If you recall I have five employees that are telecommuters. They have the luxury of working from home. As part of my duties as their supervisor I must make periodic home inspections to make sure everything is on the up and up. What IÂ’m checking for is to make sure that all the equipment that the company gave them to use is there and in working condition and that they are following the agreement they signed to be eligible to work from home. This includes:

-Verifying that the floor plan for their home office is correct.
-Confirm that work area is a separate space from common living area of home.
-Confirm that work area has a door with working lock.
-Confirm file cabinet has a working lock.
-Verify it is a distraction free environment (no television, pets, children or elderly they have to take care of.)
-Verify that homeownerÂ’s/renterÂ’s insurance policy is active.
-Verify working Smoke Detector.

We actually have a checklist we have to go down. If they fail the inspection, then they have to return to working out of the home.

Today I had to do my first round of home visits. IE The Inspection! Of course, to make sure that they donÂ’t cheat, itÂ’s a surprise inspection. Meaning, I just show up during the times they are supposed to be working and make sure everything is on the up and up. The whole thing is rather uncomfortable for everyone involved. I really donÂ’t want to go in their house, and they really donÂ’t want to just surprise them by stopping by, especially if itÂ’s a bad house day.

Of course there is some fun to be had. I hit the first minionÂ’s home. Everything was squared away and fine. She had all the information I needed and everything matched as it should. When I went to check the smoke detector, it wouldnÂ’t go off. Of course she gave me the song and dance that the battery had been unplugged because of a cooking incident. Once the battery was plugged back in, it worked just fine. However, I couldnÂ’t bypass this opportunity to tell her that I was going to have to fail her because it hadnÂ’t been plugged in. At first she believed me, but because I was in a hurry to get out of the house, I let her know right away that I was kidding.

One of the houses I went to really threw me for a loop. Management has joked about going to the houses and seeing people working in their pajamas. I just never thought I would actually see it. Nope, when I rang the doorbell my minion answered the door in her pajamas. She had everything on the up and up, but it just made me a tad bit more uncomfortable. I was really glad that one of my Peers was with me, just for proprieties sake. And trust me, this is the only time you will ever hear me be honestly thankful for this peer, because she in general gets on my nerves.

One of my minions is a smoker. When I visited her, I saw that she had ashtrays next to her computer. Our company has a very strict no smoking on company property policy. I had her going that I was going to have to revoke her work from home privileges because she was smoking while on the company time. I explained that, even though she is at home, the equipment belongs to the company and that while she is on the clock, she is not allowed to smoke. Because she was in violation of that, I had to bring her home. I even went so far as to show her in the agreement papers she signed; it states she must follow all company policies. I had her going pretty good.

I let her off the hook as I was walking out the door. We all had a chuckle about it, of course she was relieved. She didnÂ’t want to have to go back to working in the office.

So my first set of home visits went well, IÂ’d still rather not do them, but if I have to, I hope they all go this well.

Posted by: Contagion at 07:06 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Sometimes people meet just don’t get along. It could be because of political or religious beliefs. Maybe it’s because of an incident in their past, such as a perceived slight or insult. Sometimes it’s just because their personalities clash. I’m sure we’ve all seen this. Ron meets Jerry for the first time at a friend’s house. Afterwards while speaking with the mutual friend they make the comments, “I don’t know, I just don’t like that guy. He’s a total douchebag.” These are the most fun, because they can spiral out of control quickly. They almost look for things to not like each other about.

Now these two can be even more “fun” in the workplace. Yea, you may not have to like each other, but you have to work together. They will do good for a while, and then something will blow up and they will drag everyone they know into it.

Well, I have this situation at work, and me being me, I couldnÂ’t help but to take advantage of it for nothing more than to make myself laugh. I have a Peer which henceforth shall be known as Talkative Peer (she never shuts up and turns a 15 minute meeting into a 2 hour meeting), who has a personality clash with another member of management that will be from now on referenced as Sports Girl, because she coaches and plays a lot of sports. Sports Girl and Talkative Peer have disliked each other for at least 3 years. They have always clashed and sometimes the arguments get so involved it was brought to staff meetings to resolve. We donÂ’t dare let them be in the same room alone. Yes, they hate each other that much.

Sports Girl used to be a peer, but she took a voluntary re-assignment to an Inventory Management position (similar to one I used to have). She didnÂ’t like the responsibility of having direct reports. In her position, we report to the same asst. manager. On Friday before I left for the weekend, they dropped the bomb on us that our current asst. manager is being moved to the other department in the office, and my entire department is going to report to one asst. manager, instead of two. Because of this Sports Girl is now going to have to report to someone at my level instead of an asst. manager.

IÂ’m sure you see where this is going, but IÂ’m going to finish the story anyway.

I walk up to Sports Girl this afternoon and say to her, “I hear you are going to be reporting to Talkative Peer” (Talkative peer has other management reporting to her, so this is a plausible situation.) Sports Girl eyes grew three times their size, her jaw fell into her lap, the blood drained from her face leaving her once copper tanned skin the moon pale look of a night shifting computer geek that only sees the sun when he has to wonder to the comic book store to buy the latest limited edition Laura Croft action figure to “play” with.

She looks at me with a horror that I had truly never seen in any humans eyes before in my life. Tears started forming, and her eyes became bloodshot. You could actually watch as the tiny veins filled causing the read lines to spread across the sclera (White part of the eye). Her breathing increased and small beads of sweat started to form on her forehead. In a very thin and wispy voice she says, “wh-what?”

Now I could have been nice and let her off at this point, but to be honest IÂ’m not that nice. So I said:

“You’re going to be reporting to Talkative Peer.”

Her eyes almost rolled back in her head and she wobbled a little in her chair.

Her, “Really?”

At this point, before it turned into a medical emergency because she was starting to hyperventilate. I let her off the hook with a, “Nah, I’m just horsing around.”

Her look of horror contorts into a glare of anger. Her wide open eyes narrow, her almost corpse like complexion flushes back to an angry red. I swear you could almost see the veins in her eyes bulge! Her muscles clench as if sheÂ’s getting ready to try to attempt to remove an arm and beat me with it.

“THAT’S NOT FUNNY!!!!”

Me, “The hell it’s not!” Meanwhile I’m barely able to stay upright from the laughter. The rapid and complete change of moods from content in work, to deep seeded fear and finally to rage in under 30 seconds. The complete physical transformation that went with it was HILARIOUS!

I’m holding onto the edge of her desk because I’m laughing hard enough to get dizzy. I’m trying not to laugh so loudly I distract the entire office, so I’m trying to hold it in. Watching me laugh so hard, she started laughing. Called me a jerk and said that “I was a real bastard” She only got away with the last one because I actually like her.

She told me that since Friday when she heard about this whole issue, she had feared that was what was going to happen to her. So when I verbalized her “worst fears” the thought that they wouldn’t have told her first ever crossed her mind. We then had a brief conversation about who she doesn’t want to have as a boss. She said she would rather have me then most of my peers. I told her she was a damn liar. Of course that got a chuckle out of her.

This is good, because sheÂ’s a bit uptight. Okay you could put a lump of coal up her arse and get a diamond in 24 hours.

Posted by: Contagion at 05:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 971 words, total size 5 kb.

Wow, I’ve been really neglectful. Over the last couple of days, I actually started going down my blogroll… the one that is mislabeled “Blogs I regularly read”.

WOW. Just wow.

I knew that I had let my job kind of take over things in my life and that my blogging has really taken a dive for it. That includes reading and keeping up with my regulars. As IÂ’ve gone through and started clicking on links, I see that some blogs havenÂ’t been updated in years. Some have ceased to exist or the ownership has changed hands. Or it had been so long since I had been there that when I started reading posts I realized that a lot of big things have happened to these people and I just had no clue!

WOW.

Heck some of the blogs I used to comment on daily seem to have died to the point that the post maybe once or twice a week as opposed to once or twice a day.

Then again, the same thing goes for me. Then I realized what happened. I had “unauthorized” people from work find my blog. These are people that if they read my blog and went back and said something in the office, it would get me in trouble. Because of these people I really decided that I needed to scale back and not blog about some of the stuff I was… mainly work. Well those individuals that found me are no longer with the company or in my office and I just never got out of “private mode”

Yes, I still blogged some about work, but when was the last time I shared a really good Minion story. Hell when was the last time I even referred to my people as minions?

Well since I am fresh out of give a damn about work. IÂ’m turning the filters off and actually going to try to make some rounds from now on. Maybe not as actively as I was before as I do have some resemblance of a life, but more than theÂ… oh say NEVERÂ… that I have been doing.

IÂ’m gonna start with trimming the MIA from my blogroll and updating the new sites on there.

Posted by: Contagion at 03:48 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 379 words, total size 2 kb.

1 I've been so busy it was a choice between blogging or reading blogs. I decided to just keep throwing posts out there. Although I had to finally open my feed reader and divide all my blog reading into days. This is just a sucky way to do it, but at least I can manage to hit most blogs I want to read once a week. If you can find more hours I can add to my day for blog reading, I'd really appreciate it.

Posted by: Teresa at April 01, 2009 06:33 PM (ybEr8)

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Posted by: Sweecurebug at April 04, 2009 04:53 AM (3xhy+)

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Posted by: weabbike at April 10, 2009 05:05 PM (3xhy+)

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