Worst thing about your Job

Discussion Open Forum
1

No question for me. I absolutely hate it.

I hire outside law firms fairly regularly to represent our company. While I’d like to focus on the substantive work, my boss has a fixation with the costs. Sure, one should always watch costs, but this guy is fucking obsessive and totally detached from reality.

First, when hiring them I have to negotiate them down like crazy, get them to agree to deduct X% off their regular hourly rates, get them to agree to fee caps for each stage of the proceedings, etc. And, no matter how tough I am with them, if I get a 20% discount and extremely low fee caps, my boss will always chew me out, telling me it’s not good enough, I need to control costs, this goes towards my performance evaluation, etc.

Then, every month when I receive their invoices, I’m required to scrutinize them line-by-line, find items I can accuse of being excessive, so I can complain to them and bargain them down further. I must complain about every single invoice and demand a substantial reduction. Not a single invoice is ever acceptable. Seriously.

Our lawyers all know by now that we’re stingy bastards who scrutinize every detail closely and complain regularly about the bills, so they’re mostly extremely fair and honest and more than reasonable, but that doesn’t matter. If they charge $20K my boss will complain. If they charge $10K he’ll complain. If they charge $5K he’ll complain. If they wrote off $20K in legitimate fees, he’ll still complain. The dollar amount is irrelevant. It’s my job to bargain them down every time, period, regardless of how cheap they already are.

It drives me fucking mad. They hate it. I hate it. It’s almost always cheap, petty and unreasonable of us (of me, the enforcer) and we’re (I am) abusing our honest, hardworking counsel, but I have no choice. I get chewed out a few times a week for not bargaining them down enough, even though I’ve bargained them down substantially, but the fucking game must go on. . . :fume:

2

And then there’s the fact that it takes us at least 4 months to pay their invoices, or longer (despite 30 days being standard practice), and yet I’m still required to complain to them (and not vice versa) every single time.

Can I quit now?

3

Rough, MT.

The worst thing about my job is waking up at 6AM and commuting.

4

MT, get them to quote you an initial exorbitant rate say 3 times their standard, and then have them bill you for twice their rate (a demonstrable 33% saving) and then split the remaining 100% profit down the middle (so they still end up with 150% of their usual rate and you collect 50%.

Then, get them to pay you back another 10% from their line by line bill… present this as another 10% saving to the boss, so the boss retains 10%, you get 50%, and they get 140% .

Winners all round!

5

Some of the worst things about my job:

  1. Having to eat Chinese food 3 meals a day
  2. Getting poisoned by said food cooked in sewer oil so that I can’t eat for a week.
  3. Having to walk around on foot in horribly polluted cities.
  4. Having to walk around on foot in cities with killer traffic (try crossing six lanes of fast moving cars when you don’t have a crosswalk)
  5. Dealing with people who won’t give you the information you need.
  6. Having to lie all the time about what I do
  7. Having to constantly ride local buses and trains where people spit on the floor
  8. Riding a local bus for 4 hours to some gorgeous spot and having an hour if I am lucky to enjoy it before heading back for another 4 hour bus ride. Repeated daily.
  9. Having to try to communicate with people who’s accents are so strong that san-bai-jiu comes out san-bei-ju.
  10. Having to rely on such people for accurate information
  11. Dealing with oil spills, taxi strikes, car accidents (my driver hit a China Petroleum truck once) police states, oppressed minorities, altitude sickness, exhaustion, sunburn, and the worst frickin case of athlete’s foot I have ever had
  12. having to look at other people’s shit on a regular basis
6

The worst thing about my job is dealing with idiots.

7

Mother T,
Sounds like you’ve sold your soul to the devil. :frowning: I couldn’t do that (well, unless I was down to my last coins and needed a bottle really badly).

The worst thing about my jobs are:

  • being paid a year or more after the work (and that payment being dependent on others’ honesty)

  • having to read and listen to mindnumbingly boring soul-destroying drivel - oh god, the inanity, the terror of relentless boredom (yes, talking about teaching)

  • having to constantly break in new coolies

  • not getting to carry the torch of civilization in one hand and the sword in the other, nor getting to bend entire nations to my iron will

  • and finally, the lack of cavalry charges really pisses me off

8

[quote=“urodacus”]MT, get them to quote you an initial exorbitant rate say 3 times their standard, and then have them bill you for twice their rate (a demonstrable 33% saving) and then split the remaining 100% profit down the middle (so they still end up with 150% of their usual rate and you collect 50%.

Then, get them to pay you back another 10% from their line by line bill… present this as another 10% saving to the boss, so the boss retains 10%, you get 50%, and they get 140% .[/quote]
Excellent strategy! :thumbsup:

9

Having to do everything myself. Even with outsourcing, it can get a bit chaotic trying to remember to follow up on everything.

10

Burning two hours each day in needless travel. I GREATLY appreciate having a massive office to myself, but as 99% of my work and contact with co-workers takes place via email, why not let me work from home and help out with the parenting? I’d get more WORK done and have more time with the family.

11

but this is taiwan: we get more face from having a captive monkey than one that runs free.

12

Writing. I detest writing papers and find it a slow horrible painful process. Unfortunately it’s also an extremely important part of my job, since publishing is the main thing that academics get evaluated on. I have a whole backlog of things I need to finish writing up, but god I hate doing it.

13

Sitting in an overheated office, staring at several endless work queues on two computer screens, and having to listen to obese co-workers whinge about how hungry they are, what they watched on TV the night before, and what they are going to eat after work.

14

Stress: Everything is always urgent. You miss a deadline or you screw up and it’s the apocalypse.

No Fun: Some jobs are fun. There are too many fun jobs to bother listing some of them, in fact. My job isn’t fun.

Mountains of Paperwork: (self explanatory)

Dealing with clients who alter a 300 page document without making notes of where the changes are. It’s worse than medieval torture.

15

Fridays. Because it means the weekend is coming and I have to wait two days before I can work again. It blows.

/Love my job! Mondays are Happy Days!
//Yes, that’s right! I’m THAT guy! :slight_smile:

16

[quote=“MilkTeaJack”]Fridays. Because it means the weekend is coming and I have to wait two days before I can work again. It blows.

/Love my job! Mondays are Happy Days!
//Yes, that’s right! I’m THAT guy! :slight_smile:[/quote]What do you do? Only if I may ask.

17

Teenage boys who will not stop feeling each other up in class while I’m trying to explain an activity, who then give me the ting bu dong treatment.

Actually, even weirder and fucking downright disturbing, the brother and sister who will not stop feeling each other up in one of my activity classes. I didn’t realise they were related and I told them to keep their hands to themselves and then the girl got really upset about it because he’s her brother, not her boyfriend. Meanwhile, the brother just stared at me with a really creepy look on his face. No, I’m not imagining it. Another adult pointed it out to me that they were feeling each other up under the desk in a prior lesson and I couldn’t see it.

Or how about last period every Friday dealing with Rainman meets that fat kid from Bad Santa who seemingly can’t figure out that no, you can’t clean liquid paper from a desk by wetting your hand under the tap outside the classroom and then rubbing it on the desk, but who is a fucking child prodigy with a Rubik’s Cube? I guarantee there is one of these kids who can’t put his right shoe on his right foot but has just solved Russell’s Paradox, squared the circle and built a time machine by the first bell in every school in Taiwan. At least the dumb kids in Australia are fucking dumb at everything.

18

My job is in Taipei and Taipei is noisy and ugly. Preferably, I’d like to work in the mountains somewhere and hear a bit more birdsong day to day.

19

Worst thing: Not having my wife with me.
Second worst thing: not having my guitar with me.
Third worst thing: not having a pizza on my desk.
Fourth worst thing: not having a case of good micro-brewery lagers tucked under my desk.

"snot a bad job, though.

20

I encounter similar situations with puzzling regularity. Client informs me he made a few changes in the text but gives no hint as to where they were. As if he expects me to read through the entire thing, instead of just checking his changes. :loco:

At least there’s Word’s “Compare and Merge Documents” function.