of a company that basically locked the doors on their employees and didn't make payroll, which was paid monthly, so everyone came to work to find us locked out and then not paid for the last month. an embarrassing number of employees were living paycheck to paycheck, and it was devastating. we had a few single mothers that were freaking out about not being able to buy food for their kids or pay their rent. it was a seriously dick move by the owners of the company. (turns out that the owner was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer so tried to divert all funds he could to his family before he died a month later). one call to the labour board and they were onsite in an hour, figured out what was going on, brought in the sheriffs, took possession of all material items of worth in the office, and froze all corporate bank accounts and personal accounts of the directors. within three days everyone was paid. for the first time in my life, i was rather impressed with a government agency.