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Some days I hate my job...

SadisticPeppers

SadisticPeppers

eXtreme Business
It's days like today I really and truly wish for a big lottery win, and to retire to a tropical island somewhere, growing peppers.

Where I work having sites nationwide, each site has it's own travel coordinator. Every other site I've worked at (this making the 5th such site), the travel coordinator is only one person since we have a web portal for us to do our own travel, thus meaning in other sites, 90% of the work is done by the person doing the travelling. Not at my current site though. My current site has 4 full time employees in an office of their own, people which I can only describe as wastes of oxygen, a sentiment confirmed by most everyone whose done travel from this site. They make you do unnecessary paperwork, then have a nasty habit of losing that paperwork 2-3 days before you go on travel, only for you to rush to get everything signed again. That alone is something I've had to do no less than 3 times, and they also assume people are too stuipd to use the web portal themselves, so they insist on additional paperwork, which requires you to go to the site, jot down what flights you want to use, what hotels you want to stay at, and then they do it for you. That is the only reason i can think of form them to keep their jobs.

Also, they neglect to tell you things until after you come back from travel. Case in point: I decided to park at the airport for one week I was at travel last year for a certification class, since it's a well known fact that taxi service where I live is very expensive, and short of living a couple blocks from the airport, it's not worth using the taxi. It wasn't until a week after I had submitted my expense report (again something I could have done online on the web portal myself but they insisted on doing it themselves for me), that I should have taken a taxi and I wouldn't be reimbursed for parking at the airport. After a big drawn out fight, I finally got reimbursed for it.

Which brings me to the present day. In late March, I went and got certified for computer networking, and had to go through the usual cadre of doing the paperwork twice, etc. for the travel. The class went well and I got certified. Upon my return, I go to the site to do my expense report, and find that my account has been locked. I contact the travel people, and they reset my password. Despite that, I can't get in. This keeps going on back and forth, and includes me going down there twice in person only to be rebuffed (they claimed they were busy), Then today I get an e-mail, saying I'm 60 days past due on my travel card and unless I pay the full balance right away, my card will be cancelled and I will be unable to go on travel until I get a new one, which I've been told, people have to go through Hell to get a new one. The balance is over $830 and it means I'll have to dip into my savings, and I'm still locked out from my account, meaning I can't do any expense reports, since they're now requiring us to do them.

Oy vey...
 
Hahaha I feel your pain. Back in the late 90's I was a Y2K compliant consultant for a big IT firm and the job was great, I was young and got to travel the country for 2 years and earned a ton of money. The thing I hated was the outsourced "travel" department. Like you they made us do tedious paperwork and submit our request to them via e-mail so they could go online and book our travel. The stupid part of it all is you have IT guys capable of designing and configuring some of the largest WAN's in the country filling out forms instead of using the online option? Most of the time I end up walking the girl on the travel desk through how to use the software when she called and said I can't book that flight or get a specific seat.

As a team lead on a few projects I decided to fight back by logging and asking my entire team to log all time spent filling out forms and calling the travel desk (long hold times) and all travel related issues for the entire project. By the end of the 6 month project we logged over 40 hours. If you calculate that amount of time by what we charge the client the company has lost over $20k.

I took that full report to my director and said if you calculate that amount by 6 teams for a year you could by the silly Travel company!!

About a year later although I wasn't with the firm they actually fired the outsourced travel agency and went with an all online portal for consultants. Seems like your firm is going backward.
 
LGHT said:
Seems like your firm is going backward.
Click to expand...

Sure felt that way too. For all the other travel I've done prior to coming to this site, it was so smooth, and I had no problem with it. I did all the travel myself, booked it all, got the seats I wanted, everything. I swear these four in that office are on there because the powers that be couldn't find anywhere else to put them, since my organization is notorious for not firing anyone unless they do something blatantly illegal or which gets egg on the face of management in the public's eye.
 
elcap1999 said:
I swear these four in that office are on there because the powers that be couldn't find anywhere else to put them, since my organization is notorious for not firing anyone unless they do something blatantly illegal or which gets egg on the face of management in the public's eye.
Click to expand...

I'm sure that's it, but in all honesty that type of "commitment" to useless employees is why a lot of big companies loose their %@% in the long run. I love firing dead beats. Come to think of it I've probably fired more than 20 people in my career and found it actually helps the department because the lucky few realize they need to work or they will be on the chopping block!!
 
I honestly wish I were in a position to fire people, but where I work, politics and unions get in the way quick, fast, and in a hurry. As I mentioned, the only real way someone can get fired is for them to do something overtly illegal, or make the upper management look bad in the face of the public. Otherwise, we'd need to have a mountain of evidence showing this person was willfully shirking their job duties over a very long period of time usually a period of years.

Two perfect examples: I took over a major project from another employee because that employee was discovered to be burning copyrighted DVD's on work time, using work equipment, and with discs purchased by department funds, then selling them. They did an internal investigation and had him dead to rights in terms of evidence. They gave him a choice to either quit, or stay on and face a formal police inquiry, so he opted to quit. The officer who did the investigation on him said that the kid was lucky he didn't go to trial and catch the federal judge on a bad day, because the fines would have been easily been in the millions, and each copy he made could've been a consecutive charge. Considering the number of copies he made, that sentence could've easily stretched decades. And this is after he was already busted for looking at gay porn on work time, and suspended without pay.

Second example involved a guy who was caught multiple times by multiple people, including his supervisor, and their boss, sleeping at his desk. He'd already been suspended twice, the second time for a month. Finally, our department chief caught him yet again sleeping at his desk after warning him not to do so again, and fired him. Surprisingly, the guy sued to get his job back, claiming he had a previously undiagnosed sleep disorder, and just hadn't gotten around to getting it diagnosed yet. Our attorneys argued that he could've gotten tested for it during either one of his two suspensions, but in a fluke of the justice system, the judge ordered that the guy get his job back with full back-pay. Even so, after he came back, everybody just gave him looks and just kept their distance from him.

So yeah, getting people fired where I work is quite a monumental task, especially after they get past their one-year probationary period.
 
I just got headbutted in the mouth by a first grader. Not only will he be back in school tomorrow, I get to walk him to the FFA's barnyard day. With a fat lip.
 
Ohh noo you said the "U" as in Union word. Enough said. I will never work for a company that has a Union. Those places are like a roach motel as you checkin and never check out. Most employees are great and work hard, but like your example shows if someone makes the mistake of hiring a dead beat it's next to impossible to get rid of them.

Reminds me of the LAUSD school system here in California and that guy they caught spoon feeding semen to kids. Although the guy quit and was later arrested because of the Union deal he is STILL getting paid behind bars lol. Gotta love Unions..
 
And the irony of the whole thing is, the unions here have virtually no teeth, since it's illegal for federal employees to go on strike (remember the air traffic controllers that Reagan fired, even though they were union?) They're all bark and no bite but some managers here still fear them. The ones that don't tend not to last long since the powers that be don't like people who "make waves" (ie. the managers who do the job they're supposed to)
 
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