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...

i got a snide remark from someone today in regards to a polite request I made, so I spent all this time restructuring my follow-up sentence to make sure I kept it as neutral as possible, and in doing so, removed a key word accidentally, the word "because".

the resopnse was supposed to say "I said what I said because", and instead said "I said what I said", making it sound like I was some snotty person on Twitter. I never say "I said what I said", i hate that phrase, ugh.

So a weird update on my workstation thing noted above. Turns out it was NOT my manager who made the decision to put them both in my workstation, it was a decision made by a different coworker. I came in the following morning and my manager actually pulled me aside and apologized to me and said that was not his solution and he notified the other coworker that it was unacceptable and another solution needed to be worked out. So at least I'm back to just one additional body in my workstation.

Funny thing is though, I had not yet said a single word to my manager about the seating arrangement when he apologized to me. I was planning to later in the day during my weekly one on one with him, but he brought it up before I did. Anyway, said coworker that made the dumb decision in the first place has made a giant production about not speaking to me since this all happened, because they are a petulant baby and upset that they got (rightfully, imho) told off about a (terrible) decision.

my boss is a perfectly nice guy, he's not toxic and he's very friendly, but he's not getting any better in the disorganization department.

he scheduled a meeting at 8:45 in the fuckin' morning, which is before my shift even starts, for no reason (and it could have been an email). he bumped up a meeting by 3 hours, which forced me to take a short lunch. he always gets the dates wrong when communicating assignments, leading people being allocated to classes that they're not actually available to teach, which we then have to fix.

he double books people on assignments, he double books reservations in our training environment, and this one particular issue with the training environment, he continues to try and solve by doing the one thing I told him will not solve the problem and pleaded with him to please stop doing ...over and over...for four years. I've even forwarded the same how to document ten or more times.

he's not stupid. and he loves me so it isn't hurting my career, but man, I'm just baffled as to how someone is this sloppy and running a department.

Crown Prince Dickrod of Painfully Sincere Folk Dickdom telling me that garage bands aren't "punk".

Uh lol wow

That is serious RONG

my boss's boss asked me last Thursday if I'd present a quick 5-10 minute presentation during a meeting today. I got this email while I was in the midst of handling an escalated situation in training (basically, some dork accidentally shared private learner feedback w/ the entire class).

somehow, I was the only person in a team of 50+ people left off of the invite (despite the fact that we have an Group set up in outlook to prevent these types of situations). I only found out it was already going on when my boss messaged me when only 10 minutes remained to ask if I was still presenting today.

passive aggressively emailed them the To and CC fields to show I wasn't on it so they can't claim I 'declined' the meeting.

team lead wants us to tell him, and everybody else, what we've been doing. it's like he hasn't been paying attention in morning meetings. feels like homework.

and he's done this by putting a word document on dropbox. so now 10 people have downloaded a copy of this word document and will all try and upload it ahead of the meeting. he could've put this on confluence, or used dropbox paper, noth of which we use and which support concurrent editing by multiple people, but no.

noth / both

boss managed to somehow miss an entire training group when he organized our training plans, so we're 21 trainees more than planned and are outside the mandated teacher-student ratio. and it is now too late to fix it.

passive aggressively adding the missing class to his stupid logistics chart felt good.

one of our partner site managers decides to ask our instructor if a specific learner left class, stating she knew she was having pregnancy issues. just blurting out private medical details to strangers.

so cool....now I have to report that this morning.

hey the boss is at it again!

so two weeks ago, fucker triple books me. I'm supervising two nightmare classes that end 6/12, and he inexplicably gives me a certification class that runs 6/11 - 6/13. and on 6/13, I'm supposed to begin prepping 14 instructors to teach 7 classes. Before I can go "what the fuck", he goes "don't worry, I'll back you up".

He didn't do JACK SHIT. He was nowhere to be found the last two days of nightmare class training. I couldn't check in on them because I was leading my own class! so I'm not there to be able to ensure the instructors send the final report to the managers doing the next leg of training, nor to send a warning email to those managers about some of the behavioral issues. and I can't do it the next day because I'm leading certification all day, and the day after that, my first four hours of the day are earmarked for prep sessions.

so of course it slipped my mind. so now my boss comes to me today to ask if I gave any warning to the managers, as they're complaining that the bad trainees are still bad. Despite all of the things that didn't get done due to him triplebooking me, the issues were well-documented in the ticket, which auto-generates emails to everyone on the ticket, which included those managers. There was a week's worth of discussion on the problem children of the class.

manager insinuates this wasn't enough. I remind him that he was literally supposed to be backing me up and he goes silent as if...he didn't even remember he did that to me.

on top of that, I just remembered...he was the official manager for both classes, and I never should have been the one handling this shit at the level I was anyway. the other manager I'm working with on my other classes always tells me "I got this" when the problem hits a certain level of severity, whereas my boss just leaves it for me.

we have about 10% of our learners without power due to Hurricane Beryl and the project lead decided to offer to extend training a day to catch up (a great idea, which I supported).

one of my instructors is pissing and moaning about it all day, like boo hoo I'm sorry I put you through the trauma of teaching an extra day, a lot of these learners have water damage, spoiling food, no power, and are sweating their asses off. wanna trade?

not to mention - some of the people who were supposed to do the next round of training...are also without power, so they couldn't start their training tomorrow if they wanted to.

Was working a new set at the gym today, on my day off from working there, and my co-worker comes up and says, "hey, k is in hospital because he got heatstroke, can you cover his closing tonight."

and i said "heat stroke huh? how did k get heat stroke, i mean it is hot but"

and co-worker responded "he got drunk last night and then didn't drink any water and fainted in (most populous public square in our city)"

i looked at my co-worker deadeyed and said, "no."

i love these kids, even the one who fainted, but jfc i was NOT this level of stupid at their age.

i realized that was convoluted at the beginning— i was working on some boulder problems that had just gone up on the walls, but i also work at the gym. anyway.

it’s me, hi, i’m the problem it’s me

loool tabes

when he comes back to work you should all pitch in & gift him one of those 10 gallon water jugs

he's in training to become a pilot, and the other day i asked him what type of planes he wants to fly, and he talked about becoming a bush pilot in Alaska, and i was like "wow that's so dangerous" and he had no idea? he's just not the brightest bulb, but he's very nice and is good to work with.

I know a guy who does that. He's also a jazz bassist; he was in Jaimie Branch's band.

Hurricane Beryl issue has lead to six classes becoming a nightmare. not because of the learners still without power, because what the fuck can you do about that, but because the grown adults I'm working with can't simply have a discussion about how to ensure they get caught up when they return. making decisions without getting other people's ok first requiring us to cancel those plans moments later.

and then one asshole makes a comment suggesting maybe some of them are actually no call no show and should be termed and i'm like REALLY, dick? do you not know how many people are without power there?

so the assignment that was stressing me out that was supposed to end yesterday might now extend out another three days. all because my boss decided to give me double the work everybody else.

i really...better get that fucking bonus now.

i am just finishing work now. I was supposed to be off 3.5 hours ago. all because of the ineptitude and sloppiness of a number of people and my boss not thinking through that 150 people transitioning out of our class at the same time is actually very hard for one person to handle.

(best believe I billed that fuckin OT baby)

I've complained about this particular co-worker in the past but, well, here we go again.

So our department (and not even the whole department, just the half I'm in) has stupid rules for working remote - only allowed one day a week, can't be Monday or Friday. Whatever, annoying and less than ideal, but we've learned to deal with it. I've usually had mine on Thursdays for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it's the one day I for sure don't need to be involved in any in-person meetings. Unfortunately, for a variety of project meetings that need to attend in person, I personally can't ever do Tuesdays remote. So that leaves me only Wednesday and Thursday as options.

This summer myself and said co-worker got randomly assigned the task of overseeing some student interns. Again, totally fine and it's been an interesting experience. When they started our boss told us we couldn't take the same remote day, as one of us would need to be in the office with the interns. Once again, fair enough.

So for the first few weeks of this, we would have a quick conversation about which days we'd take remote and about 75% of the time I switched mine to Wednesday. But there were two occasions where I really needed Thursday and explained this to her. Both times she started crying and made me so uncomfortable that I didn't know what to do and ended up switching mine again (okay, yes, my choice to give in, but I was so uncomfortable I didn't know what else I could do). But this week, she went in to the shared calendar and claimed Thursdays for herself for the rest of the summer. No word to me, no heads up, nothing.

Genuinely not sure how to handle this. Our boss always likes using "taking away remote days" as a threat and I'm fairly confident there's a very large risk he'll just tell us we both don't get remote work days if I bring this concern to him. Past direct conversations with this co-worker have ended with her crying, no matter how lightly or gently I approach the question. (side note: there have been other complaints about this particular co-worker "weaponizing" her tears and she self-reported to us that her last performance review spent a significant amount of time on the frequency with which she cries in the office) I think it's bullshit that she can just unilaterally claim every Thursday and that's just it, but I'm not sure how to resolve it.

tell her you need to take some thursdays and to suck it up

I can't think of a neutral way to ask "is there a way I can ask you normal-ass questions about our work schedule without upsetting you to the point of breaking out in tears?"

on the bright side, maybe she's blocking off Thursdays to finally go to therapy?!

to quote Hootie: let her cry

like just sit for as long as she cries for and then ask her to help you come up with a workable solution

or better yet, take it to HR. that’s what they’re there for!

HR would probably be best. Might be worth it to mention you’re worried about losing promised wfh days as an unfair punishment.

lol just join in the crying and watch her freak out

That is actually the best idea

So I’m a freelancer and submit invoices after I’m done a project. Normally payment comes through within two months from the different shops I work for.
This absolute dunce sat on two of my invoices for two months and then quit. So three months later I’m not getting responses to my emails asking her what is going on. When I saw on LinkedIn she’d moved into a new job 4 weeks ago (somehow landed a better position despite being the WORST producer I’d ever worked with) i was so fucking if annoyed. Who does that?! Did she know she was going to quit and just not bother doing her job for an entire month?!

we usually teach customer care agents but they gave us four licensed Series 7 financial advisors to teach, so honestly they probably know more than us about 401k, but it's just to teach our systems.

these boomers act like they've never seen a computer in their life. it's almost hilarious watching them not being able to do rudimentary things.

like you're telling me the financial companies you worked for prior to us didn't have a web presence or require you to use computers? seriously?

Are they extra proud of not knowing how to use computers, or just a little smug about it?

they seem like they think it's 1997 and expect us to join them there

People used computers for their job in 1997! They were even more complicated then!

I’ll never have to type a command line again and lovin’ it

latest edition of 'dumb boss chronicles', so they did a significant redesign of health benefit coursework while we had several classes already going on. standard process is to let them continue with the course curriculum that was in place when class started, and then we deploy the new curriculum separately, and only retire the old one when all of the classes using it have ended.

Instead, they accidentally overwrote all of the existing coursework with the new courses, so trainers who had prepared were completely lost as to why the materials looked different. Then, instead of archiving the activity materials from the old class so we could still get to them, he deleted them all from the database permanently.

every hour I get a new question about something that unexpectedly changed. and boy do I enjoy telling my boss about it when it happens.

“dumb boss chronicles” would be a sick thread tbh

What was that wonderful thread where somebody recorded all their mad boss’s utterances/singing?

A thread for Steve n.'s list of songs that his boss sings

one of my trainers sent me a mocked up schedule showing which trainer is leading each topic at each time for the next six days.

she is the only trainer in the class.

what in the world was the point.

there are 8 or so of us on the on-call rota, so we have to do a week roughly every 2 months. but people have been booking monthly slots or slots 3 weeks apart, which is squeezing people out. (it's quite lucrative - the rates have just gone up 250% which is probably why)

they decided to only align one instructor to this class as there are only four learners. the reason, however, that we usually align 2 is because people get sick, have emergencies, etc, and it stops the class dead every time if you only have one instructor.

as expected, our first instructor got sick three days in and had to be replaced. Then our replacement instructor was only available for one day, so they put another one in. Now that person had system problems and they had to replace THEM, so now four different people have presented in 8 days.

compounding things, today, we had the learners read the material on their own, telling them we'd debrief it, and I told the replacement instructor to find out how far everybody got in the reading, and then find a good place to debrief/pick up from. he instead started from the beginning. it's a four hour lesson and we were supposed to be finished an hour from now.

really feels like babysitting, i swear lol

Working on a piece about Prohibition and architecture, which entails sekf-financed travel.

I requested a pile of books for my research.

This is what I went to school for.

What I get is "can I get a copy of the musuc you're writing about"?

I'm not a music writer, dumbfuck. No I'm not going to paint a mural for you or write poetry.

What I do on my own time is my business until it's finished. Which may take two years the way things are going. You don't finance my work so fuck off.

They have a new media librarian at my old job she is so bad.

A professor asked her to order more 80s "college rock" for his class so her master list is a Replacements and Warren Zevon and Syd Straw anything Peter Buck played on like she looked it up in five minutes. It was like very dad rock corporate frat boy - no British or Australian music or anything.

I said the director has to go the place has gone to shit everyone meaningful is gone, all our hard work down the drain.

Thank you ledge!

one of the things we are supposed to go over in training for new hires is the customer website, so they can guide them. for the second straight year, the link to that site in our training environment has been broken for months. last year we lost it for about 2.5 months. this year, it's been down since early February, almost six months.

the former person in charge of fixing it was the worst, basically would deny it wasn't working even as you demoed it not working to them, and then would do nothing for 3 weeks and then ask you 3 weeks later "still having the problem?". but they took her off and replaced her w/ someone who...does even less.

You know, when I was a teenager I thought no-show jobs were a mob thing, and then I started working in corporate environments where shit just...doesn't happen, even though there's a person in charge of making them happen. It's incredible, sometimes.