5 Comments
User's avatar
Bill de Haan's avatar

I had a manager who used to not only schedule meetings with subject lines of "Meeting", with no agenda, he'd send instant messages people at about 5pm, with the IM marked as high priority or urgent, with just their name ("Bill..."). He'd send that single line, and then not follow up for 45 minutes.

I ignored them, but co-workers would call me in a panic asking where he was, because I had a line of sight to his office. They often thought they were being fired, but it was invariably some trivial request.

What was worse, he'd start one of these "urgent" IMs to ask them something, get the answer himself, and then just forget about the IM. Meanwhile, anxious employees were sitting on pins and needles waiting for him to follow up on what they thought was actually high priority.

Because his meetings had no agenda, people stopped going to them when they had real work to do. This frustrated him tremendously when there really was a serious matter. The funniest thing was that he complained about the team's lack of communication. When you look in your calendar and see 22 meetings with him, with some being project launches, some being personnel reviews, some being technical discussions, and some being budget discussions, and every single one of them being labelled "meeting", with no more details, it's not the team that's got the communication problem.

Mostly Lurking's avatar

This is the office nightmare version of "we need to talk"

Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭's avatar

I dream the day people properly set up meetings.

Agendas please!

Bart Massey's avatar

Just finished reading the archive. Nice strip! There's a lot of wisdom here.

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That said, I am going to take the liberty of offering a couple of suggestions that might improve your readership and retention. Because that is the spirit of Work Chronicles.

My process for finding the first strip in the archives (I think?):

* Look everywhere here for a link to it. Nothing.

* Go to piperka.net, where I read webcomics. First-page link is borked. (Sent a request to fix, not sure I found the right first page — see below.)

* Ask Google where the first page is.

* Google points me at a Reddit post.

* The Reddit post has an image, but fortunately it contains the title.

* Come back here and search the archives for that title.

In reading the archive, I found a reference to an "older comic" I hadn't seen that makes me think I might not have found the first page after all.

The site really needs a way to navigate to the first and to the latest page. The traditional solution is to add buttons for this where the "previous" and "next" buttons are.

The "previous" and "next" buttons are below *a bunch* of stuff. This makes it hard to read the archive at full size on screen.

There are multiple repost comics in the archive, I think. There should be a "next new" button to skip those too.

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Having said all that, I really enjoyed the comic. Looking forward to future strips!

Steve's avatar

No agenda? No accept 😏