RL Anger

[EmmahSue]

@Coin I'm not calling you a cheater. I just didn't win that time. :<

ES

[Ganymede]

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

See, what I get out of that story is that adults are shit, not children.

The thief is also shit. It wasn't enough that it stole a cellphone, which is worth a substantial amount of money; it also had to go ahead and be a tremendous dick about it.

I'd press charges if I were the victim's parents. And then inform the school board of the principal's failure to act.

[Arkandel]

Not anger... but a bunch of mixed feelings.

I've decided to take an offer for a different job, and it's not something I'm good at doing. It feels disloyal somehow to jump ship even if rationally I realize it's just business, or that I've seen my boss lay people off without any warning several times over the last few years.

It feels awkward, and the excitement of being at a new place with cool new things to do is mixed with the knowledge I'm not going to be seeing some of the people I've been interacting with everyday and have come to quite like.

I just hope all that - and a nice salary bump - make all this worth it.

[WTFE]

@Ganymede said in RL Anger:

See, what I get out of that story is that adults are shit, not children.

The thief is also shit. It wasn't enough that it stole a cellphone, which is worth a substantial amount of money; it also had to go ahead and be a tremendous dick about it.

I addressed that. The child in question is a shit, no doubt. But very rarely is shit just there. Shit doesn't just happen:

Shit takes systematic effort to make most times. And in this case the shit was made by parents who aren't monitoring and who likely even helped protect the shit from consequences multiple times in the past.

[WTFE]

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

It feels disloyal somehow to jump ship even if rationally I realize it's just business, or that I've seen my boss lay people off without any warning several times over the last few years.

Businesses can expect upward loyalty iff they exhibit downward loyalty. I've not seen (nor even really heard of!) a business that consistently exhibited downward loyalty at any point in my life. Downward loyalty only happens when economic times are good and workers are rarer than positions. As soon as there's even a momentary turn in that relationship businesses show their true colours.

Don't feel "disloyal". Feel "smart".

I just hope all that - and a nice salary bump - make all this worth it.

It is. And it isn't. Unless you're a sociopath you will miss your former colleagues. You might remain in touch with the ones you were closest too, but likely not once the main reason for your getting together is removed from your relationship.

Just make new friends in the new place. Then it's worth it.

[Sparks]

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

Businesses can expect upward loyalty iff they exhibit downward loyalty. I've not seen (nor even really heard of!) a business that consistently exhibited downward loyalty at any point in my life.

I have—notably where I work right now, which is no small part of why I'm here—but you're right that it is vanishingly rare; I've encountered it three times, and only three, and one of those was "a company of six people all of whom had been friends before making said company".

[Auspice]

Couple months ago, a coworker and I built out a sort of 'database' of replies for the CS/Tier 1 team to use. I say 'database' because it was just a notebook in OneNote they could reference for these macros. Responses for standard/common tickets they could copy and paste and edit rather than type up from scratch every single time.

We did this as a volunteer thing, in between our own tickets. We never got thanks. We never expected it. We mostly did it because we got sick of being asked the same things over and over by people ("What do I tell people who want to change their username?" "What do we tell people who want spoilers on upcoming card releases?") .

Today, management drops the bomb on us: "We don't like that you used OneNote, so we need you to rebuild it in a GoogleDoc using this layout we designed. ASAP."

Thanks, guys. Really. Just great. Super awesome. Thanks for the reminder why I never, ever do anything nice for a job anymore.

[WTFE]

@Auspice The sense of entitlement many employers (most?) have is sometimes truly shocking, or would be if it weren't so comical. Some highlights from my past:

1. A colleague of mine and I worked in our spare time: evenings, weekends, lunch hours, on bringing the product line's core architecture into the 20th century. At the time we were a single-vendor shop, but the industry in question was exploding and interoperability was becoming a major thing with standards (note the plural) developing for mixing and matching disparate components into systems. We knew it would only be a matter of time before that bit us, so we decided to take the lead on fixing the architectural errors that made us almost militantly a stovepipe shop. In one of our lunchtime bull sessions the boss came in, asked us what we were doing, demanded a demonstration of what we'd done thus far and pronounced it "useless" and "a waste of time". So we stopped, reasoning that working on something the boss thought was useless wasn't a good use of our meagre spare time.
   Months later the inevitable we predicted happened: a major sale hinged on our ability to incorporate an additional device into our support. The sale didn't happen because we couldn't. "But what about your fancy new architecture?" "We stopped working on it." "Why?" "You said it was a useless waste of time." "I said no such thing!" He was genuinely put out that we'd stopped using our own unpaid, free time working on something that he himself said he didn't need. He was actually pondering firing us over not continuing to work for free on a skunkworks project that he had killed.
2. The very first school I worked for in China was run by a real piece of work. I could write entire novels about this place, but I'll restrict myself to a single representative anecdote. The two foreign teachers in the school had, single-handedly (O.K. dual-handedly) taken the pro forma (but do-nothing) "English Club" on campus and turned it into a major activity centre. We'd organized the students into organizing their own "English Corner" (I will not be trying to explain this concept because it hurts my brain) and we'd marshalled the necessary resources and relationships to make an English Conversation Lounge happen, after which we handed it over to the student club again to run. We'd easily spent an extra 15-20 hours a week on top of a full time teaching job (how full time? -- one teacher once asked me how many teaching hours I had and was shocked; she had 2/3 that number and was complaining about being treated as a "teaching machine") setting this up, participating in the activities, and generally keeping the students engaged and interested. All this in the face of leader ennui and active disinterest.
   And the effort paid off. Our school's English Corner attracted English students from literally every other school in the city (as well as a dozen or so local businesses trying to up their game). Our English Conversation Lounge was written up in an education ministry newsletter. This latter point proved the school's undoing. One of the leaders of the school was interviewed in local media about the programs and he lost face publicly when it became increasingly obvious over the course of the interview that he had no fucking clue whatsoever what he was being interviewed about.
   So the leadership swung into action in the inimitable corporate way: the bosses swept in and started ordering gratuitous changes. Like moving English Corner from Thursdays to Wednesdays. For reasons. And here's where the thing went sour for them really quickly. First, other activities all over the campus had been organized around the existing English Corner schedule. The English Corner was the 900 pound gorilla of school activities, augmented by the fact that a lot of outside influence was involved as well. NOBODY but the leadership wanted to change what was already working just fine, but you're not a "leader" if you're not telling people what to do, right? So they ordered the change. And we said that our English Corner would be held on Thursday.
   The students (and outsiders) came to ours, not theirs.
   So they tried to order us to go to the Wednesday one because we were their employees. To which we pointed out that we were contractors and had done all our work for free as a gift, but if the gift was going to be stepped on and spit upon like that we'd be withdrawing our gift. Instead we would treat it as contracted labour, present our bill for services rendered thus far and negotiate our payment for the extra work.
   Suddenly the leaders magnanimously ordered English Corner to be held on Thursdays again, but in private they were very distressed that we'd dared to threaten removing our unpaid labour on something they'd not given a shit about for over a year while we worked ourselves into exhaustion.
   To them a "thank you" was "we won't fire you for gross insubordination in threatening to withhold unpaid labour". And they couldn't figure out why none of their by-then six foreign teachers after that point ever wanted to do anything for the school any longer. And why all six bailed at the end of their contract. And why all six left word in every major expat teaching circle that their school was to be avoided.
3. A bottom-feeding consulting company I worked for refused to ever pay overtime (but would CHARGE customers overtime!). Even worse, they were claiming R&D tax credits for my overtime. And they couldn't understand why I left my job without even giving two weeks' notice. (In my resignation letter I said I'd be taking two weeks' vacation in lieu of overtime. They still didn't get it.) Nor could they understand why they lost all their consultants inside of six weeks. They called us "disloyal" for wanting to move to employers who actually paid us.
4. Another company I worked for survived only because three people put in superhuman effort for about three months. I'm talking the degree of effort where a 75 hour work week was us taking it easy. More normal was 96. It impacted the health, both mental and physical, of the three people in question and this herculean effort literally saved the company (AND literally prevented the company owner from being rendered homeless!).
   The company moved from the brink of bankruptcy (at one point, right at the very end of the period, there was a high degree of probability that the next paycheques would bounce; only the fact that we finally got the product finished and made a few big sales of it saved us) to wild profitability to being purchase bait. And someone took the bait, making the company owner a multi-millionaire. And his response to being made a millionaire on the backs of the health and labour of three key individuals? Two bonuses of $10,000 and one bonus of $15,000.
   We'd literally saved the motherfucker from being homeless and he thought an ample reward was a "bonus" that was a fraction of what he'd have had to pay in just plain overtime for our efforts. (A quick thumbnail calculation says that's about 20% of what he'd have had to pay in overtime.) And he was shocked to his core when every one of us was so "ungrateful" that we left our jobs inside of six weeks. And that within six months he'd suffered an almost 80% turnover in his company as those who left found jobs with the place they'd moved to for those who'd been left behind. And he had to explain to his new owners (part of the terms of the purchase were that he had to keep running the company for three years, and there was a profitability clause as well whose details I don't fully know) why the people who made the product all quit.
   And he blamed "disloyalty" of course. The motherfucker.

[Sparks]

Health.

Just in general.

My mother is going through chemotherapy. A friend was just diagnosed with a degenerative nerve disease probably caused by their chemo medication of a few years ago. Another friend's father just passed away from cancer a couple of hours ago.

Oh, and just for the cancer combo-breaker, my father is staring at a likely diagnosis of Parkinson's. My chronic migraines/cluster headaches seem actually pretty damn minor in comparison.

American health care: we're #1. Or something.

[Luna]

I hate this audit. I hate this job. I don't hate my boss but he's a banker and refuses to let us take a loss ever. The company would have been actually profitable months ago, but since we were turning profit on paper only, we still have to shuffle things in order to make a 'profit', when we actually make a profit, but are still trying to drag revenues to cover old losses. There's also no health insurance.

[Pandora]

Every word in the thesaurus is not created equal.
'Asiatic' is kind of offensive when describing a person. Why can't your character just be Asian?
'Florid-cheeked young woman' over there, rosy cheeks would have worked just fine. Whenever I see you, I will think that you're angry or drunk.
'iconoclast' is a cool word, and it might even describe your character, but it is not a physical descriptor, I didn't walk into this bar and think 'This poorly-dressed iconoclast drinking the cheapest beer on the menu gives zero fucks about tradition, clearly!'.

[Pandora]

@Arkandel Good luck with the new job! Remember, if someone offered your boss a better job with a better salary, he probably wouldn't hesitate to leave you all behind, either.

[Thenomain]

@Pandora said in RL Anger:

'iconoclast' is a cool word, and it might even describe your character, but it is not a physical descriptor

I remember asking someone what "a bespoke gentleman" was supposed to mean, and got snarked at for being pedantic. I really had no idea how someone could look "bespoke"! None of us are made to order; you kind of end up with whatever you get!

[Pandora]

@Thenomain You should have just discreetly inquired around town about who did his cosmetic work.

[surreality]

@Thenomain Patchwork person, clearly, built to order as a sexbot. Totally has to be the thing.

[Thenomain]

Really, web store, I'm there to shop. Popping up a request for me to sign up for your newsletter and then getting cutesy but snarky about the "no" option is not going to endear me to you. I am thinking about spending money with you; why are you trying to get in my way?

[SG]

People cancelling D&D to do stupid yardwork they could do any night of the week. FFS taking a 3 day weekend to do six hours of work. UGH!

[Coin]

@Pandora said in RL Anger:

Every word in the thesaurus is not created equal.
'Asiatic' is kind of offensive when describing a person. Why can't your character just be Asian?

While I get your peeve here (Asiatic vs. Asian), Asian is still a horrible word for a description, since there are several varieties of Asian, some of which differ greatly from each other (Indian vs. Chinese, for example).

Just as a minor peeve of my own.

Also, this is the RL Anger thread; this seems like a MU/RP related peeve and should have gone in the Random Bitching thread for MU-related stuff!

[Pandora]

@Coin I used MU-examples but the gripe is very general - people that use alternative-words to make themselves sound more worldly, but wind up just sounding like they've raped a dictionary. I cringe every time someone at work says 'Let's get some verbage on that'.

As for the use of 'Asian' as a descriptor - fair enough. Though in general many people (not all, I am definitely making a generalization here) aren't good at telling the difference between a Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai/Viet person, especially at a first glance. So a descriptor of 'A middle-aged Asian man with poor posture' would be fine to me, with bonus points if their look-desc goes into more detail about what specific nation they seem to hail from, and extra bonus points if they're ultimately Middle Eastern.

[Ghost]

Bonus points for people who make Anglo-appearing Russians from east of Moscow and refer to themselves as Asian