Aesthetics



  • At WTF Inc, the managers may be incompetant, but the place is homey. Everyone - up and down the chain - was always encouraged to bring in plants, pictures, and general doodads to make the place nice.

    They recently hired a new office manager here at WTF Inc. Naturally, the first thing the woman does is make a bunch of changes to show that she's doing her job. Specifically, the office MUST maintain a professional atmosphere at all times; no exceptions.

    No more personal pictures, artwork frmo the kids, posters, plants, cultural icons, ... clue bats.

    Then they had the office maintenance guy come to every desk and tell people to remove it or lose it.

    Mind you, no customers ever come through here; this is purely a back office setup.

    Anyone want my clue-bat?

     



  • Nah, between how long you've already worked there and the WTFs that place still manages to spawn, your clue-bat seems defective...


  • ♿ (Parody)

    The beatings will continue until morale improves.

    --
    Management


  • @snoofle said:

    the office MUST maintain a professional atmosphere at all times;
     

     

    Based on the known history of WTF inc ithis may actualy be a good thing :-)

    unfortunatly sterilising the offce is unlikly to be the way to achieve it.



  • @snoofle said:

    Naturally, the first thing the woman does is make a bunch of changes to show that she's doing her job.
    This is something that has plagued business for many years.

    Years ago, a new manager took over the department I worked in.  I'll call him Manager A.  He made all sorts of changes and people complained.  The complaints were greeted with the standard speech you've probably all heard before, "You're just afraid of change . . . We must change . . . .The only thing constant is change . . . blah blah blah blah". 

    A couple of years later, Manager A leaves and is replaced by Manager B.  He make all sorts of changes and people complain.  The complaints are greeted with "You're just afraid of change . . . We must change . . . .The only thing constant is change . . . blah blah blah blah".

    A couple of years later, Manager B leaves and is replaced by Manager C, who came from a different division of the company and had little or no knowledge of how things used to be in this particular department.  He started making all sorts of changes.  He didn't know it but he put everything back to almost exactly the same way it was before Manager A took over nearly 10 years earlier.

    Change can be good.  Or bad.  Or neither good nor bad, just different.  But whenever someone tries to justify a change to something by saying "You're just afraid of change" I immediately know that they are full of shit.



  • @boomzilla said:

    The beatings will continue until morale improves.

    --
    Management

    But when and where will it happen that the beating continues until management improves? *cannot help asking*

    @Snoofle:  It seems that the quality of work is still too high at WTF Inc. But hopefully their newest counter-measure will finally fix the tedious problem. It's about time! ;-)

    But seriously: To me this looks like a typical disciplining to remediate any latent notion of freedom and instill respect for the powers that be but shouldn't. I once worked for a client who used Windows policies to disable the right-click on files and folders in explorer - and also on the task bar. For security reasons, we were told...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @spezialpfusch said:

    But when and where will it happen that the beating continues until management improves?
    Mutiny!



  • @snoofle said:

    Everyone - up and down the chain - was always encouraged to bring in plants, pictures, and general doodads to make the place nice.

    We use a service where a guy brings in plants and comes in once a week to water them/pick dead leaves off them/etc. This includes everything from box planters to actual small trees. The graphic designer - who is also the person who decides the office layout/furniture purchases, etc - decided to rearrange everything one day. She does this roughly once a month because she's a fucking nutjob. Anyway, long story short, she decides that she wants to throw out a medium-sized plant, which I disagreed with and rescued, which now sits on my desk. The thing is probably two feet tall. The funny thing is that said nutjob designer sits across from me, and the plant is so large it's actually starting to grow into her desk space, over the divider.

    That's not the WTF, that's just a story that I find amusing. TRWTF is the fact that the designer insists on having a tree in our interview room, which has no windows, and sits in complete darkness most of the time. It gets used maybe two hours a week. That tree gets no light, and has to be replaced about once a month, because it's on the brink of death. I tried to explain the fact that trees need light to survive, to which her response was "What about night? Trees don't get any light at night!"

    Then I punched her in the face and called her a dumb cunt. In my head. In reality I just gave her a pitying look and walked away.



  • @mikeTheLiar said:

    The graphic designer - who is [snip] a nutjob.

    Graphic designers seem to march to a different drummer. Or possibly an instrument that the rest of us can't even imagine the existence of. When I was at ($JOB - 3), our graphic designer came up with new business cards. They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>), and he thought it was the most awesome thing ever. He had absolutely no idea why we all thought it was a bad idea.



  • @mikeTheLiar said:

    In my head. In reality I just gave her a pitying look and walked away.

    I don't mean to boast, but...I'm a level 9 silent judger.



  • @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<FONT color=yellow>yes, really!</FONT>)

    Could be worse?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

    Yellow on white is harder than white on yellow, at least to my eyes. YMMV.


  • @snoofle said:

    They recently hired a new office manager here at WTF Inc. Naturally, the first thing the woman does is make a bunch of changes to show that she's doing her job. Specifically, the office MUST maintain a professional atmosphere at all times; no exceptions.

    No more personal pictures, artwork frmo the kids, posters, plants, cultural icons, ... clue bats.

    Then they had the office maintenance guy come to every desk and tell people to remove it or lose it.

    Mind you, no customers ever come through here; this is purely a back office setup.

    I've done that. It's great fun. Then you ask individual employees whether they've cleared their desk because they're planning to leave, and fire them. Or, even better, just keep the whole quivering mass in constant terror of the sack.


    The assumption that someone working in a managerial position is actually engaged in their best attempt at career building rather than just messing around is not always justified.



  • @dkf said:

    @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

    Yellow on white is harder than white on yellow, at least to my eyes. YMMV.

    Ouch. They both suck. But yes, everyone's eyes are different. For me, the yellow background actually causes burn-in on my retinas AND makes it almost impossible to see the text, whereas if I squint, I can read the yellow-on-white.



  • @TDWTF123 said:

    I've done that. It's great fun. Then you ask individual employees whether they've cleared their desk because they're planning to leave, and fire them. Or, even better, just keep the whole quivering mass in constant terror of the sack.

    I almost want to relocate, and get hired in your company under you, just so I can punch you in the face for this.

    Then again, I do have a certain grudging respect for such evilness, so I'd probably accidentally buy you a drink instead.



  • @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

    Ow. That text causes me physical pain. I think I'm cross-eyed now.


  • @El_Heffe said:

    He didn't know it but he put everything back to almost exactly the same way it was before Manager A took over nearly 10 years earlier.

    You've worked at the same place for 10 years?

    You ARE afraid of change.



  • @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

     Thanks. I didn't need my eyes today, anyway.


  • @alegr said:

    @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

     Thanks. I didn't need my eyes today, anyway.
    For me, the yellow-on-white is unreadable, but the white-on-yellow just looked like a plain rectangle; I wasn't sure there was even text there until I selected it.

     



  • @RobFreundlich said:

    Graphic designers seem to march to a different drummer. Or possibly an instrument that the rest of us can't even imagine the existence of.
    My daughter is a Graphic Arts major. I'm not sure what drummer she marches to, but he's probably playing something by either Jerry Goldsmith or Ron Grainer*.

     



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    @alegr said:
    @malaka said:
    @RobFreundlich said:
    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)
    Could be worse?
    Thanks. I didn't need my eyes today, anyway.
    For me, the yellow-on-white is unreadable, but the white-on-yellow just looked like a plain rectangle; I wasn't sure there was even text there until I selected it.
    You all obviously just have shitty monitors



  • @dkf said:

    @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

    Yellow on white is harder than white on yellow, at least to my eyes. YMMV.
    It depends on the medium.

     



  • @Anonymouse said:

    You all obviously just have shitty [b]eyeballs[/b].

    Yes. Yes I do.



  • @Zecc said:

    It depends on the medium.

    Close, but not quite.

    HOT DOG STAND FTW

    Oh my God, it even has a watermark.



  • @Zecc said:

    @dkf said:

    @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

    Yellow on white is harder than white on yellow, at least to my eyes. YMMV.
    It depends on the medium.

     

     

    you're dead right & these same so-called graphic designers insist on using a white background for there shitpoint power point presentations.

     

    the only reason no-one complains they are unreadable is because nobody actualy cares.

     

     

     



  • @spezialpfusch said:

    But seriously: To me this looks like a typical disciplining to remediate any latent notion of freedom and instill respect for the powers that be but shouldn't.

    At my last job, they used a policy that forbade us from changing our computer desktop wallpaper/background images.  There was a corporate one that was auto-loaded for us at every reboot.  Most of the time it was boring but inocuous.  But the year before I left HR implemented a campaign to pay one month of insurance premiums for any employee that got a physical* and then we had to suffer through a series of hideously inane advertisements in the form of reminders to fulfil the steps of that program.  By the time the ads were suddenly replaced by the inane wallpaper one day in mid-December, I'd never been more glad to see an HR campaign finish. 

     * plus some retarded paperwork to prove that we did it



  • Don't you mean "I've never been more glad that I keep all my windows maximized"?



  • @CodeNinja said:

    @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

    Ow. That text causes me physical pain. I think I'm cross-eyed now.
    Could be much, much worse.


  • @Ben L. said:

    @CodeNinja said:
    @malaka said:

    @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>)

    Could be worse?

    Ow. That text causes me physical pain. I think I'm cross-eyed now.
    Could be much, much worse.
    I disagree. At least with my browser/monitor/eye combination, that is definitely not "much, much worse." It is still pretty much unreadable, but no worse, and perhaps slightly less bad, than the white-on-yellow. Oddly, because don't Firefox and Thunderbird use the same rendering engine?, the email notification is actually easily readable – I certainly wouldn't want to read text that low in contrast, but I don't have to select the text to see that there really is text there. I tried a bunch of color combinations trying to come up with something "much, much worse." I could, of course, reduce the contrast to the point where the text was completely invisible, but I couldn't find anything more uncomfortable (for me, anyway) to look at than the white/yellow.

     



  • You are reading this thread via THE WEB?



  • @Ben L. said:

    You are reading this thread via THE WEB?
    I see what you did there.

    In the unlikely event that was a serious question, I get email notifications of responses of threads I've posted in, because I've never bothered to tell CS not to send them to me. Mostly I delete them without reading them, and just refresh my "Side Bar" window. This time, I happened to look at the email, started to respond that it wasn't so bad, and noticed the colors were different between Thunderbird and Firefox.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    Oddly, because don't Firefox and Thunderbird use the same rendering engine?, the email notification is actually easily readable – I certainly wouldn't want to read text that low in contrast, but I don't have to select the text to see that there really is text there.
    The e-mails Community Server sends out aren't exactly the same as the post content you see on the web.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ben L. said:

    Could be much, much worse.
    Never have I been happier to find some text unreadable.



  • @snoofle said:

    Anyone want my clue-bat?
     

    The new Office Mangler.

    Behind the knees, to the kidneys and over the head.

    Repeatedly.

    @boomzilla said:

    The beatings will continue until morale improves.

    --
    Management
     

    I see no text exempting Management from such beatings...

     

    @El_Heffe said:

    Change can be good.  Or bad.  Or neither good nor bad, just different.  But whenever someone tries to justify a change to something by saying "You're just afraid of change" I immediately know that they are full of shit.
     

    That.

    "No, I'm afraid of bad change. What is the expected benefit of this change? How will ROI be measured for the business case behind this change? In the interests of good stakeholder engagement, may we review the business case to understand how it will deliver measurable benefits?"

     



  • @RobFreundlich said:

    They were yellow text on a white background (<font color="yellow">yes, really!</font>), and he thought it was the most awesome thing ever. He had absolutely no idea why we all thought it was a bad idea.
     

    A Technical Conslutant I worked with did an event schedule in Excel with white writing on black background so it matched the same skin as our webshite (retro light text on dark background, circa HTML3 era) but he'd used Arial 8pt for the text.

    It didn't occur to him that tiny white text in large black boxes was a bad idea, not even after he'd printed it on three different printers until he found one with a sufficiently large DPI to produce readable text. I pointed out the cost of printing a page 90% black, but that's a business cost, so we could absorb that, and toner was cheap.

    Then I asked him if he'd tried faxing it to anyone yet, and how a potential customer would react when they the only clear text in all of the illegible white specks floating on a toner-hungry page was our company name.



  • @jetcitywoman said:

    At my last job, they used a policy that forbade us from changing our computer desktop wallpaper/background images. 
     

    Sometimes that's intended to defeat people who screenshot your desktop then use it as a wallpaper. But that's only in environments that don't encourage good account security (workstation locking when away, etc).

    BTW: relevent (the website is down).



  • @snoofle said:

    Anyone want my clue-bat?

    If you’re near the F train I could pick it up from you on my way to work one day.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Cassidy said:

    relevent
    Is that where you grumble about something not totally tangential?


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