Headless chickens

[creampuff]

Would you say most companies are organised, or people run around like headless chooks with no idea?

Prior to the oil price going down the toilet, I used to work in the oil and gas industry. I thought it was very organised and everyone pretty much had a clue.

Due to getting laid off, I took a general type job. Now nobody has any idea. Not only no idea, but they create work such that I spend a lot of time replying to internal emails which is totally unbillable and I have to drop doing billable work. Today I got 42 emails addressed to me. In the oil industry I was client rep for about a £700 million project, everything technical from the contractors landed on my desk and usually my desk only. I never got anywhere near 42 emails a day.

Now I'm dealing with stuff about 1/100,000th the value and I get 42 emails, most of which never needed to be sent. WTF????? Is everywhere like this?

[creampuff]

thainy77 said:

I'm not sure this doesn't apply to the O&G industry either, in my previous role (O&G country manager) I would receive anywhere between 150-500 emails a day, 90% of which didn't require any input from me. It's just people covering their arses.

Edited by thainy77 on Friday 20th May 07:42

As an aside, what system did you use to sort which ones could go direct to the bin, which you had to file and which ones you actually had to do something?

[creampuff]

I've almost always worked in large oil and gas outfits, either EPC contractors or operators. Never really found excessive emails to be a problem in any of them, even at lead engineer level where you have emails going up the chain and down too.

Now I work for a tiny company and oh fk are the emails annoying. The problem is every fker copies every other fker about everything (except I only send emails to people who actually will benefit from them, but that leads me to get an occasional bking from the director for not coping everybody in the office) so everyone is supposed to know the minute detail about what everyone else is doing. It's micromanagement and I hate micromanagement.

[creampuff]

Each one of the jobs we do is pretty small and one of them is in Russia and by coincidence there is some Russian or eastern Euro dude working in the office, so he can converse by email with the client or whoever it is (I can't work it out because the emails are in Russian) in his native language. So every time this projects fires up again I'll get a string of fking emails in Russian which I can't understand, but which are copied to the entire office, even though out of the whole office there is only one person (the Russian dude) dealing with it. Seriously, WTF is the point?!?!?

I know I'm going to get another blocking when I go in tomorrow, because there was about a 6 business hour period over two days when I didn't copy the director in on every fking thing so he didn't know if I had done my job to contact one of our clients, even though the client is dealing with me and me only and involving everybody in the office adds no value whatsoever, plus of course why would I be able to do my job anyway, because contacting a client about a £3000 job is a lot fking more tricky than managing the technical content of a £700m oil platform as per my oil job before oil went down the toilet!!!!!

Edited by creampuff on Sunday 22 May 14:41

[creampuff]

Oh jeez. This is reaching new levels of cluelessness. Now (because everyone emails every other fker in the company about everything) one guy has butt into one of my jobs only this time he emailed the client with a bright idea; only it was something I'd already talked to the client about and we jointly decided it wouldn't work. So now there is an email gone out which basically says to the client "we don't talk to each other in the office and we have no idea".

The area around me was devoid of other staff today so I've taken to humming little songs to myself as I work. I've made up some good little ditties like:

No idea
Oh now can everyone have no idea
It's no idea, no idea at all
Oh how can we have no idea?"

Another good one is:

Arse on fire
Oh arse on fire
Oh would not know if arse is on fire
Oh fire, fire, fire

[creampuff]

Not the usual volume of crap today, but I did get two monumentally stupid emails from the director and the Russian dude. This company is just barely hovering above break-even on their finances; infact this year it may well be a loss. I think I know why.

[creampuff]

Flooble said:

I've been where you are and best thing is to relax and not worry about it. Unless you are the Financial Director, leave them to it. Otherwise you'll just raise your blood pressure without reason.

Mmmm, I'm not bothered at all if the company goes under or not. They are about at break-even but with a slightly south trajectory, so even if it goes under it will take 2 or 3 years, which is longer than I care. I'm just bothered that I spend about 1.5 days a week dealing with unbillable crap, which just means that I can't get other stuff done. That and considering that the internal procedures at the company are pretty poor, I dislike being told I should or should have done this or that, the petty blame culture, when it really makes no difference to the outcome and certainly make no difference taking into account that the company is running around like headless chickens.