Work colleagues

[Miguel Sanchez]

My manager is an idiot, a coward and I remain convinced he's a plant from a competitor trying to get us shut down.

[Bairnardo]

My old work was good for these things. It was rare that folk left so mostly there was a gift. I benefitted from a significant volume of good quality whisky, and cards were expected to be filled with no holds barred abuse. 

[TxRover]

2 hours ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

My manager is an idiot, a coward and I remain convinced he's a plant from a competitor trying to get us shut down.

Never attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by stupidity.

[Swarley]

9 hours ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

My manager is an idiot, a coward and I remain convinced he's a plant from a competitor trying to get us shut down.

^^^ was caught reading P&B on a work computer and received a formal warning. 

Few things worse than a piss poor manager. I've never had one (as yet) but I sympathise with people like you who have. 

[HeWhoWalksBehindTheRows]

On 13/06/2023 at 10:20, hk blues said:

Aye - if there was such a things as sponsoring an unknown bloke off the internet then the Prof. would be a shoo-in for P&B. 

I'm Team Milky Gem.

Many thanks. 

[TheScarf]

On 26/05/2023 at 12:14, TheScarf said:

I feel like I might need to grass my direct colleague in to my boss very soon.

I've worked with him for 2 and a half years and he's a fat, lazy c**t.  He's rude to other members of staff intentionally so that they avoid him and come to me for help, meaning I have more work to do while he can sit at home doing f**k all, fingering his arse.

He's worked here longer than me but we're on the same paygrade (which he's at the top of so gets 2 grand a year more than me) but it's public sector so he knows the chances of him getting sacked for his performance is virtually zero.

He also strolls in (when we're both in the office) whenever he wants and always leaves early.  Just a total gimp of a man.

Edit - I should add, our boss is physically 200 miles away so has no sight of this.

Said colleague of mine, the day after i typed this, was off for 5 weeks with Covid.

He messaged me yesterday incandescent that his absence, along with his 3 week absence in February with gout , has triggered a meeting with HR about his attendance.

'I'm getting punished for being ill' was his exact words to me.

Well no m8, these attendance/sickness quotas are there for a reason. If they didn't exist, folk like you would take 2/3 weeks off 'sick' all the time and you'd never be in work.  You're paid to come in to work and do your job.  Companies can't employ people who are too sick to work, you utter fud.

[scottsdad]

1 minute ago, TheScarf said:

Said colleague of mine, the day after i typed this, was off for 5 weeks with Covid.

He messaged me yesterday incandescent that his absence, along with his 3 week absence in February with gout , has triggered a meeting with HR about his attendance.

'I'm getting punished for being ill' was his exact words to me.

Well no m8, these attendance/sickness quotas are there for a reason. If they didn't exist, folk like you would take 2/3 weeks off 'sick' all the time and you'd never be in work.  You're paid to come in to work and do your job.  Companies can't employ people who are too sick to work, you utter fud.

It'll be an occupational health meeting. I'd hardly say it is a punishment - I had one similar when I came back to work in 2009, after being off for 14 weeks with a virus that attacked my chest.

[TheScarf]

Just now, scottsdad said:

It'll be an occupational health meeting. I'd hardly say it is a punishment - I had one similar when I came back to work in 2009, after being off for 14 weeks with a virus that attacked my chest.

Aye it's a 'Health and Wellbeing' meeting they call it. But companies need a trigger point, which is what he's upset about.

[Swarley]

20 minutes ago, TheScarf said:

Aye it's a 'Health and Wellbeing' meeting they call it. But companies need a trigger point, which is what he's upset about.

He's upset because he's at it and he thinks they are onto him. If it's a decent company it'll be exactly what you say and just them checking that he's ok and whether he needs any further support etc. 

[scottsdad]

When I had mine, I was on the mend. They sent me to their own specialist who agreed with my own doctor. I was back at work a couple of weeks later. 

The whole thing was very much around how to support me. 

[jimbaxters]

1 hour ago, TheScarf said:

Said colleague of mine, the day after i typed this, was off for 5 weeks with Covid.

He messaged me yesterday incandescent that his absence, along with his 3 week absence in February with gout , has triggered a meeting with HR about his attendance.

'I'm getting punished for being ill' was his exact words to me.

Well no m8, these attendance/sickness quotas are there for a reason. If they didn't exist, folk like you would take 2/3 weeks off 'sick' all the time and you'd never be in work.  You're paid to come in to work and do your job.  Companies can't employ people who are too sick to work, you utter fud.

This is the crux of the problem in that by saying you're sick or getting a doctor's line then nothing is allowed to be said.

I'm blessed with good health (so far) and therefore I am always at work but there are colleagues (teachers) who I absolutely know will be absent circa 20 days each academic year, a fair whack of which will be lead swinging. Now anyone can be ill but for the life of me, I cannot envisage me saying the night before (usually Thursday or Sunday evening) that I will be too sick to come to work tomorrow. That happens regularly here. Italians are utter wimps with sickness but it's still infuriating.

 

Edited July 5, 2023 by jimbaxters

[Netan Sansara]

22 minutes ago, jimbaxters said:

This is the crux of the problem in that by saying you're sick or getting a doctor's line then nothing is allowed to be said.

I'm blessed with good health (so far) and therefore I am always at work but there are colleagues (teachers) who I absolutely know will be absent circa 20 days each academic year, a fair whack of which will be lead swinging. Now anyone can be ill but for the life of me, I cannot envisage me saying the night before (usually Thursday or Sunday evening) that I will be too sick to come to work tomorrow. That happens regularly here. Italians are utter wimps with sickness but it's still infuriating.

 

Was always a big thing in my German office as well. People would start wearing a scarf indoors and you knew they’d be off for a few days as soon as you saw that. An Italian guy at my work was off for a week once because he “wore thin soled shoes on a cold marble floor” which obviously made him insanely ill. 

[jimbaxters]

2 minutes ago, Netan Sansara said:

Was always a big thing in my German office as well. People would start wearing a scarf indoors and you knew they’d be off for a few days as soon as you saw that. An Italian guy at my work was off for a week once because he “wore thin soled shoes on a cold marble floor” which obviously made him insanely ill. 

Hahaha. they're unreal pal. One colleague was off because they had gone to the gym and forgot to take a change of clothes. When he came out into the cold wearing his sweaty top it "made him sick". 

I tell my students that going outside with wet hair doesn't give you a cold and tell them to go home and tell their parents the same thing. Invariably they come back next day saying, "My father says you're wrong".

[Boghead ranter]

27 minutes ago, jimbaxters said:

This is the crux of the problem in that by saying you're sick or getting a doctor's line then nothing is allowed to be said.

I'm blessed with good health (so far) and therefore I am always at work but there are colleagues (teachers) who I absolutely know will be absent circa 20 days each academic year, a fair whack of which will be lead swinging. Now anyone can be ill but for the life of me, I cannot envisage me saying the night before (usually Thursday or Sunday evening) that I will be too sick to come to work tomorrow. That happens regularly here. Italians are utter wimps with sickness but it's still infuriating.

 

In my experience what eventually comes and bites the lead swingers on the arse is that they eventually genuinely take ill enough that they have to be off for a period long enough that messes up their clever calculations and puts them over the trigger point.  And yeah, they then claim that "they're being punished for being ill"

I managed a lassie that knew how to work our trigger point perfectly.  Like clockwork, within a couple of days of her oldest absence being too old (if you know what I mean) and dropping off the points calculation, she would be off again, taking herself back to just under the trigger total.

[jimbaxters]

Just now, Boghead ranter said:

In my experience what eventually comes and bites the lead swingers on the arse is that they eventually genuinely take ill enough that they have to be off for a period long enough that messes up their clever calculations and puts them over the trigger point.  And yeah, they then claim that "they're being punished for being ill"

I managed a lassie that knew how to work our trigger point perfectly.  Like clockwork, within a couple of days of her oldest absence being too old (if you know what I mean) and dropping off the points calculation, she would be off again, taking herself back to just under the trigger total.

And were you able to be open about the fact that you knew what she was doing?

[Swarley]

Had a colleague who said he couldn't come into the office because his garage door was broken and his car was inside the garage. He lived within 5 mins walking distance of the office.

[GordonD]

It works both ways though.

There was a woman in our office who genuinely had serious medical problems. She could be off for months at a time then would come back for a few weeks before going off again. She could have been medically retired but didn't want it and the company gave her 100% support, keeping her job open for her. She was really popular with her colleagues too, always cheerful, but sadly one time she went off sick again and we heard she had died.

[Boghead ranter]

17 minutes ago, jimbaxters said:

And were you able to be open about the fact that you knew what she was doing?

No, because A) she was always just under the trigger point level, and B) I could never confidently confirm that her illnesses weren't genuine. If I could have, my company's process would have allowed me to take action for Unauthorised Absence rather than under the Sickness Policy. But strangely enough, person who was clever enough to confidently play the trigger system was also clever enough how to self-cert her absence reason at her return to work interviews (Never anything disprovable, never anything recurring/repetitive)

[Boghead ranter]

1 minute ago, GordonD said:

It works both ways though.

There was a woman in our office who genuinely had serious medical problems. She could be off for months at a time then would come back for a few weeks before going off again. She could have been medically retired but didn't want it and the company gave her 100% support, keeping her job open for her. She was really popular with her colleagues too, always cheerful, but sadly one time she went off sick again and we heard she had died.

Yes, and that was the way it was in my work, all the trigger system was create an equal point at which the line manager had a deeper chat with the person about their absence level. People with large, one-off illnesses or longterm, on/off conditions had the chat, we talked about extra support, and that was the limit of the action. People who were just off a lot for varying reasons started at a Verbal Warning and either got better, or progressed on thru the disciplinary levels.

[hk blues]

39 minutes ago, Netan Sansara said:

An Italian guy at my work was off for a week once because he “wore thin soled shoes on a cold marble floor” which obviously made him insanely ill. 

We'll not see a better post on here today than this.