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  • Took a pretty heavy call from a friend this afternoon that is going through a rough time. She had an altercation with some friends in our group which I think set her off into a spiral. I had no idea about any of this. It takes a lot of courage to reach out to someone.

    I used to get affected by the same friends too, but then learned to stop putting disappointing people on a pedestal, thinking they do the same, and rely on them for emotional support and wellbeing which was always one way. I made some new friends. I discovered that healthy adult friendships actually exist and instead of being upset about certain behaviours from those people, I learned to pity that behaviour. I hope she learns this too.

    • so many many hugs

      it was a very sad day for me when I realised my family of origin would never be a support . I went non contact because of abuse, and my husband's family? I will do nothing for them anymore other than grunt oh noes when they tell sad tales. I am lucky to have a few people in my life I can rely on and I think that's what it's like. In life we only get a few people.

  • yay, I got lactose free milk and have been able to have coffee without effects , it was a bad week ... lol

  • Currently trying to organise a redundancy reference. Can't risk getting to the last stage and having someone drop out.

    Also, we are a chicken household:

  • @Seagoon Feeling really annoyed at an acting middle manager at our workplace right now.

    He's terrible at communicating. He refuses to listen to people. He makes decisions and orders people to do stuff without asking anyone if the thing he wants to do is even possible.

    There's a whole string of bad decisions as a result, and everyone else is left to clean up his mess afterwards.

    For example, there's an event that was scheduled on a particular date. An email was sent out to the people (outside the organisation) who are likely to attend.

    Before that email was sent, he decided to postpone it. Just he didn't let anyone know until after the emails were sent.

    Another example. One of my colleagues was told she had to drop everything to find leads for a new product that he decided to launch in two weeks. He then blamed her for not coming up with enough leads.

    He's decided the IT team needs to roll out a new automated reporting system right now. The IT department has already said it's not adding any features to that system because they're getting rid of it in the next year or so. They don't answer to him, and will just refuse to do it. So there's a whole series of meetings now planned because he's insisting that it has to happen.

    There's also a whole marketing campaign that the marketing team thinks is a stupid idea that won't work, because they tried it last year and it didn't work. He's insisting they do it anyway.

    And there's a whole string of decisions like this.

    The thing is, I'm not sure he's aware at just how demotivating his unique management style is to those around him.

    Sorry for the rant, I'm just feeling really frustrated right now.

    • Sounds like he's trying to justify his own job/position. Absolute wanker

      • @StudChud Even though I'm not directly in his department (thankfully!), I am affected by his decisions.

        I mentioned to a colleague today: "Have you noticed manager has a habit of springing decisions on people, and not taking things into consideration even if they have been explained to him?"

        She said yes, and gave me some of her own examples.

        So it has been noticed by people — although unfortunately the people who he answers up to are new in the role as well.

        Earlier today, I was in a meeting with Manager and some people from the business sales team.

        Marketing had wanted to run an end of financial year promotion for business customers.

        Manager overruled them and decided that they should instead run a discount campaign aimed at consumers. (It's a small team that doesn't have the resources to do both.)

        (This despite the fact that he said himself a couple of months ago that he wanted to focus more on business sales.)

        (Manager's idea is the stupid campaign they don't want to do.)

        I explained to the sales team that because the consumer discount campaign was happening — the one marketing doesn't want to do — there wouldn't be a promotional campaign for business.

        This apparently hadn't occurred to Manager, even though it was clearly explained to him. (I was in the meeting when it happened.)

        "Well, ummmm, maybe we can do both?"

        And then this afternoon I had a meeting with a colleague. One of Manager's brilliant ideas is for her to cross-promote a product from Manager's division with a product from another division.

        "Okay, well before you go too deep into this, you might just want to be aware that the IT systems in Manager's division aren't integrated with the systems from the other division."

        She gives me a mildly horrified look. What do you mean not integrated, she asks?

        "Many years ago, Manager's division used to be a completely separate organisation. So it has its own separate IT systems. That means its own customer database, its own accounting package, its own content management system. Many of the platforms are different to the ones the rest of the organisation uses.

        "Nothing is integrated.

        "IT is planning to eventually move everything across to the same systems, but in the meantime any data that you want to move from one system to the other has to be done manually.

        Her face dropped as she realised her workload was now at least triple what she had expected. Why didn't Manager tell me any of this?

        And that's a very good question...

    • hugs

      keep a diary and look for other work while you are there

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