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

Boss:"Ronan could you comb your hair next time you come to work"

Me:"eh in fairness the contract doesn't say anything about me having to comb my hair"

Boss:"yeah but I mean you're a student now yeah? this job isn't so bad. they look after you well, it's a good wage, I'm happy with my lot"

Me:"I don't think there's any chance of me ever working here for a living, long term"

Boss:"Yeah and they pay your health insurance, it's not too difficult a job either"

Me:"Yeah no I'm never going to want to work here, to be honest I was planning on quitting as soon as I start college, or maybe even sooner, you needn't tell the main boss that"

Boss:"Oh don't worry, whatever is discussed here stays here. *long David Brent style lecture* I know what it's like to work WITH people and AROUND people, and I know that this station is not being run as effectively as possible, it's a clique, and I'm sure you can see that too Ronan. But quitting isn't going to change that. You quitting will not make this a smoother operation.

Me:"Eh I don't care about this job, I'm not sure what your point is"

Boss:"All I'm saying is, think about what I've said to you yeah? Just think about it"

Me:"............ok"

CEBCWTJCW: Morning Rachel!!! Oooh! What have you done to your NOSE??

Me: What? Oh yeah, it's a spot.

CEBCWTJCW: No! You've cut yourself or something! It's really RED.

Me: No, really, it's just a big, shiny, noticeable spot.

CEBCWTJCW: It looks really BAD!

At this point I gave up all hope of having a good day.

Woman At Next Desk: Oh, you used to live in London? So did I. I moved back after my daughter started school and, to be honest, I'm really glad I did. The education you get in London is terrible.

Madchen: I've heard inner city schools are, er, challenging.

WAND: Oh yes. I mean, she was one of only three white faces in the class.

Madchen: Oh. (Mutters something under her breath about 1 in 4 Scots).

Office twats who preface statements with 'I'm not being funny' should recognise that everything following the phrase comes with its own virtual kill file.

My other suggestion would be to canvass other coworkers for a pizza delivery one Friday and exclude her blatantly.

I work in a room with two people. Person 1 said to me all the stuff I wrote above. She thought nothing of saying it to a stranger (the assumption, I guess, being that I would think the same). Person 2 laughed along merrily. Also, I have come across numerous people in Glasgow who tell me they get scared in London because there are so many black people around. Again, the way they express themselves implies they feel no sense of shame whatsoever - they just don't see there's anything wrong in expressing obviously prejudiced opinions.

I'm not denying for a second that racism doesn't exist elsewhere (and I'm not forgetting that the survey found 3 in 4 Scots aren't racist) but this is the only place I've encountered bigots who have the expectation that my opinion must be the same as theirs.

reply from me: "actually, on Friday we both determined that we had the wrong CD and would have to special order a new copy. On Monday."

reply from my boss: "There must have been some miscommunication here."

yeah, between your ears and your brain. moron!

What the fuck?

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...

Hangin' With Mr. Couper

Had a meeting about returning to work in the office today, they'd already gone over how people with health concerns can apply for exceptions to stay home.

Coworker pipes up during the q'time "I have elderly parents and am worried about public transport can I stay home" THAT WAS ALREADY ADDRESSED TAKE IT OFFLINE GEEZ.

so the 'new tool' I referenced we are building, since it's on a third party vendor and no longer proprietary tech of ours, it requires licenses for all users. previously, no 'licenses' were needed, access to the previous tool was automatic.

they had a deal with the vendor for a specific # of licenses. the number of licenses is insufficient for the # of people who need it. entire project put on hold.

after we already moved our training materials in QA and QC to the new format.

lol. this place is hilarious.

Whoopsie doodle

My boss has been out of the country for the last 5 weeks so I had to take sole responsibility for hiring and training 2 new staff for the stores, which I hate bc 1. I don’t want to talk to anybody let alone strangers and 2. I don’t fucking work in the stores so I don’t know shit about the front end of our POS

But fine whatever, I do it and it’s been 2 weeks. One of the new staff, who seemed promising, is already giving off major red flags:
We’re all in a group chat bitching about a customer who tried to throw a one coworker under the bus to another. New staff member - let’s call her G - privately tells another coworker that she thinks it’s “catty” which is just like... wtf you claimed you’ve worked years in CS, bitching is what everyone ever who works in CS does - it’s fucking bonding!!
Again, we’re in a group chat bc there’s some customer issue, we’re trying to figure out who she originally dealt with, coworker E says that from what she can gather from the customer, the original staff member was G. G goes OFF and accuses E of being a liar - in the group chat!!! She eventually sort of apologizes and blanes it on stress caused by unspecified family issues.
Later on I tell that I’m happy she apologized but that she needs to know it’s inappropriate and unacceptable to speak to a coworker that way and WOW she didn’t like my attitude. She claimed she was raised to “defend” herself (except she attacked instead of defending), blamed her personal problems again, and when I told her that personal problems are no excuse for disrespecting coworkers she gave me a lecture about disappointing it is her employer doesn’t care about her.

I can’t wait till my boss gets back bc these two will absolutely not vibe and shit is gonna hit the fan.

ugh ... yeah ... one of my clients does custom products and has a store as well ... and complaining/joking about customers was definite bonding time. ... like the guy who walked in and wanted the front end staffperson to help him make a cactus hoodie, like how to design a cactus hoodie ...it was actually hilarious (because the guy was a jerk and also probably high) and awesome because it then became a brainstorming session about how one would actually go about making a cactus hoodie and why someone would want a cactus hoodie.

really hate when managers want a meeting with me but it's beneath them to set up the conference line so they email me to set it up instead

Lol yes that is bullllshit

oh it wasn't even asked either, it was just like "we would like to have a call tomorrow morning," just implied that they wouldn't be setting it up. i wish i could have replied "OKAY, AND?"

"that's cool. i would like a salad right now myself"

how one would actually go about making a cactus hoodie and why someone would want a cactus hoodie

so how would one make a cactus hoodie though?

asking for a friend

LOL speaking of bitching about customers in group chats, I wrote "ugh i am going to kill harry" (a customer) in what I thought was our direct team-only chat but it was the somewhat wider our team + all the devs and managers craaaap

Thankfully someone just joked "make sure you Jira that" lol. I deleted it p fast.

I did that once years ago where our most toxic member of our team had just loudly boasted "I WORK TWICE AS HARD AS EVERYONE ELSE ON THIS TEAM". I wrote "K@thleen just said she works 'twice as hard as everyone else on the team'", and then accidentally sent it TO HER. I tried to backpedal and say "and I agree with you", only I realized by looking at her desk that she hadn't read it yet, and then a manager pulled her into a meeting and she didn't lock her desk like she was supposed to.

I got up and closed the window. this was Sametime 15 years ago so it didn't save Conversation History and it wasn't setup to send email transcripts to her email, so she didn't see it.

Now if I'm trash talking, I double check!

i wrote a css overlay for slack to make 'safe' chats have a different background colour to shared chats, just as a reminder.

anyway, i'm off for a week so i wrote instructions on how to make a time sensitive change to the worst config file in history and on the jira ticket noted that there was a known problem which is unimportant and pre-existing and to be careful because the config is fragile.

change was applied as requested, and then the team-lead noticed the non-problem and 'fixed' that too, breaking the config and causing other jobs not to process.

Going by my past experiences, your coworkers will then subtly infer that this would not have happened had you not taken time off.

we're redesigning our training and one of the SMEs disagreed with feedback that my colleagues and I had left. She posted her concerns directly below our feedback, which was sure to confuse the developer with conflicting instructions, so I took the discussion offline. We discussed and the head of our dept decided to go with our approach rather than the SMEs.

In retaliation, the SME is now making passive aggressive comments ("you'll need to ask Neanderthal/etc, I disagreed, but they decided not to go with my suggestion, and then she deleted all of her feedback, including feedback not related at all to the content in dispute. so now the developer is asking where that feedback went as they need it for today's deadline.

like, are you 12 years old? jfc.

My immediate team is 4 staff. With the way our work's structured, we've basically divided the work into 4 parts, each about as busy as the other but all diff skillsets. Me and the other gal in the team we can, and do, manage all 4 tasks when we have to ie when someone's away we'll do their bit.

Whenever I or her are away, the other 2 useless men in the team stick to their own part and whinge theyre busy.

2 ppl were away the last 2 days leaving me and Useless Guy to divide the work up. 50 50 right? Makes sense?

So I say "I am doing my usual task A and T*ryns task B, You can do your usual, and Task D". He has the gall to say "I'll see what I can do to help out."

...help out? How are you HEPLING me by NOT DOING YOUR SHARE.

He kept making it sound like he was doing me a favour doing his extra quarter of the work, whinged he was busy, and inevitagbly I had to do the bulk of it because it couldnt just not get done.

So I did 3/4 of the work last 2 days and I am PISS MAD.

there seems to be one of those at every business and yet if you ever call them out for not being productive, they have every excuse in the book, none of which has anything to do with why they couldn't do the work to help.

is there another assignment you can have someone drop into his lap by proxy?

i'm tired of idiot team managers being allowed to add their stupid fucking representatives to training roster up until the Friday afternoon before it begins. rather than instituting a firm cutoff date, which should optimally be a week before.

We base the number of trainers on the size of the class a week before, which proves faulty because between during the Monday - Friday of the week before, the requests that come in Thursday/Friday wind up increasing the roster 150 - 200%. More than half the time, that means we have too few trainers (as the ratio is supposed to be 12:1) and have to go scrambling to find someone last minute, or leave the class short handed. (and in virtual training it's important to have a good ratio due to the increase in the number of tech issues, where there's often multiple that need to be addressed simultaneously).

then a quarter of the time, they wind up msging us the Monday or Tuesday to disenroll these same people, saying "nevermind, they have a conflict this week that I didn't know about". real easy to keep together who's in the class when the 'official roster' is out of date by the time it gets to us (and the dude responsible for keeping it fucks it up half the time).

verbatim exchange I just had. including timestamps, which were visible to the other person while making these statements:

[12:26 PM] GOOBER
how much time do we have I want to take it over but if not enough time to start it I will do it again later.

​[12:26 PM] NEANDERTHAL
about 9 minutes

​[12:27 PM] GOOBER
Ok, I reviewed, I know my mistakes but want to make sure I have time to redo so I will later even if it doesn't count for you guys, for myself.

​[12:36 PM] GOOBER
that was the longest 9 min I could've retested by now.

entire GUI system down in our test environment for over 24 hours. nothing like this has ever happened before.

the lead IT guy's response is to merely say over and over again "this shouldn't be happening".

so basically all of my trainees can't properly utilize the environment they're supposed to use and aren't getting practice.

fun!

fuck ... I want to post in this thread, but it's on ILE and not 77 ... honestly, I should keep it to myself. Stupid, annoying ... but understandable

I told my boss once back in 2019 that he could message me on WhatsApp since I was in the Philippines.

He apparently took that one time permission to mean "message me here always instead of texting" and unbeknownst to me, has been sending me messages there for weeks. Usually for emergencies. Like today, he wanted me to come in early to help fill in for a training, so he WhatsApped me yesterday. I didn't see it as I don't even have it installed anymore, he didn't text me, so I was late.

WhatsApp is like FB Messenger, it shows you if the messages have been read. can't...he see...that I am not reading them?

Not to mention the years of nonresponse!?

yeah for real. i haven't replied to a single message since 2019. lol

told him this morning to just text me from now on.

well now at least he knows what's up

one of our trainees in one of our classes has a smoke alarm with a low battery that has been chirping for two weeks, and constantly forgets to put herself on mute. eventually one of the other classmates said DOES SOMEONE NEED TO CHANGE THEIR SMOKE ALARM BATTERY

observing a trainer who is literally making the training all about him and his emotional outbursts. he made a mistake yesterday and then said loudly "put a bullet in my head!"

oh yikes. Is this training about dealing with stupid, annoying coworkers?

unintentionally, it has become exactly that

i uh hope that fellow gets the help he needs

He did in that I told him he was done for the day and took over

in more stupid trainer chronicles...

"Hi Rob - here's the status report for the week. Sorry, I couldn't take roll yesterday as I was presenting."

"I....what? You literally have a partner who wasn't presenting who could have taken roll. For fuck's sake, MS Teams shows you the people who were invited that aren't present in the session, it takes all of 30 seconds to confirm at the beginning of the day."

it's a level of dumb that I have no antibody for

much like public schools and standardized tests, our dumb leaders think that the stupid post-module 'assessments' are these great predictors of individual performance (editor's note: they're not). We have *14 of them* in the Pension course I teach, and they're open-note so they're not hard to pass, and usually only illuminate the poorer performances (or those with test anxiety).

If you cut them for time - you get an interrogation, even though not cutting them means if you run over time in a lesson, you have to cut tiem in another lesson, and then you're rushing and nobody learns anything.

coworkers who cc themselves on their own emails are 9 times out of 10 completely disorganized and have an inbox that is an actual nightmare

My father died suddenly of a heart attack while I was on vacation and I emailed my manager so that he’d tell my coworkers.. he offered to do so.. then “missed” my reply. So when I got back I had to answer a bunch of chipper “how was your vacation?”s in back to back calls which was absolutely brutal. The first one, I didn’t know they didn’t know, so it felt completely heartless that this usually thoughtful person would ask. I want to burn it all down. So instead I booked my second shot for that night so that I’d get sick (and I did) and miss the next day. Fuck you shitty “oh we are all such good friends” fake ass manager. Having a pension is the only thing that’s stopped me from rage-applying to other jobs. This is after six months of my father going through significant mental health problems during a time of great project stress at work, all of which the manager was very aware of and was praising me for withstanding.

jesus christ, i'm so sorry to hear about your father, but also the insensitive way that it was handled by your manager at work.

thank you. It is nice at least to feel anger occasionally rather than sad. But the first hour when I sat online prior to our calls and none of my decent work friends reached out was so alienating and depressing. I could tell my coworkers were so shocked and sad to see me have to say it too. He fucked that up so bad.

❤️

Wow, yeah he did. So sorry, FFM, what a horrible time <3

ugh what a careless jerk

Thank you ❤️ needed to rant somewhere that won’t get me fired! Please no one snitch. xoxo

Not a specific coworker, but so tired of having some variation of the same exact conversation with our IT department eight or nine times a year when reviewing the design for a new classroom layout with AV needs:

“So based on the size of the room and throw distances, here’s the projector we recommend. The one we used last time was discontinued, but this is the equivalent model.”

Nope, don’t like that one.

“Okay, no problem, which model would you prefer?”

Not that one.

“Sure, no big deal. But can you let us know what you do like, since you guys will be maintaining it?”

That’s up to the designer and their recommendation.

“Okay, but you didn’t like what they just recommended. How about this other model?”

Oh, no way, we had a bad experience with those.

“Alright, fair, so any recommendations at all for brands or types you prefer?”

Well, we’d prefer you stick to our standards.

“Of course, can you share your standards with us?”

Well, we don’t really have written standards…

ahh yes, the UH method of procedural documentation

all standards are stored "up here"

*points at head*

i got yr standards right here

one of the benefits of being burnt out to where I'm phoning it in at work is that I no longer feel compelled to bail out someone who keeps goofing up/failing to do things. like scheduling a meeting for a manager checkpoint with your learners and NEVER INVITING THE MANAGERS TO IT.

when we were spinning off from our parent company in 2017, we temporarily called ourselves NewCo until we settled upon our new name. so our intranet site temporarily contained "NewCo" in the URL.

it is four years later, NewCo is still in the URL, and they haven't bought a new URL with our company's name in it and just moved the intranet there. just looks so tacky.

Bigwigs: "we've got to stop this crazy attrition, we blame you as trainers for people leaving!!!!"

Me: "Hi, uh, today is day one of class, 20% of all of the classes were no-shows, 5 of them were given the wrong equipment by IT, and despite having a whole day to get everything setup on Friday with their IT, another 25% of the classes can't get into their systems, and they all sound frustrated."

Bigwigs: "Dude, whatever, these things happen."

Me: "But this is why they keep le-"

Bigwigs: "I said DUDE, WHATEVER"