Work

[hallicks]

2 hours ago, DavidB6937 said:

Guys this is WORK not WANK.

[Slapnut]

On 8/5/2026 at 12:42 PM, Slapnut said:

Nobody saying 67 every few minutes and asking me what I'd do if I cummed myself in work though, so that's a win.

Somebody said 67 today. I'm going on the dole.

[Chris B]

What would you do if you cummed yourself in the job centre, though?

[DavidB6937]

Got someone new at work called Oba. This may be my biggest test to remain professional in my career.

[BomberPat]

I'm absolutely fed up with it all, and the new academic year hasn't even started.

The university I work for is going through it's third restructure and fourth or fifth round of redundancies in five years. Our boss, who was supporting the restructure and doing a good job of defining what our role would be at the end of it, died suddenly of a stroke back in June. In terms of line management structure, there were two people between him and me - both have taken voluntary severance, with my line manager leaving tomorrow. Another member of our team will become my line manager, but she's on leave for two weeks, so I have effectively no management above me whatsoever.

Between voluntary severance and redundancies, our team has been cut in half. The university is split into two faculties, and the larger of the two is where I work; we would have struggled at this time of year when there were seven or eight of us, and there are currently four, one of whom is part-time. 

 

When our old boss was still with us, he was explaining that because we would be a much smaller team, part of the new structure meant we would no longer have as much proactive, project-based, or relationship-building responsibilities, and would become largely a reactive, "service desk" model of just responding to enquiries, but that, within that structure, we would be much more empowered to say, "no, this isn't our job, find someone else to do it" or "no, you haven't followed the policy, go away and do it properly next time". But to do that I would need to know what the job is under this new structure, to know what the boundaries of it are, and we just have no idea. 

At no point has anyone in management acknowledged how damaging this has been to our team. There hasn't been any effort to address the fact that an essential part of how the university operates is now down to not even a skeleton crew, with zero management, leadership or direction. They never even reached out to us with condolences when we lost our boss and friend. And I just left a training session that I was only told was happening three minutes before it started, in which they repeatedly suggested we address our questions to people who have already left the university, and were surprised to hear there's nobody acting up or filling those roles, that we have no management. Which means nobody's telling any of the other departments that we've lost half our team. So we're going into a new academic year, the most chaotic time possible, with half the resources we should have, zero direction, and the expectation that we will be able to provide the same level of service as when there were twice as many as us. It's going to be a shitshow.

The day-to-day of it is getting miserable too. The manager leaving tomorrow is someone I have really enjoyed working with, and I'm not looking forward to exchanging that relationship for working more closely with a manager who I like, but whose management style I don't really get on with. And the other full-time member of our team has just become unbearable - he was always hard work, but now he can't get through a meeting without derailing it with unrelated complaints, usually bemoaning how busy he is, as if he's the only one of us affected by all of this, and generally accidentally letting slip in the middle of his rants that he doesn't know how to do a job that he should have been doing the whole time (I've long suspected he doesn't do half the work he's supposed to, and this seems to be proving me right).

On top of that, I've started to get emails from students that have nothing to do with my job. I am not student support, I don't deal with students at all beyond bursary applications. I get it when a bursary applicant emails me with a question about something else, as I'm someone at the university that they've been emailing, and I don't expect them to be across what my responsibilities are, but when it's a student with no connection to my work, with a question that's nothing to do with my work, I have to wonder who the fuck is giving out my email address as a point of contact and why.


It's not going to get any better.

[westlondonmist]

In a organisation wide teams meeting (3000 employees and only the first 999 could get in). Been told by the Chief Exec our reorg isn't a reorganisation, it's a change of mindset. What a cunt. A group of executives talking for an hour, who's salaries and on costs equate to well over a million pounds a year managed to say absolutely fuck all despite talking for so long. 

 

Been told they'd essentially need to raise council tax by 100% or find income equal to stop this and other service cuts. 

Edited September 8 by westlondonmist

[BomberPat]

fucking exhausted today. Everyone's a dickhead. 

Someone came in for an interview a couple of months ago, somehow got wind that somebody else who interviewed was given permission to claim for travel expenses, so insisted they be allowed to as well. For context, the person who was given permission got a flight to London from Dundee, the guy complaining took a twenty minute train. He's also claimed for lunch, which I don't think he was entitled to, but the head of the school he was interviewing for permitted it, and asked that I send him the appropriate paperwork.

I sent him the claim form, and a few weeks later he sent a shitty email saying "still not paid" with a sad emoji. Not the model of professionalism. I said we'd never received the expense claim back, it turns out he'd printed it out and posted it, and not told us. Our team largely works remotely, we're not a regularly manned office, and we don't get regular post. Nobody ever posts us anything, so we're not in the habit of checking the post room. This bloke, rather than filling in an Excel spreadsheet and returning it by email to either the person who emailed it to him, or to the email address it explicitly tells you to send it to on the form, printed it out, filled it in by post, half-guessed the right address to send it to, and then mailed it to us without thinking to reply to my email saying that's what he'd done.

One of my colleagues was in the office when I found this out, and helpfully went and collected his form and scanned it for me to upload to Payroll for processing. Payroll queried it, because he hadn't submitted proper itemised receipts with his claim. He was claiming £10 for lunch, but the receipt associated with it was for a single payment of £27, wasn't itemised, no indication whatsoever of where it was from, what it was for, or how it related to his claim. 

I emailed him to say that we hadn't been able to process his claim because of this, and he replied saying "life's too short", and then threatening to contact our new Vice Chancellor to complain about how badly external candidates are treated. Proper dickhead behaviour. I intended to reply to that email with a copy of his claim and his receipt, making it clear that they didn't match up, but I've got more important things to be doing than constantly dealing with this knob, so I had left it a few days.

Today, he emailed threatening to take us to county court to get his expenses repaid, and that we would incur this court cost, and all this additional legal action he was threatening if he didn't get his money back within 48 hours. What happened to "life's too short", then? 

 

All this over a claim for less than forty quid, that he'd have had back months ago if he'd just actually done what he was asked to do. 

Edited yesterday at 12:57 PM by BomberPat

[DavidB6937]

Send it in pennies the stupid git.

[westlondonmist]

I don't really understand getting lunch paid for if at an interview. I did a recruitment day once at a call centre where there was like a 100 people so they put sandwiches out etc but that's it. Are people who apply to jobs at colleges and universities just have a high opinions of themselves and expect all this?

Edited yesterday at 01:15 PM by westlondonmist

[gmoney]

Let the cunt take it to court. You've got record that he didn't fill it out properly and of him saying he couldn't be arsed to do it properly when it was pointed out to him. Not exactly a slam dunk case. 

Edited yesterday at 01:30 PM by gmoney

[BomberPat]

5 minutes ago, westlondonmist said:

Are people who apply to jobs at colleges and universities just have a high opinions of themselves and expect all this?

I think that's part of it. A lot of university staff, especially those who have been around a long time, just have an expectation that every little thing will be done for them, and resent having to lift a finger themselves.

I get claiming for food if you've had to travel for work, if you're at a conference, staying overnight, anything like that. This bloke has been on a train for less than an hour, and come in for an interview day, with a decent break for lunch. If he wouldn't ordinarily pay for lunch on a working day, there's nothing stopping him packing a lunch at home and bringing it with him. It he would ordinarily pay for lunch on a working day, why are we paying for this one?

He's replied again, saying that my response was unsatisfactory and that he will "let a district judge decide". The email is, as usual, really shitty, full of spelling errors, and doesn't engage with anything I actually said. He just keeps repeating that things are "unsatisfactory" or a bad experience, or how badly he's been treated, without ever addressing the points that he hasn't actually submitted any of the paperwork I asked for, and hasn't engaged with any of the possible solutions.

I would put money on, somewhere down the line, a ridiculous ChatGPT-generated "legal challenge" showing up. He seems the type.

[davertfnewman]

What ever happened to the uni lecturer who would come in late, fuck about in the office for a bit, head down to the union bar and neck a pint before their first lecture, then realised they'd forgotten to photocopy something they planned on handing out and head off in a small storm of belches and "Fuck!"s? Rest in peace, Gordon.

[Monkee]

God, I hate people like this - entitled, can’t follow simple process, blame others for their incompetency, go all Karen when the ball is actually in their court.

I’d just keep doing a copy and paste of what he needs to do to get his money. I recently discovered the concept of “Don’t JADE” - justify, argue, defend, explain. The idea is that once you’ve given someone a reasonable answer or boundary, you don’t keep trying to convince them that you’re right. Every extra explanation gives them another detail to challenge and turns the interaction into a negotiation.

This is how I’m trying to manage difficult people without getting myself worked up, stressed, apologising when I don’t need to or explaining the same thing over and over again. Because, at the end of the day, “life is too short”.

[Mr_Danger]

Pretty annoyed Pat hasn’t revealed if they got the job or not.

A girl was kicking off on the local Facebook page that she had done a 4 hour shift at a local bar restaurant on a trial basis not gotten the job and then told the 4 hours was an unpaid trial. Pretty fucking Tory of them if you ask me but the feed was full of bootlickers who loved working for free. Now I’ve done my fair share of shitarse wrestling and even then I’d draw the line if there wasn’t at least petrol money and enough for a KFC on the way home on offer. Who is doing 4 hours of fairly menial labour for free?

[westlondonmist]

5 hours ago, BomberPat said:

I think that's part of it. A lot of university staff, especially those who have been around a long time, just have an expectation that every little thing will be done for them, and resent having to lift a finger themselves.

I get claiming for food if you've had to travel for work, if you're at a conference, staying overnight, anything like that. This bloke has been on a train for less than an hour, and come in for an interview day, with a decent break for lunch. If he wouldn't ordinarily pay for lunch on a working day, there's nothing stopping him packing a lunch at home and bringing it with him. It he would ordinarily pay for lunch on a working day, why are we paying for this one?

He's replied again, saying that my response was unsatisfactory and that he will "let a district judge decide". The email is, as usual, really shitty, full of spelling errors, and doesn't engage with anything I actually said. He just keeps repeating that things are "unsatisfactory" or a bad experience, or how badly he's been treated, without ever addressing the points that he hasn't actually submitted any of the paperwork I asked for, and hasn't engaged with any of the possible solutions.

I would put money on, somewhere down the line, a ridiculous ChatGPT-generated "legal challenge" showing up. He seems the type.

I'm not sure if he's a bell end who likes to intididate using faux threats or just an idiot thinking that he wouldn't have to pay for the county court costs. Even if he won there's a very good chance he'd pay all his fees himself.

 

1 hour ago, Mr_Danger said:

Pretty annoyed Pat hasn’t revealed if they got the job or not.

A girl was kicking off on the local Facebook page that she had done a 4 hour shift at a local bar restaurant on a trial basis not gotten the job and then told the 4 hours was an unpaid trial. Pretty fucking Tory of them if you ask me but the feed was full of bootlickers who loved working for free. Now I’ve done my fair share of shitarse wrestling and even then I’d draw the line if there wasn’t at least petrol money and enough for a KFC on the way home on offer. Who is doing 4 hours of fairly menial labour for free?

I've heard a few places like that, is it even legal? I bet it isn't. I think even pay minimum wage for the shift even if the wage if you get it is more. I've worked at one place that did a trial day (which was because the previous person dissapeared on their 3rd day during their lunch break and was partly to see if the new person was happy to stay) and the person was paid but not LLW which they'd get for subsequent days.