Do you have anyone you work with who refuses to take in information you've just given them

Fucking hell.

Give him a formal warning.

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All these people sound like heroes and you all sound like Tories.

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haha. i’m not his manager, i’m just in his team. nice young lad in presumably his first job and very shy but it’s quite funny sometimes.

also cos we work a late shift we get an extra couple of quid of unsocial hours pay a night for the last 2 hours but we have to record the hours on one of the systems so they’re added to our pay. last month a few of us were comparing our payslips to work out why we were getting slightly different amounts and he turned round and went “wait, what’s this?” he’d missed out on 6 months worth…

I hate this kid. Hate him.

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Yeah, I think it’s fine if the other person has a much better working understanding of whatever they’ve explained to you.

In my case, it would be a specialist in another area of law and I would be the one having to communicate it to the client, so I’d want their wording for reference (or copying and pasting).

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I work in HR and while I’m a proponent of dealing with people face-to-face rather than just emailing them, I often have to get things that have been agreed in writing, to prove that they actually said it/requested it…

They really, really don’t.

good to see Ville Valo finding work post band split

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They’re bringing the system down from inside mate I think you could learn a thing or two.

thread is giving me flashbacks to working with this guy who was a total nightmare. he would get in a total flap at least once a week and demand someone come and help him out, usually he’d made a simple mistake but you’d try and explain it to him and he wouldn’t listen at all. drove me nuts.

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yeah i’m a bad listener
if someone talks for too long then i’ll just think about other stuff
you should all work on communicating more succinctly instead of waffling on

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I’m of the opinion that in person tutorials offer absolutely nothing in the way of actually instructing someone how to perform a certain task in an office setting. Same goes for all meetings really. Meetings exist in order for people (im guilty of this btw) to emotionally influence an outcome.

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I always do this interior monologue when someone is explaining something complex and boring to me (which most work stuff is, let’s face it):

“Am I looking them in the eye too much? Too little? Do I look shifty to them? Should I look over there for a bit? No, look at the paper/monitor so it looks like you’re reflecting on what they’re telling you, shit, what did they just say, I dunno just nod, okay flick your eyes to theirs then look at the window, oh fuck what did they just say about sub-optimal processes? Okay smile at their joke, I think they made a joke. Holy fuck work is torture, how can anyone do this for 50 years? Meet their eyes again, wait, not for that long. Oh shit I’ll have to do this for 50 years! What would be a painless way to die? Meet their eyes, say uh-huh. Try looking at the bridge of their nose! They think you’re meeting their gaze but you’re not really! Heheheheh. Smart. I could jump off a big building, I guess. I haven’t heard a word this person has said. Christ, my life wasted, wtf, oh, wait, they said something else, just nod. Jesus, what is life?”

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Especially if they seem quite interested in it, then it’s just a sad situation all round tbh.

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This is also me - I find it much much easier to take things in when they’re written down. When people phone me with requests, instead of emailing them, they tend to waffle on and give me loads of extraneous information, which I’m writing down, trying to work out what is actually important - it’s incredibly inefficient. Just jot down a few bulletpoints, and then I’ll have your email to refer back to. And it will be in my workflow.

Or, shorter: people have different communication styles and not everyone learns best from having someone talking to them. Adjust your style to your target audience for maximum effectiveness.

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i’ve found the opposite because some people just will not follow written instructions. i sometimes train new starters and we have really detailed training guides with screenshots and step by step instructions. after going through it with someone and talking them through the guide, when they forget stuff they then interrupt someone else to ask them to show them what to do instead of looking in the fucking training guide that i printed out for them, watched them write notes in and can see sitting on their fucking desk

(bonus points if the person they ask is another new starter instead of someone who might actually know)

Yeah, I sympathise with this. Ended up writing a step-by-step guide to a process at work, trained everyone on it, and still get people asking me questions which are explicitly answered in the guide. Got to the stage now of telling them to look at the process rather than answering the question (I do realise this makes me seem a bit of a cunt).

it’s fair and probably doing them a favour, tbh tbf

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Little inside knowledge for ya - if you’re still at the company, people would rather email you for the answer than look at the massively detailed and helpful handover guide.

I’d accept that if it was 60 pages long or something. This was literally two sides of A4.