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...

FWIW I don't advocate firing people willy nilly but like...there's always a toilet that could use a bit of extra scrubbing, manager who probably couldn't manage the intricacies of a three-ring binder.

i feel like this site is falling in on itself tbh

ILX is work now?

:(

since 2014 imma say

It feels that way because you're not ranking metal subgenres on ILM.

idk, deems is perhaps disappointed in the lack of nuance itt dedicated to the art of hyperbolic work-related steam expulsion

oh im too woke now huh

I've been saying, tone it down my dude

Between Facebook, Twitter, reddit and a few other massifs hovering up the time and attention of most potential ILX newcomers, and ILX's heavy reliance on text-based interaction and the generally high level of verbal acuity required to participate, ILX has been slowly sagging and shrinking for a while now. When it finally becomes a ghost town, I'll be one of the last to leave, but I'm thankful the necrosis is not too far advanced, yet. I like the company here.

I've been steadily gnawing at the load-bearing support struts for some time, myself, sorry about that.

lol

sorry for rights

― deems of internment (darraghmac), Friday, November 1, 2019 11:37 AM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, lol at this. best thing about being a unionized employee in the public sector is that my ass is basically unfireable

― ت (jim in vancouver), Friday, November 1, 2019 3:01 PM bookmarkflaglink

Has nothing to do with rights deems/jim. Obviously I don't want managers firing motherfuckers for bullshit reasons. That is the good function of our HR.

But they don't let manager terminate people who are legitimately terrible. I had someone on my team who missed every deadline for three years, even after extensions. Who me and others had to finish the massive work they couldn't finish while doing their own job. Who frequently lied and was caught lying. Never got through one project where they completed more than 60% of what was assigned.

The only person on the team who had this problem. Left me working 70 hour weeks doing her job and mine.

But no, we weren't allowed to terminate her.

Keep on taking bad faith reads tho guys it's a gl for ya

I mean shit I didn't even get a wrist slap for the major code of conduct violation i accidentally committed on a hot mic

you just gonna leave us hanging like that?!

― FRAUDULENT STEAKS (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Friday, November 1, 2019 2:24 PM bookmarkflaglink

I was given five minutes notice that the class I was supposed to be relieved from was mine all day while having to simultaneously do another 8 hour assignment. And then I found out my partner hadn't done the favor he had promised to do to help me just take a breath.

My anxiety was going nuts. So I vent to myself, but loudly, "Oh my FUCKING GOD, all I fucking asked you was to do one motherfucking favor but of FUCKING COURSE NOT!"

Surprised to hear rustling over the phone from the learners, who are doing an assignment yet all seemed to start muttering right at the same time I....

Oh shit, I look at the WebEx to check that I muted it, which of course I did, stop being paran...

Oh fuck. Not muted. One angry learner types "Mute your phone, sir!"

Self-reported it to my boss, issued lengthy apology to the class. Waited for the formal discipline that never came.

Boss seemed to think it was nbd. I shoulda at least been written up tho.

I feel like i got lucky due to how busy it was more than intentionally being let off.

yeah i have dipshit coworkers too. i just am very direct when they fuck up and that keeps most people from being too much of a nuisance

― ت (jim in vancouver), Friday, November 1, 2019 3:09 PM bookmarkflaglink

Lol last time i did that i got a talking to, nice that youre allowed to do it

I can only laugh today

so I was worried I’d have dumb questions or a derail from my manager’s peer, who works elsewhere, during this meeting. but instead this happens:

three of us in the room, the person doing the work remote, and her manager remote. we speak for a while, then I ask a question that one of the remote people need to answer. dead air! so I check, and the person who would do it had dropped from the conference call. happens due to connection issues, nbd. her manager isn’t responding but is listed as present so maybe he’s dropped but it hasn’t timed out?

about ten minutes later, I hear breathing on the speaker. he’s there! he says something about “had to step away”
and mumbles something jumbled including “bathroom.” she appears back on a moment later, and we find out.. she had technical issues and he had silently absconded to the toilet! whatever, but pretty funny because he’s a constant interjector and micromanager and actually assumed she could handle it but only because his bowels were messed up

so the funniest part is later. someone who was in the room messaged me to confirm he definitely had disappeared for a while. apparently there was an after-meeting conversation and he played it off like he’d been on the call the entire time

Lol last time i did that i got a talking to, nice that youre allowed to do it

― When I am afraid, I put my toast in you (Neanderthal), Friday, November 1, 2019 4:34 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

didn't get fired though so that's nice

We found out at work that a former tech employee had been spying on people's e-mails and stuff. She had been stalking a well-liked media studies professor. She apparently had people's e-mails and stuff, which included me, because I had exchanged e-mail with him. I guess she had been spreading a lot of bullshit about people having affairs and stuff. How a fantasist like this ever got hired in the first place is beyond me.

Also it got back to me that she thought I was having an affair with the professor, who was old enough to be my dad.

well, that only seems incredibly fireable and somewhat criminal

Of course it's criminal...I guess we have to wait and see whether charges will be filed. Certainly a crazy erotomanic stalker like that ought to be off the streets.

there‘s this woman in my region who has been covered by local news multiple times for getting a job under false premises, telling an elaborate story about her life that‘s and stealing a bunch of cash from employers

she’s obviously intelligent and sympathetic enough to sell it but it blows my mind that she’s dodged out with a requirement for mental health treatment, ordered to pay restitution, only for some employer who hasn’t recognized her to hire her again and she’s back in the news cycle in six months

so uh, best of luck with the work stalker

story that’s tragic, I meant to say

Shared an office with a guy who exhaled a satisfied 'aaaahhhhhhh...' after every loud gulp of coffee or water for one year.

i work with a sicilian

its been intense but we're both taking learnings from it

Where I work is full of Italians fwiw.

I'm part sicilian, is there something I should be concerned about?

If one more, just one more, person of whom I've requested something is like 'yeah, we're all good bruh' only for me to discover that we are not actually all good, bruh, and that the requestee never even bothered to confirm that we were all good before consulting whatever goddamn faulty oracle he's using to sense whether a request might or might not be legitimate, I'm going to aim my head directly at that person's midsection so as to assail them with skull shrapnel when my brain finally and inevitably explodes.

― Feed Me Wheat Thins (Old Lunch), Friday, November 1, 2019 12:37 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Elapsed time between this morning's request (to a different manager altogether) and the offhand and completely incorrect dismissal it received: < 1 minute. BRB, scheduling a brain explosion rn.

xp i dunno, its kinda hard to say without knowing whether you have any idea of the volume of your voice, the ideal level of personal space other people would appreciate, whether or not they like to finish their sentences before you begin to tell an unrelated anecdote because you were bored etc etc

i mean i think it may be just him, but ive raised it at increasing levels of fraughtness and he just thinks its a cultural thing so....?

Where I work is full of Italians fwiw.

― Michael Oliver of Penge Wins £5 (Tom D.)

ITALIANS ARE NOT THE SAME AS SICILIANS, as Sicilians will tell you when you meet them and about every five minutes thereafter.

I do a lot of the stuff people on this thread complain about.

*meaningful hand gesture*

Imagine how confusing it is for those of us who are part Italian and part Sicilian. My identity is a mess!

please stop shouting, please

The entire department just behind me (in our garbage open-plan office where there is no privacy and certainly no barriers against sound) is comprised of individuals who have seemingly never been exposed to the concept of an 'inside voice'. Or the concept of 'working instead of pretending you're on your third glass of wine at a raucous dinner party'. I assume these were qualities that management actively sought out? At any rate, it's...it's just such an absolute delight.

guessing that here darragh is using “Sicilian” to mean “someone from Sicily,” not “someone from America”

Sometimes, sic, your corrections are in reference to things that were never said or even inferred. Just FYI, if you want to save yourself some time.

(At any rate: the unspoken-yet-readily-acknowledged thread that runs through my panoply of work-related complaints is that I just plain don't belong here and that the real problem is that I haven't moved the christ on already. I accept this as primarily my failing, I just don't allow it to curb my bitchery.)

im not, and i know im fierce on the distinction as it pertains to my own set, but im not sure sicilianity actually dilutes tbh

ITALIANS ARE NOT THE SAME AS SICILIANS, as Sicilians will tell you when you meet them and about every five minutes thereafter.

Not like Italians to be hung up on whereabouts in Italy they come from.

there were a number of hilarious things that came out of a conversation between my traveling companions and a younger Polish dude when I was visiting a few weeks back, but one of the best might have been that residents of Warsaw, unlike the people of Krakow, are "not really Polish"

well yeah this isnt a strange phenomenon tbf

like, dubs....arent *real* gaels like. everyone knows this.

And Glaswegians aren't Scottish (i.e. Protestant) enough but they dgaf.

*nods*

ITALIANS ARE NOT THE SAME AS SICILIANS, as Sicilians will tell you when you meet them and about every five minutes thereafter.

Not like Italians to be hung up on whereabouts in Italy they come from.

― Michael Oliver of Penge Wins £5 (Tom D.), Monday, November 4, 2019 10:18 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

as someone who is 1/8th genovese i don't care where in italy you're from as long as it isn't the south

Sometimes, sic, your corrections are in reference to things that were never said or even inferred. Just FYI, if you want to save yourself some time.

I’m not sure if this is in reference to anything that was said or even inferred

Ha ha ha...I'm 1/4 Calabrese and I grew up around a lot of Italian-Americans and let me tell you, the Calabrese were taught that Sicilians were the "shit" Italians. Then I take a course in Italian and the Northern (very white) Italian teacher tells us that southern Italians are worthless, their food sucks and they have made no contributions to culture and history.

So this past week, this new dude screws up a project, gets chewed out for it, so of his own volition he goes and does it again, just to prove he can do it right. Never mind that it is pointless, redundant, and a waste of everyone's time.

can't we all just agree that italians were a mistake and call it a day

My work AGM today, thoughts and prayers appreciated

a good coworker has predicted “fireworks” during his group meeting next week where the ridiculous manager I’ve complained about will be attending. apparently the last full group meeting they had ended poorly and with the manager in town, there may be torches and pitchforks

A little off-topic, what I learned from that Italian class (which I was taking for work anyway) - never say, "quanti ani hai" instead of "quanti AN-NI hai". Pronounce both of the "n"s or else you're saying "how many assholes do you have?"

Sounds like a Jurassic Park question

And then having to get up really early in the morning so I can come in to work early because I have to clean up a mess someone else made. My health is no good, I can't keep living without sleep, I'm cleaning this shit up for free (because we're all screwed if someone doesn't). I'm too old to find a new job so all I can do is make these sacrifices in hopes that maybe someone will eventually care that I did all of that work.