Let's bitch about our stupid, annoying co-workers

Despite the fact that she's obviously still pregnant.

However, I AM authorized to purchase them, however I want, whenever I want.

What does that even mean?

SUBJECT LINE: I gotta get outta this place
...if it's the last thing I ever do (feel free to hum along.)

After a delightful morning spent discussing why someone:
1. Shouldn't open a printer paperfeed drawer, while the printer is printing;
2. Shouldn't send emails to everyone on their mailing lists about Church-related emails;
3. Should let others know when they need the printer instead of deleting documents in the queue;
4. Shouldn't tell someone "this is urgent" so they work really late to get it finished, when really, it isn't urgent at all and in fact, doesn't need to be done at all; and
5. Shouldn't take someone else's lunch from the refrigerator and leave it on the counter to make room for "extra drinks in case we have visitors,"
I have now experienced the conversation to top them all (and really, you have to laugh at this one. I did. Once I calmed down, imbibed chocolate and nicotine, and thought "well, at least it's not quantum physics?). So....here it is:

A Dialogue between "M" (yours truly) and "S" (Otherwise known as Scarett/Princess/Arch Nemesis/The Scarf Lady/etc.)
S: Hey "M"!
M: Yes?
S: You know how to work that digital camera yet?
M: Yeah, figured it out last week.
S: How long does it take to get those photos developed?
M: What?
S: I need some photos really fast, so I can photocopy them and make notes on the back. And get duplicates too, in case they get messed-up.
M: What? What pictures do you need taken?
S: I need to you take pictures of my computer.
M: Why?
S: I need to know what's on my computer.
M: (sigh) You are looking for a file?
S: No, I need to know what is on my screen thing.
M: (dawning awareness) You need screen captures?
S: No, I need pictures of my computer.
M: For....?
S: I need to know what's on my screen, 'cause these instructions don't make sense and I want to make notes.
M: Okay, then you need a picture of the information on your screen, that you can print and add notes to?
S: Yes.
M: Okay, we don't need the camera for that. We can just do screen captures. It's easy.
(M walks over to other office, taking deep and soothing breathes all the while, and explains how to "CTRL+ALT+PrtScn" - runs into trouble with explanation of holding down all keys at the same time. Eventually resolved and screen is captured.)
M: Now open Word and set the page to ?Landscape.?
S: My computer won't do that.
M: What? Yes it will.
(M goes through brief discussion of "portrait" vs "landscape" and how to perform operation in Word. Discovers part of problem is that S doesn?t know how to open Word because the icon isn?t on her desktop.)
M: Now just hit "Shift+Insert" and your screen shot will be inserted.
M: No, you need to hold down both keys at the same time.
M: I don't know, that's just the way the program is designed.
M: Yeah, it is find of frustrating.
M: Okay, now you have it. Just insert a new page for each of the next screen captures and then print the file.
(M returns to own desk and gets back into rhythm of formatting proposal.)
S: M! It isn't working. I want you to take the pictures for me.
M: I don't have time to take the pictures right now, I have to get this back to _____.
S: Well, I don't have the time to use the camera, so I guess this won't get done and _____ will be mad.
M: Yeah, I guess ___ will be mad, but I'll explain the problem to him.
S: Can't you do these thingys for me?
M: No, not right now. I have to get this done.
S: You know, it's your job to do this.
M: No, actually it isn't. I am sorry, but I really can't do it right now. If I have time later I'll come over and see what we can do. In the meantime, why don't you look under the "Help" menu to see if those instructions are better.
S: Oh, my computer doesn't have any "Help" on it. I keep telling ____ he needs to fix it, but he won't.

(M decides, for sake of sanity, to not try and figure out what that last comment means and returns to her editing, swearing all the while.)
End of original email.

And here are additional interesting tidbits about ?S?:
She claimed on her resume to be ?Microsoft Certified,? but was unable to explain what that meant;
She wrote all of her correspondence in Excel, because she didn?t know how to open Word (the icon wasn?t on her desktop);
When she came into work each morning, she made herself a pot of tea and sat in her cubicle reading household decorating magazines and drinking tea for the first two hours: and, best of all
She was once asked to provide a file that she had finished working on to another co-worker. The file was not on her hard drive for, as she explained, she ?didn?t want to fill it up with things? (and it was a 20 G HD!) File was eventually determined, by her, to be on a floppy. But floppy was blank when co-worker opened it. Eventually ?S? showed supervisor where she stored all of her floppys containing important info. She was attaching them to the metal parts of her cubicle with large magnets, so she ?could always find them.?

~ Laura (who is thankful that she can claim to be a happy rat, that abandoned the sinking ship in time to move to a much cushier and affluent ship, and is now ridiculously happy with things)

I've met a few people who have done basic "computer literacy" courses at colleges and Adult Ed. places who do this. What seems to happen is: the college says "don't store your files on the hard drive [of our lab computers], use a floppy" and the person absorbs this without understanding *why* they're being told it.

These sort of courses always seem to produce people who can't do anything except exactly what was on the course, and then only if their computer is set up exactly like the college ones were. Hence, not being able to start Word if it doesn't have a desktop icon.

(of course, the other stuff shows that this person seems to be a fuckwit regardless of that)

The ex-receptionist at my office once printed out an email so she could type it up in Word.

it's a sappy day.

1. "What does agriculture mean?"

2. "I was so annoyed. Someone threw themselves under my tube yesterday. People that do that must be mad."

3. Me: "Just tell them to put the web address in and it will take them straight into the site."

Her: "What address? Their address?"

Other things he did: worked at his cube standing up (making everyone around him very tense), unbuttoned his shirts halfway down his chest, commented on every phone conversation I had (work related or not), talked to himself, and played horrible CD-Rs of cabaret tunes he wrote and produced. I think the whole experience inoculated me against ever being annoyed by co-workers again.

Unfortunately something this stupid is uttered in my office at least once a day...

An old japanese woman wearing a baby dress and pigtails jumping and down in front of me at the desk. I just came in. Please, let me wake up a bit first. Or am I still dreaming?

i feel like i'm missing out

There's nothing like a five minute meeting with your boss in which he tells you that you've basically got like two months to turn things around with a mouth full of Mike n' Ikes.

big flat mole on the left side of his face with 9 really long and scraggly hairs growing out of it. He was always playing with them... twisting and pulling on them (but not pulling them out.) Very distracting....

"Please tell me if you understand what I am saying, at the moment in the exqualifier there are only a 4 digit code, you append another 3 in front of them I don't know where, but doesn't matter anyway to sort out the letter in the front for the new code."

I assure you it makes only 1% more sense to me than it does to you.

THis goes on at least ONCE A WEEK in my office.

Also, I don't think the owner's secretary knows how to use the phone properly, because she's always complaining that "the phones are down", but it's only her phone, apparently. And when someone comes in to test it, it works.

I think you just identified the perv dream of far too many people in the world. But you'd have to give them guns too.

head of IT department here really bothers me, they should just rename it the gaslighting department

I would never have the patience to be in IT. As it is, because ours is outsourced to a 3rd party company who is terrible, I get lots of tech related questions from instructors that typically:

-Contain screenshots where the important part is cut off

-say something unhelpful like "isn't working

-Establish they did little to no troubleshooting before just immediately rushing to get help.

Then, when you ask a follow-up question, you get an "I don't know, I'll find out" followed by no answer for hours, followed by them asking you if you have any updates as if the answer to your question wasn't directly tied to resolving it

There’s someone in my plant who’s started taking up two disabled spots with a Ram 3500, the back glass of his camper has a giant version of this sticker - https://www.scrollfactory.com/products/urgent-fury-ranger-diplomacy-sticker

Bragging about invading Grenada has to get an eye roll even from people still riding high on their Panama action.

lol he was in danger of getting a mojito

oh yeah... liberating the sketchy medical school from marxist fiends, one of our finest moments

operation urgent fury sounds like a euphemism for a prescribed anger management program.

this sticker

Or masturbation.

And is that a totenkopf and half an SS lightning bolt?

This annoying creepy guy I work is convinced we all hate him and that the work environment is toxic. The truth is he’s just bad at his job and doesn’t listen. It’s not that deep. Anyway, he’s talking all this shit to HR about his colleagues (inc. me) and creating a bunch of extra auditing work for us as a result. Not only stupid and annoying but also vengeful! He’s hasn’t shown up at all this week, wonder if he knows we’re all mad at him now.

eugh i already feel bad posting about that. just blowing off steam, i guess.

you have to, sometimes

my friend had a coworker like that who was either jockeying for a special assignment or something cushy but genuinely had no skills and was doing nothing. they eventually just started making bogus HR claims

gee, wonder how the "annoying creepy guy" would ever have the thought that people hate him?

I don’t know, maybe it was the flirty texts he kept sending to the female staffers? Gfy

I’m just trying to do my job, he makes everything into a big scene revolving around him

Do you hate everyone that annoys you, Jon?

i don't like people who hold grudges toward their coworkers. this used to be me. i've been in this job i don't like for 6 years now. i feel like the purpose of all of this has been to teach me to just not care about what someone else does or doesn't do at work. it's such a liberating feeling. suddenly i can be nice to everyone. i know everyone talks behind my back. they do the same to everyone else when i'm around them. i don't do it anymore. what a waste of energy. i know i do a good job when it isn't some bullshit, you know? i do my best when it isn't bullshit. the rest of it all can gtfo. reclaiming my power. i've noticed i don't dread going into work as much. i get to choose what my day is like. the actions of everyone else, what they do or don't do, are either commendable or funny or kinda sad.

i am aware that i don't really deal with any hostile coworkers or a hostile boss. that's an entirely different can of worms. mine are all mildly backbiting grumps with no real demonstrated bite.

put in my notice today, gave them a month.

my sweet but young and slow coworker scheduled a mandatory training to happen during his shift, which we were told not to do so we could get paid for it, which meant that i had to pick up two shifts worth of work while he did the training.

also the new guy arranged the bills and coins lowest to highest instead of the standard highest to lowest. honestly felt like i was going insane all day.

that said, one of the schemes for the fall involves teaching writing workshops online again, and the fees from registrations have already outpaced what i would make in two months at this gig, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i know i made the right choice monetarily and for my own sanity.

im working all the time at taking map's approach above

im nowhere near being "the problem" with any of my work but have spent years stressing out over filling every gap and prevailing upon others to do likewise and now im just....doing my job.

and nobody said boo to me when i made the change

during good weather i may decide to take it to extremes, we'll see

Similar here. Last year I phoned it in by my standard, maybe working qt 75% of my usual effort.

They gave me the highest performance rating in the dept anyway. Killing myself truly wasn't necessary all these years.

In our last virtual townhall, people kept spamming the question "how does the company plan to address the burnout and loss of morale due to layoffs and the excess workload that has resulted from it?" in the chat.

Since we're siloed a bit this made clear to me that the entire company is miserable, not just us, and alleviated any and all misguided 'guilt' I had over pulling back. I don't owe my soul to the company store etc etc

(100% of my effort used to involve picking up other people's slack. I just let them fail now)

It’s been 2 1/2 years since I last had a co-worker… idk if I could go back to having co-workers at this point… I feel like I have become feral, out in the wilderness too long. Fwiw sometimes I annoy myself.

The last time I had coworkers was in 2021, and that was because my client had 16-hour a day care.

the silly managers on my team are now tracking the same information in three different documents, instead of one - and all of them contradict each other. the person in charge of it initially told me that information would always be the most recent in one location, and now it appears this is no longer true, that the 2nd location is more up to date.

even more amusing - this person failed to change the "last updated on [mm-dd-yyyy]" indicator in the 2nd location and has been making updates for the last week anyway, so for about a week and a half I ignored it, thinking there were no updates.

I swear, I don't know how some people get to these roles.