Yeah I'm with Ox on that one.

Sometimes karma wins though. My bitch of an ex-boss Helen was a total cow, scheming to get rid of us all and have a fresh new team. She successfully drove 3 of us out herself (2 others managed to get other jobs before she could get her claws into them) then when she finally left the company herself and went into a lesser job (deputy manager) she got fired after a couple of months for being incompetent. Hah!

heheh.... I agree with Peltz... the way to move up is to be noticed. I tend to do that by being competent, mainly... anything people give me, I do well. Of course, I end up getting more crap dropped on me, but at least I'm noticed. I also run several websites, coded from the ground up, so I'm the only person that knows how to tweak or fix them. This makes me nearly indispensable, since the websites are critical. Woo me. It doesn't keep me from getting crap dumped on me, but it does keep me employed. The trick is to keep coming up with more and new ways that I'm indispensable.

Yea its a game of chess in the fight for survival. Everyone makes their moves and those who plan ahead win. Now if you know you are good, you do your stuff well, then making yourself noticable is not a dirty trick but rather a way of making the playing field equal and just. You want fame and riches, well effin fight for it . And thats pretty much how the brownnosers think, they live only once and they will get as much as possible in any way possible just shy of outright murder and theft.

No but, I don't want to get fame and richess (per se). I just don't feel I should be doing something extra because it will protect me from the brown-nosers and backstabbers. Because if THEY'RE getting ahead and getting all the good calls, you're always gonna suffer. Not to mention that you usually won't have a very good relationship with them, since they are dead inside.

Now, I wouldn't mind so much if this was somehow inscribed into the company rules or police (or general work ethic). Instead, there is a sham front where you're told that as long as you do your job well, nothing much bad can happen to you. The benevolent company, looking out for its employees. This is of course a massive lie. It's that what I hate.

I can imagine it's fun to make extra efforts in a job you actually like doing, but let's be real, chances that any of us are going to do a job they really really like are slim. That's a very small part of the population.

I don't think any of us talked about doing extra work. The point is, when you do work, do it well, then point out how well done it is. Trumpet your own fame. The website stuff I do is extra... sorta... except I started just coding my own websites while at work. After awhile I realized how I could use those skills to make my job easier. So that's when I built the other websites. Basically just ways to make my job easier. They also happened to make other peoples' jobs easier, and now they're indispensable. I'm also not expected to do as much "regular" work, since I have to maintain, fix, and tweak the websites as well. though my boss tends to forget that on an annoyingly regular basis.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with what you guys are saying as well, that brown-nosers and those who get noticed are the ones who get up the ladder. I also agree with Ox though that they shouldn't. Not unless they deserve to. And if you're good at your job you shouldn't need to brown nose because you're keeping the whole place running anyway.

Unfortunately, people don't look at it like that. They like ass kissing and that's what stands out to them.

I'd also like to say I frigging love my current job. My boss rules and the job is relatively easy and stress free. So much better than working for shitty GAME.

You working at a competing game retailer, or doing some else entirely? Just curious. I refuse to ass kiss.

Just thought i'd give a general update with regards to myself so you can laugh at my mysery

I'm part of a 3 man business/systems/data analysis team that works for Intel. Last month, the other 2 guys left for companies that offered them more money (which isn't hard). Since then, the company has been looking for replacements and only this Wednesday they found the first. I've been covering all 3 roles and working overtime all this time, getting extremely stressed because of the workload and general shittyness of the way the 2 guys had their jobs and procedures setup, such as reports. Meanwhile, my management hasn't acknowledged the excessive weight i'm carrying and things are starting to slip. Like deadlines and quality. They've not communicated the problem (2 guys leaving = hit on capacity) to the stakeholders. The stakeholders therefore expect things are running smoothly as ever. Now they're getting shitty with me because I'm responding bluntly at their chase-ups for stuff like reports. I'm sick of giving bullshit estimations of when stuff will get done, because I'm constantly pushing stuff out. I get all sorts of requests come in every day and re-prioritisation is carried out almost every hour. It's pure overload. I'm not taking any more overtime because it's too stressful and simply not worth the money. What's more, there's a sense of "don't tell them the truth" when it comes to explaining why i'm missing timelines, because my management fucked up the recruitment process and they don't want to make themselves look like the incompetent fuckwits they truly are. Things aren't all bad though. I've transitioned to the role of one of the guys who left, which means a new area of business that will keep me stimulated for at least 6 months. The role implies bumping me up a salary grade, but really once I get settled, i'll be applying for another job.

Other than work stuff, i've moved in with the GF, but the house is so damn small I can't bring my PC over. Which sucks because that means I can't play MoW. More than that however, I just miss hooking into the net and losing myself for a few hours. Kind of weird. Never though i'd miss the surfing that much. Well, I don't miss it so much for the pr0n, but just the feeling of connecting and doing research, letting my mind free and lookup up random shit until my ass gets numb and I need to eat.

Hope you guys are doing well and I hope you're leading your little virtual soviet army men and T34's to countless victories for the motherland.

I'm in a completely different job. I'd still enjoy retail in general, particularly for a gaming company, but never for a big corporate company again. Especially not one owned by Game in any way.

I now work on a service desk for a telecommunications company. The job is a real mix of things including logging incoming phone line/system faults and passing them to the relevant departments, updating customers, registering phones onto networks (I potentially have the knowledge to completely take out the phone systems in Tesco and B&Q for a couple of hours - big supermarket and DIY store for those non-UK forumites) and generally moaning about how shit BT are as a phone line provider.

I get weekends off, bank holidays off, free fruit, dress-down Friday every week, all sorts of other benefits I can take up plus my current boss is awesome. Due to the recent riots she sent me home early one day because I had to catch the bus home - the riots never even hit us here. Woo! Plus even when it gets stressy, it's more relaxing than the most relaxing day spent at Game. Oh, we even had a couple of days where most of the company were at a conference in London; for us poor souls who had to stay behind to man the desks we were bought free pizza both days. Not shitty pizza either but Dominos!

Good to hear you're still alive Derfmeister! Kinda sucks about the work issues, but if you think you can take being laid off financially in any sort of way, this is the time to start putting demands on the table. If you'd make a threat in the sense of "if I'm gone, your entire shit and knowledge base collapses" (of course don't say it like that), they'll be quick to come running. After all, your superior doesn't care about you or the company, he cares about looking good...and having 3 people leave on short notice on his watch with no one left to carry over expertise doesn't exactly speak for his leadership skills. So...blackmail that fucker. Blackmail him into the ground.

Other than that we kind of miss you on the MoW front...we've played 3 (I think) of the 5 new skirmish maps but not all of them yet. We should get another game going really, since there wasn't a real reason why we quit except for a new drug (terraria). Don't you have a laptop of some sorts you can use to browse the web a bit at home though? I mean, maybe I'm not the most social person ever (just maybe haha) but being stuck with one person in the same small house, tons of work and no real means of solo relaxation sounds like hell to me - even when i really do like the person. I need my time. I can't be around the same person all the time, makes me want to murder them before too long.

@ Pev: that does all sounds really good-natured for a CRM-ish office environment! In my personal experience, it depended a lot on your direct superiors and colleagues whether an office job would be meh or actually kind of fun. I think you may have hit the jackpot.

On a personal job-related note: I am still looking for work. I did translation tests French-English-Dutch for a translation company in Wallonia (2 hours from Antwerp) and I of course smoked them and got a job offer, but the money wasn't good enough to warrant a move. S'too bad, since the company looked like a very nice place to work. I'm also writing to several administrative assistant positions with EU agencies all over Europe (like in Spain, Germany, Finland)...not because I'm all too keen to be an administrative assistent per se, but since they pay between 2300 and 3300 € nett a month I can live with that. And perhaps, once I get a foot in the door, work up to a uni-level position in the EU administration. We'll see.

Hey Derf, nice to hear from you. Sounds like your job really blows ass. I'll back Ox on the blackmail thing. Who knows, maybe you can squeeze a raise or two out of the deal. As for the house being too small for a computer.... I'd be figuring out something. No way could I live without my PC for an indeterminate amount of time. I'd lose my crap. Even disregarding the pr0n.

And sounds live Pev's moved up in the world. Congrats on your new job. It sure would be nice if my manager wasn't a douche bag. Of course, i've been off for the last week.

I'm applying for jobs as you may know, and today I was in for a revisor/translator job in Brussels. I did a little chit chat with the manager and my potential future colleague, then had to do 2 translation tests (English to Dutch, French top Dutch) and one revision test (10-15 Dutch sentences I had to correct).

The revision test...first sentence was something like "The 2000 Olympics took place in the capital of Australia, Sydney." There was an obvious error in there, but I also scratched 'capital' and wrote next to it that Canberra is the capital of Australia. I didn't know if it was actually part of the test or an oversight.

Guy comes back, I hand him the test and ask him 'hey was that thing with the capital city a trick question?" He says, "yeah, it is. We've been using this test for years and you're the first to actually spot it though."

I was like...nigga please You're gonna need something better to trip ME up

Haha, funny, while i was reading the line i immediately thought "sheesh, do they really expect people to fall for the old sydney/canberra trick?".

Well it just proves we're pretty smart/educated/awesome/ ... compared to a lot of people, again.

Het is natuurlijk wel zo dat vertalers standaard van de hogeschool komen... grapke haha

err... I probably wouldn't have caught that.

On an on-topic note, I'm shooting for a new job in the same company I'm in. With a big raise attached. I think I'm a shoe-in, but I'll cross my fingers until I get an actual offer.