Have you ever been given an assignment, but not given some of the most important tools needed to successfully complete the assignment?

All the time! My office is so inefficient and disorganized! Makes me cringe and twitch! ... and it’s an Accounting Firm!!

It is hard for some people to put themselves in others’ shoes. My mom is a teacher, who substituted for a while, so I kinda know what you’re going through. Teachers a lot of time take so much out of their pocket to do their job; it is really incredible. The only thing you can do is suck it up. If you like teaching, get to the point where you have your own classroom and then you can write for grants to fund your lessons.

@lilikoi You bet they have to get a lot of stuff out of their own money. It’s a disgrace.

Sure, we had to rig up some dressings and implements for some procedures depending on the patient and what cuts the hospital had made that week.

Yes! In the current job I hold now. They literally threw me in this office and said, “Here’s your job, do it and figure it out.” Thankfully I had some prior knowledge and interest in the subject, otherwise I’d be the most stressed out person in the building!

Happens all the time. For awhile I worked in a prison for adolescent boys. They kept telling me “You can’t do that!” and “You can’t do that, either!” so I asked for a rulebook.
The honcho guy looked askance and said, “You kind of learn the rules by osmosis.”
Yeah. If I didn’t get fired first. Sheeit.

@Kokoro Basically that’s how my last job went. The gal who was supposed to train me….well, basically her idea of training was to just continue doing her job while I watched. For a MONTH! No hands on. Then I got in trouble for not knowing what I “should have” known by then…..

I once worked at a Fortune 500 company as an Accountant in the IS area…my main role was creating budgets and forecasts for certain shared services. Shortly after I started, my boss assigned me the duty of working with IS Procurement (which she also oversaw) to document purchasing procedures, as I had experience in a previous company documenting data entry procedures for the implementation of new Accounting software. So, I began the project, and then a week later, my boss’ father passed away unexpectedly and she took over a month off…the month in which the bulk of my project was to be done. So, I sat with the procurement staff, got them to walk me through the various steps and documented them. I kept a log of my deliverable dates and gave my boss the completed project and timeline when she got back. Well, apparently, what I did was not at all what she wanted done, and she wasn’t happy that I didn’t email her on the deliverable dates (instead of keeping a log), even though she didn’t check her email (she just wanted a record so she could make sure I was meeting my appointed deliverable dates I guess, which she couldn’t really do with a log, because you know, I could have fudged the dates), and even after the fact, I never really got a good explanation of what it was that she wished I’d done differently. She had very specific guidelines as to how she wanted the result to appear, but she never imparted that to me, then blamed me when I didn’t read her mind.

After the fact, I found out that a couple other people had tried to document the Procurement procedures and met the same end, but no one told me that before, because everyone was scared of this person. As time went on, I found out why. One thing she insisted on was a white board in your cubicle on which you would write down where you were going to be if you were ever away from your desk for more than a minute. So, sometimes I’d go to the bathroom and not write it down, then a week later, I’d hear that so and so came up to my desk when I wasn’t there, and because I wasn’t there and it didn’t say where I was on my white board, they bothered one of my co-workers. I figured out that this was an environment where success equated with tattling and giving up information on others…everyone knew if they wanted to stay on my boss’ good side, the best way to do it was to get someone else in trouble. But I found out it wasn’t just my department that she had wrapped around her little finger. Because I did budgets for certain shared services, I essentially provided information to several key managers within the IS department, people who were at a supervisory level who could speak to my ability to get the job done (regardless of what my boss thought). So, after I had been laid off from that job and had a really good lead on a great job, I hit a sticking point that I couldn’t get a reference from my former employer…basically there was a company policy that stated that the company would ONLY provide employment verifications via an 800 #, so even if we’d had the best imaginable working relationship, she wouldn’t have given me a reference. So, I emailed one of the managers whom I supported and asked him if he could give me a reference, and instead of hearing back from him, I heard back from my former boss, who told me it was against corporate policy. I realized from what I had to go through that basically anyone in the entire IS department went to her about everything, good or bad related to one of her employees, because that’s how she wanted it.

I don’t know how she got that powerful, but I was glad to be out of there. I was really stuck there because I took this job which paid a lot less than my previous job and was a step backwards in title as well, yet in my boss’ estimation, I wasn’t meeting her expectations. More than once I was told that I should have known how to do something I’d never done before. I honestly think she felt I should be de-moted, even though I was already working well below my capabilities, whereas I was trying to get back to where I had once been. I applied for a job in another department that had NOTHING to do with IS, and it would have been working for a person who just came on board, so there was no existing relationship. And one day my manager asked me about having applied for that job…seems she set up a lunch appointment to get to know this other person and my name “came up”...as you can guess, I didn’t get that job. I was basically at the mercy of a person who had tons of expectations, but zero ability or desire to communicate what they were or to show me what her idea of “success” looked like, who also had everyone in the entire Fortune 500 company on a leash to ensure that she was able to determine my future.

@dalepetrie Man. My heart goes out to you. That’s pretty much like how Boeing operates. If you give your life up to it, that place will chew you up and spit you out. It completely warps almost any decency you have.

@Val123 – A lot of the bigger companies are like that. The whole key to success has nothing to do with what you do, and everything to do with who you know. I so prefer to work in smaller companies where I just roll up my sleeves and do the work, you know? I can say though that I learned a lot about what to stay away from in future job searches. Like right now I’m up for a job with Citi, and I was really concerned because it seemed like that might be a corporate nightmare environment, so when I interviewed, I asked a few questions and found some really good common ground with the hiring manager. He too hates that kind of corporate mindset, and as it happens, this is just one small offshoot, something the company purchased, that really has very little interaction with the company at large, so it’s run like a small company. so, my experience in a way paid off there because 1, I was able to know what questions to ask, and 2, it allowed me to find a common ground for conversation with the guy who will be making the hiring decision. I just remember, I had come from my last 2 jobs being small organizations where I pretty much was the Accounting department, and there was never a sense of “that’s not my job,” you just did what you had to do to get the work done and keep the business chugging along. So, I didn’t really get that at first that in this larger company, these are things you do, these are things you don’t, these are people you talk to, these are people you don’t, and success is defined by impressing the right people.

My first real clue came when I was told that “there is no reality, only perception.” That was so backwards from the way I think. Essentially her philosophy was that appearances were more important than reality. Then one time my boss’ boss asked me for something, and I emailed it to him, and a couple days later, my boss came down on me, saying that I NEVER email her boss directly, everything has to go through her. No one ever gave me some hierarchy chart that said, these are the people you need to please, these are the people you can push around, these are the people who can push you around, and these are the people you never talk to directly…rather you go through these channels. It was definitely soul crushing and I actually celebrated the night I got laid off. It really made me understand what people mean when they talk about corporate politics. And it paid the bills.

I have been forced to use some pretty out dated software to perform my job duties and its cost me money time and time again. Eventually the company upgraded the software, but it took alot of complaining and even cost some people their jobs, but i stuck it out and pulled thru okay.

Some large companies require employees to purchase their own office supplies due to budget cuts.

@dalepetrie, I can so relate to what you posted. I’m very fortunate to be on a team where reason and productivity prevails, and management is too busy to micromanage, but other areas are very political and deliberately don’t play well with others.

I’m taking a writing class right now towards my major, and the professor is sweet, but a little…off. She gives us the assignment for the next paper without telling us in concrete terms what the assignment is about. All of us leave scratching our heads and attempting to decipher the metaphors she uses in class. I would say the knowledge of what’s expected from an assignment is an essential tool, and yeah, it’s like playing a game of roulette attempting to get it done.

Yes. Many employers simply expect the employer to make do, or provide whatever supplies are necessary. This is not uncommon.

@PandoraBoxx – Yeah, my wife’s cousin used to work for Qwest Communications, and they made their employees buy their own office supplies. All the while the working stiffs had to shell out retail for pens the company could have bought in bulk, their CEO was making millions insider trading. Gotta love the corporate mindset.