How To Use Office 2016 Without Activation

[Filomeno Robles]

Theseprojects are intricate and will be challenging. I am still the first point of contact for problem-solving, and the culture of the company is very much "the door is always open"/"the phone is never off the hook". I have also been given a trainee to work with.

I made an executive decision to leave the office in the middle of the afternoon to work from home for the remainder of the afternoon. I did not notify any of the management first, intending to do so once I got home.

As I arrived home I received a call on my mobile from a member of senior management who asked where I was, and then why: when I answered I explained that I had left to work from home with the best intentions: to ensure that these important time-critical projects could be completed.

The member of management was extremely critical of me having done so, calling me "childish" and "unprofessional". I have been summoned to arrive at work early tomorrow for 'a chat', meaning this sounds like a disciplinary matter.

If I am being completely honest, from prior experience I knew that if I had suggested that I be allowed to work from home for at least a couple of hours (bearing in mind that I usually arrive at the office shortly at about 7am and leave shortly after 6pm, my hours are 8am-5pm, and my commute to/from work is usually a total of 1.5 hours a day) the answer would have been a firm no and no explanation of the possible benefits would have been heard.

Since I am accountable for these projects being completed on time, short of continuing to work from home in the evening (I have exam finals coming up in a few weeks), it is not possible to complete these tasks in the normal office conditions as they are.

You took off without asking for permission, knowing that if you had asked to go home you'd have been refused. Furthermore, you told absolutely no one about your decision, leaving anyone who needs your help hanging, and with no idea of when/if you might be back.

How bad it is will depend on your role within the company, your seniority, the culture of the company, etc. But generally speaking it's pretty bad. Not sexual harassment bad, but still pretty bad. Not to mention that you've insulted management and shown that you don't care about their authority.

Even if you feel they would have said "No", you still should have asked. And if you had to stay at the office then so be it. Work late to get the project done, come in super early, or simply explain that the deadline is unrealistic given the current work conditions.

You did knowingly go against implicit orders. The order to work from the office unless explicit permission is granted to work from home is entirely reasonable. Ignoring this is an insult to management. Your intentions were good, but the actions were the opposite of good teamwork.

You're under stress because you have too much work for too little time. Maybe it's your fault because you volunteered, maybe it's someone else's fault - that doesn't matter at all. It's very unlikely that you can finish all your current projects on time. Management needs to know this now, so they can plan ahead, so they can tell you which project(s) to deprioritize, and so they can adjust any dependent projects as necessary.

If they happen to tell you that you need to finish all of the projects on time, after hearing you say that you can't, they are thoroughly incompetent (and should never have been allowed anywhere near a management role), which is unlikely. Should they turn out to be thoroughly incompetent, stop all unpaid overtime at once, be grateful for the learning experience, and find a way to work with a competent manager, instead of working for an incompetent one.

You should have talked to your manager, and made it clear that you don't think you'll be able to complete your assigned tasks if you have to be in the office and dealing with other things. It's then up to your manager to decide what's more important: your assigned tasks, or the "door is always open" policy. If your manager decides that the "door is always open" policy is more important than your tasks, then they've made a decision and if you come to them a week later and say "I haven't managed to complete the tasks. I was interrupted by X, Y and Z because my door was always open", then that's a decision they made and they will (should, anyway) take responsibility for that.

If you truly have too much on your plate, it's on you to tell people that the amount of short-notice rapid-turnaround work you've been handed is putting all of these critical deadlines at risk and could everybody please get together and sort out what the priorities are so you can focus on the truly time-sensitive tasks first.

she works in a different office on a different floor (against my suggestion- I was of the mind that we should work in close proximity for the first few weeks to make the training more efficient and build rapport), which means that whilst training takes place one of us is away from our workstation while this happens.

Now before you think I'm entirely criticizing, no, you do need time to focus and some of these concerns you've shared do sound like managers with more interest in what serves their egos than what actually gets the work done.

But you did screw up. Politically speaking, the man called you childish. That's a bit extreme and I'm guessing that didn't come from a place of this being the first time you've been at odds with that particular manager. If I'm wrong, my condolences and I recommend getting the heck out of there as soon as you're able.

Cover your ass. People appreciate when you do this and there's no dishonor in it if it's done transparently. When somebody hands you stuff at the last second that needs to be done by the end of the week and you've already got 5 other things to handle, it's time to email all of your ridiculous bosses to explain the load you're under and that you can not in fact focus on all of this stuff with the same level of priority and meet anybody's expectations much less everybody's. Leave it to them to sort out what you really need to get done first.

Let go of the disagreements and don't forget that you're a technology/problem-solving person. You have internet don't you? There are plenty of ways to communicate with and train people who are on the other side of the planet, much less one floor up. Rapport is built just as easily on Skype or slack.

Prefer solving the problem to dwelling on injustice. It's something most full-blown programmers who've been at it for a while figure out. When you're often smarter than the people you work for, you can't afford to get indignant about it. They're where they are because they're less interested in solving puzzles than you are and you're often where you're at because you'd actually be horrible at getting anything done worrying about the inane crap the not-particularly-skilled office worker/manager typically needs to be good at handling. You get to do what you do. Just embrace the idea that the scope of the problem-solving projects that interest you now can actually be wider than just the stuff you wanted to be left alone to solve.

IMO, you really don't need somebody to tell you that you screwed up. I suspect you knew but wanted to have the scales balanced by hearing that your work situation isn't great. It doesn't sound like it is. But all you really proved by walking out because you didn't think anybody would say yes when you asked permission, is that you don't really love or care about this job. That's okay, but it's easier to find the one you might eventually with decent recommendations. So try to remember that even if you're frustrated with your circumstances that there are in fact people who need you for what you know and not all of them necessarily, are total assholes, and you never know which of those might end up somewhere you'd like to be.

Learn to value and be helpful to the people who make it possible to do the things you enjoy doing to the extent that you can and treat the parasite-types like problems to be worked around. They never go away. You have to learn to sidestep.

Most of the responses here seem to be saying that your actions are extremely wrong. Yet as socrates's answer indicates, expectations can be different for different people. I can tell you a story about a person who called his manager a "spineless wimp" without negative consequence. (That wasn't a random insult, but was applicable to the situation.) I can tell you a story about a person who showed up late for work every day for weeks, only to be called to a personal meeting with his manager, to get promoted. So, the reality is, what is actually expected can vary based on culture (or even individuals).

The difference between these successful stories and what you explain is that what you did was totally out of line... with what was expected. This conclusion is certainly correct, as it is proven by the response. In the successes being described, these actions were done with an understanding of culture and expectations. Your decision (to leave) obviously did not successfully have that understanding.

People who disapprove of such excuses are often opposed to guilty parties shifting blame. So, saying that you have been given an impossible amount of tasks is not personally owning your own responsibility. The preferred way may be to mention the problems when a new task is being presented to you, not to violate company expectations in order to try to rectify the situation of not being able to handle work which you have already accepted (even if your only acceptance was at the time of hiring, when you indicated that you can do the job of taking care of certain expected responsibilities). Playing the role of the complaining weakling is not likely to bail you out of this situation.

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