BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
Auditor: This equipment you have isn’t on the approved list. It is against the policy and we aren’t allowed to have it. We need to talk to the person that approved buying it.
Group Manager: Well that will be hard since they haven’t worked here in a while. The person that approved it hasn't worked for the last 5 presidents we’ve had. Policies have changed a lot since then.
Similarly I always found it funny how some groups have such large turn over and some don't. There was a different group I was doing some software for at the company. Of the 6 people in the group the most senior member had been with the company for 6 months. In contrast the 12 people in the group I worked in had the new guy start 6 years earlier.
I worked in a group with a great manager that knew how to make for a working environment that people enjoyed. Communication was key, and everyone felt like they could trust everyone else. One day the manager came to the group and asked everyone for some input on what managers’ goals should be at the company. They were looking for things that could be suggested at the next manager meeting. The only thing our group came up with was attrition rate. Some people are expected to leave the company for amicable reasons. But if entire departments are quitting all the time, then there is likely a problem with that manager, or something that manager should do better.
We all thought that it was a fine goal for a manager, to try to keep their employees working at the company. So our boss went to the meeting with all these other managers, and suggested the attrition rate should be a goal each manager has. Every manager in that group said it was a terrible idea and didn’t want it. Unsurprisingly all of these managers were losing employees constantly, and they didn’t want their bonus, or merit increase tied to it.
@Hooovahh wrote:
[...] So our boss went to the meeting with all these other managers, and suggested the attrition rate should be a goal each manager has. Every manager in that group said it was a terrible idea and didn’t want it. [...]
I immediately thought that the managers misunderstood the suggestion, then I though of this scene in Caddyshack.
Sandy: Carl I want you to kill all the gophers on the golf course
Carl Spackler: Correct me if I'm wrong Sandy, but if I kill all the golfers they'll lock me up and throw away the key.
Sandy: Not golfers, you great fool. Gophers. The *little* *brown*, *furry* *rodents*.
Carl Spackler: We can do that. We don't even need a reason.
Drink Something Special
A friend of mine had just put in his 2 weeks notice, quitting a long term job to go do something new and exciting. His new job apparently came with a huge pay increase and all kinds of benefits. As a result he was feeling a need to celebrate and went to the bar with 4 of his friends. They went to a bar that they had gone to many times before that was just a local place and nothing too special. At one point he told the bartender that he wanted to buy a round of shots for his friends and he asked if they had anything special. The bartender mentioned some Cognac he’d never heard of, and my friend said sure.
So the bartender goes and gets a large ladder and moves it in front of the wall of liquor they have. He climbs the ladder all the way to the top. He saw the guy going up where there was a dusty metal cage large enough for one bottle. He pulls out a key and unlocks the cage, pulls out the bottle and brings it down.
At this point my friend is getting nervous because the bartender didn’t mention how much it costs. He brings down this very fancy looking bottle, and blows the dust off of it, then pours 5 shots. The owner of the bar just happened to be there drinking that night and came over to take a picture of the bottle and the 5 shots lined up. My friend gave a cheer, and they all drank it. Afterwards he was told it was Louis XIII and was $100/shot. At the bars I go to I’ve tried a few times asking them if they have anything special and how much. I clearly go to a different type of bar because of the few times I’ve tried asking for something special they say the most expensive thing they have is $10/shot.
What would you say I do here?
We had a new guy get hired that was a perfect fit for the company because he had lots of skills in various areas from electrical, mechanical, and basic software. At the same time the company didn’t really know what kind of responsibilities this person would have, they just knew they needed a well rounded engineer but their tasks weren’t well defined.
Within his first week on the job he was asking his boss if he could give a list of what his responsibilities and what his role in the company was. His boss then asked him to make a powerpoint presentation, on what he thinks his job should be, and they would assess what it should be based on that. As a new hire he was pretty confused at how unprepared the company was for him to work. So he just made a presentation on the things he wanted to do within the company, and management just agreed with him. They made some very nondescript engineering title for him like “Member of Engineering Team”. Oddly enough he was the only person with that title so it wasn’t much of a team.
He then got jerked around to other departments and asked to be the fixer guy for everyone and eventually quit.
Viral Video Training
At work we had several mandatory training sessions on corporate things that don't really matter. Every couple of months 200 or so employees would get together in a huge room and have to sit through the most dry and boring topics that would only affect maybe 5 people in the room.
So to spice things up, and keep our attention, the presenter would break up the content with Trunk Monkey videos. Trunk Monkey was a series of viral funny commercials for a car company. He would talk for about 5 minutes, then show a Trunk Monkey video, then 5 minutes more, then more Trunk Monkey. Well near the end of the presentation he realized he was running out of time, but still had more videos to show, so he just played them one after another until our time was up. We called all future training that had no real purpose "Trunk Monkey training".
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoxADsZ9YforxtjWODy3Kz_8JjLH-Nxp7
@Hooovahh wrote:At work we had several mandatory training sessions on corporate things that don't really matter. Every couple of months 200 or so employees would get together in a huge room and have to sit through the most dry and boring topics that would only affect maybe 5 people in the room.
Corporate training is almost always pointless. They are nothing more the CYAs for the company. The funny thing is they were commonly the same between companies. I had to do the annual ethics training (online) right before I left a company and the first week at the new company was supposed to be going through the exact same training. I may have figured out a few tricks to make things go quicker (use script mode instead of video and just quickly click through the slides, answer the questions that were exactly the same, and be done within 1/4 the time). I was done with all of the "ethics training" within a day instead of a week.
@Hooovahh wrote:
So to spice things up, and keep our attention, the presenter would break up the content with Trunk Monkey videos.
I had completely forgotten about Trunk Money. I had a coworker who showed me a few of them when they were new.
@Hooovahh wrote:
[...]the presenter would break up the content with Trunk Monkey videos.
I used to work for a company that made rocker switches like you'd find in the console of large trucks. I had access to the pad printing equipment and made a Trunk Monkey switch almost 20 years ago. I still have it.
