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

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.

The only really annoying thing my current co-workers do is send me ridiculous spam forwards about poisoned shampoo samples (normally originating from higher up in the Council!), then look sceptical when I explain that it's a dumb scaremongering thing to do. Also I have to tell them how to spell things all the live long day.

overheard an online meeting my wife was having where her boss and another co-worker were giving her a passive-aggressive “wish I could take a two week vacation”— referring to my wife’s upcoming vacation with me. Could’ve punched them. Also, they are the type of person who brags about all the vacation time they’ve accrued but say they can’t ever use (but really it means you are a sucker who passes up what is legally owed you). I guess if you die with the most accrued unused vacation time, you win? Hurray for you.

None of the managers have the faintest clue how to run things. Tasks that should have been assigned by them never got assigned so important work never got done, and in true "smelt it dealt it" variety, anybody who reports the problem is then asked to fix it, regardless of their existing workload or ability to do so.

Three weeks ago, a colleague and I were assigned a project at 10 am and told we needed to have our first meetings with our teams that afternoon as we needed it wrapped in a month. Manager left out all kinds of important information assuming we knew what was in his head, so now we've been asked to do rework to fix something we didn't know we were supposed to do.

My colleagues are freaking out. I sent an ornery message to boss's boss today about it, pointing out that clearly communication was poor if neither of us knew of the requirement, but also that I'd actually called out one of the problems 3 weeks before we wrre assigned this project, and they did nothing.

The best part is they told me I got the highest performance rating in the department this year so if they try to tell me I'm stupid, I can say "you're the idiots that just gave me a glowing review, then"

have a guy i work with at the gym. he’s five years older than me, grew up in the straightedge variant of the hardcore scene i was a part of (not straightedge), and might be on the spectrum a bit. he has really irritated me and my fellow route-setters in the past, but it’s usually easy to talk with him and let him know that he is in the wrong.

today, younger coworker— a woman— sends a pic of a stack of these hype new protein bars inside her local Target. we had been talking about them earlier in the week as a routesetting crew.

this guy then posts an AI summary of why Target is bad (ICE and anti-DEI capitulation, etc), contextless.

am i right in saying “this is jackass behavior”

sounds like the default mode of social interaction on much of the internet, so yeah

let's work through the steps:
1. "Target is bad because X, Y, and Z"
This is true, but "Well I don't shop there because of these reasons" is a slippery slope when introduced into any conversation mentioning a store. Maybe everyone knows that already, maybe they don't, but it's disconnected from the core sentiment here which is "I saw this new product," the core of the actual conversation. Where she saw them is somewhat tangential, and he's changing the topic
2. AI summary as appeal to authority
c'mon man just don't. you're not comfortable expressing this in your own words, don't defer it to a summary that others are going to be annoyed by. You may be providing info they already know
3. Lack of engagement on the actual topic, the hype new protein bars

a normal semi-passive-aggressive response would be to search who else might stock the bars locally and say something like "I've heard of those, looks like they're also at local fitness shop if you're avoiding Target like me" and leave it open for a side conversation if someone wants to ask why you avoid Target

I've caught myself a couple times but this is absolutely internet-brained executive dysfunction that has its basis in the way people post, which I think started as one-upmanship in some ways, but at some point everyone (not just the neuroatypical, although it's related) decided it's normal to just do the "I don't even own a tv" about every topic but with social justice/whatever implications

although I mentioned it as an aside I think the thing about him maybe being on the spectrum, and his past ability to take feedback, means that you might be on to something, even if the sort of rules-setting and following isn't unique to any one group and I suspect it's broken containment at large

I've had friends who have been on the spectrum or acquired what I sometimes think of as 2016ish social media brain where the conversation very much goes into a chain of them considering what I have mentioned, evaluating things based on their knowledge -- and specifically a good/bad framework, specifically about stores, people, etc -- and then responding with that as opposed to reacting to the original topic

Thanks for your thoughts, mh. I also think this has a lot to do with straightedge, tbh— he grew up in the hardline era, and was deeply “in the pit” during the heyday of Victory Records and bands like Earth Crisis and etc. Very macho, unyielding, “purity”-driven ideological base that most people grow out of because that shit is for teenagers, but alas.

None of the rest of us responded to his message— except he liked his own message. Which we all got notifications for, of course. What a baby.

wow--the line from Earth Crisis to anti-Target AI posting. . . that's pretty wild and you're spot on with the purity stuff. your coworker sounds immature!

update: coworker also loves the sort of C-grade pop shit that suburban wine moms love to pump on their way to Costco. think Ava Max and Gaga deep cuts.

he won’t let go of my saying that Max’s “My Head & My Heart” is unoriginal trash, saying that the fact that she bought the rights to the song shows “artistic integrity.” i have decided that he is just trolling me, possibly to get me angry and get me fired, and i am refusing to respond to anything he messages me about unless it’s work-related.

i am used to having coworkers have mid to normie taste in music. that’s fine tbh, and i have learned a lot about popular music in the past decade or two of working. this is a good thing!!

but christ, this guy has the worst taste. straightedge hardcore from the late 90s, warped tour pop punk from the same era, and the aforementioned c-grade dance pop shit. it’s embarrassing.

Definitely embarrassing… not sure how it rates compared to the mid to normie tastes of my colleagues whose jobs entail promoting and supporting the arts … I want to set the bar higher, but it’s just resulting in resentment and disappointment tbh

table's coworker
https://media.gq.com/photos/5d8129999f076b0008f2c8b1/4:3/w_1427,h_1070,c_limit/Burn-After-Reading-Brad-Pitt-Comedy-GQ-2019-091719.jpg

new GM of the region changed the summer shift schedules for all the gyms, so there’s an 8-2, a 1:30-7:30, and a 4-10. this would work well at our other gyms, which are either smaller or don’t have heavy foot traffic on weekdays. but our gym’s busiest hours are 6:30-8:30.

this means that i ended up leaving 25 minutes late from my 7:30 end time because there was too much shit going on that i couldn’t just leave, as my co-worker was running a training. i ended up having to pull a coach who once had my job to take over for a few minutes so i could leave.

deeply tired of being smarter than my bosses.

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?