The Work Thread

Do it. Most people are too scared to try anything that comes their way and end up sticking with a gooseberry fool job they hate for most of their lives.

Just make sure you have the same lunch break as your dad this time.

Sort of work related. A guy I work with was greeted with a £1,300 bill from Microsoft. His 13 year old son racked it up on Xbox Live.

He got a refund thankfully, but we had a good laugh about it.

Qikz wrote:I had a bit of news from my Dad last week and I'm not sure what I want to do with the information. I'm really happy about it, but I'm not sure if this is the right move for me.

To give a bit of context my Dad has his own business, he's a consulatant in the financial software industry working on software that's the kind of stuff that handles the billion dollar transactions. He's been contracting for a while, but he was contacted recently by one of his old clients who had his own massive business and wanted to expand to the UK. he said when he gets a customer in the UK he wants my Dad to be the face of that company. Now my Dad is still working on all the details, but he wants me to come and work with him if it happens and I'd be changing role quite a lot and this is what worries me. I'd still be doing support, but it'd be for that one specific product. I'm certain I can do it and my Dad said my salary would be higher which is huge for me and he knows I'm not happy right now.

He said there might be some risks involved, but I'm really considering it my head. The more and more I think about it the more I get anxious that I won't make it work and that I feel working for family may be weird. I haven't spoken to anyone about it, but do you think I could make it work?

Financial software? Billions of dollars? SWIFT? Or XRP perhaps?

Quick situational question for freelancers/contractors.

I'm working on a project proofreading texts. They come in batches and I'm contractually not allowed to work on them until I receive an official email saying 'start.'

Employer added a bunch of texts to my Google drive about a week ago. I assumed they'd send me the start email at some point. Today I got an email from them asking if I was ok, with the heavy implication that I should have started work on the new texts. I replied saying I was about to ask them the same thing and that I hadn't received the 'go' email as of yet.

Should I have prompted them earlier for the email? I want to be the best freelancer I can be and I sort of feel I probably should have prompted them sooner, but I also think that's maybe not a key part of my y role to manage their notifications.

Hmm

When they come in, I'd send them an email to say you've received them and please confirm when you're ready to start.

Ad7 wrote:When they come in, I'd send them an email to say you've received them and please confirm when you're ready to start.

Yeah, I think that's going to be the way from now on. Tbh, I did exactly that the first time but I didn't want to overdo the emails/pestering for the second. That obviously didn't work so I'll be emailing them every time I get something new through from now on.

Welcome to freelancing, you will have to constantly prompt clients for information and instructions when they fail to provide them or follow protocol and often lie about doing so.

This is another reason why you charge more, always.

Just remember that you work for yourself and if they haven't done something they were meant to do, no you do not assume responsibility for magically knowing you needed to do it for them. In a normal job there is a lot of assumptions and "due diligence" and "being proactive" which is often code for you not acting because you did not have information on which to act and that is sometime else's (your) fault. Just tell them what they failed to do and if they argue about it find a better client.

Yes you are managing the work you do but when you should do the work for them and for how long they are willing to pay (if you charge based on time) is their job to decide if that is the terms of your agreement with them (personally I would avoid this and give timeframes within which I am available to do the work, not just whenever they get around to sending it over and I may be doing something else, that's up to me whether I am then available to do it at that point).

Gotta laugh at how stupid work is at times. Dealt with something that I wasn't quite sure about, asked the people who would know more about it, they report me to my boss for doing this. WTF.

Some of the people in my department are pure scum. Bad enough having to deal with an often toxic customer base, this added on top is just a bit too much.

Eh? You got reported for asking for help?

Depends what you had to ask I guess.

You should be proactive and diligent, but don't do this before asking your boss first. You should only cover yourself and solve problems after it has been discovered that you failed to be diligent and proactive enough to solve them before they happened.

Sorry but that's just the way it is.

Yeah strawberry float off, done with that gooseberry fool.

Ha, that reminds me of something that happened in an old job of mine. It was basically getting paid to tweet, but then I answered our media relations whatever manager’s phone one day while he was on holiday, talking to various news outlets and such, and ended up being the ‘spokesperson for the company said’ dude on quite a few occasions for a few days. This was a pretty big company, and not a single person noticed.

The trouble with due diligence is it seems to vary wildly what that is regardless of what your job description is (if you are lucky enough to even have one), depending on who wants to take responsibility, or be important, or whatever.

Just let people do their jobs. The are way too many people trying to discredit responsibility while looking for and hoarding opportunities to look good, even when when they do act, they strawberry float stuff up. I guess that's also the problem with meritocracy - it's so tokenistic. Why should anyone be rewarded for doing their job? You get paid for doing that. That's why you're employed in the first place. It seems to give more opportunities for jobsworths and snobs to pick up credit for other people's work, or convenient random incidents and happy mistakes that weren't actually due to any skill applied.

I've rarely ever felt that hard work was recognised in any job I've done in the past. So I stopped doing it for anyone else. Heck I hear far more thankyous, I get really heartful messages supporting me if I am ill or went the extra mile for a customer who even only paid me a few pounds for example. It was really striking for me when I started getting those messages how it felt completely different than "at work" were everything is taken for granted and rewarded poorly, and unemotionally.

I once had a message thanking me and that they were so shocked, it was the best customer service they had ever received, compared to big sites like Amazon etc. I can't imagine putting the same degree of loyalty and passion into a giant brand enveloped around me again, without feeling wilfully complacent, and knowing it can and eventually will be swept under me at any moment because government cuts or politics blahblah. I'm not what the lesser or greater degree of risk involved actually is when you consider how insecure jobs are at the moment. The crushing highs and lows of employee vs independent are pretty similar when I think about it. The main difference is needing to be able to generate work on your own. And that's really, really hard, and a lot of people won't or can't do it.

But you don't have any of that gooseberry fool. Which is great.

Errkal wrote:Depends what you had to ask I guess.

Just advised them of the situation and asked how to proceed with it. Didn't pass the buck, said I would do whatever was needed myself, I just needed the guidance on what actually needed to be done. Haven't came across the situation before, it wasn't on any guidance docs that I use.

It was really strange. I was more bemused than anything. Now extremely annoyed.

Squinty wrote:

Errkal wrote:Depends what you had to ask I guess.

Just advised them of the situation and asked how to proceed with it. Didn't pass the buck, said I would do whatever was needed myself, I just needed the guidance on what actually needed to be done. Haven't came across the situation before, it wasn't on any guidance docs that I use.

It was really strange. I was more bemused than anything. Now extremely annoyed.

Yeah sounds like they are being dicks.

I would report to someone's boss if the thing they asked was especially stupid and clearly part of their basic day to day job so them not knowing it is clearly an issue, but a general query that's just a duck move.

Errkal wrote:I would report to someone's boss if the thing they asked was especially stupid and clearly part of their basic day to day job so them not knowing it is clearly an issue, but a general query that's just a duck move.

Reporting somebody for asking a stupid question is more than just a duck move, it's a strawberry floating quackers thing to do.

I bet he thinks he's mall'ard for doing it too.

He wet his beak by reporting the guy, but he is bound to escalate into even worse fowl play.

Well the guy on secondment til April has been kept on until December which is just great given how little work he does.

I'm thinking of handing my notice in and going back to my old role, my manager seems to be so incompetent to notice how little work he does.

Not only that but he's the lead on a few tasks that need doing by the end of May and he's not even started them yet.

I would normally leave him to it and let him explain why he's not done the work but the work is for a manager who's my business partner, who I've worked hard since October to build a good working relationship with.

My manager is putting a package together to make me permanent and I've made it clear I'll need more money as I'm on the lowest salary on the team but currently have the most responsibilities.

I don't think even with more money I would stay now given how poorly managed the team is.

The lady who sits next to me has been off most of the work with a bug, currently sounds like she is coughing up a lung and has already been sick today (luckily not anywhere near the desk!).

She is in because she’s worried about her sickness record.

Thanks Bradford Factor! I am really enjoying sitting next to the living dead and am looking forward to catching this disease myself! What a successful system it is!