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

my friend has that problem, in that he's Firstname O'Brien and there's a Firstname O'Bryan in the company somewhere

― mh, Friday, 25 August 2017 14:07 (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well my heart bleeds for ye over there surely

lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Aw5ZkPbCIAEabX8.png

There are two dudes who sit near me who, I'll qualify, are very nice guys but whose respective banality created some sort of banal singularity once they started sitting next to one another. Long, involved, animated conversations about the most incredibly boring things you could possibly imagine. They're currently marveling over plot points of the Santa Clause films.

We've got a fella in here who used to live in the big city, so he's always educating us about how the big city works.

Such as DID YOU KNOW there's a street in New York called "Houston" that's actually pronounced "HOW-stuhn"?

Do they

Do they post on the trump threads do they

pplains, if he ever gets into politics you should drop the "Did you know that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and.." anecdote and then just kind of stare at him

Long, involved, animated conversations about the most incredibly boring things you could possibly imagine

too easy

>They're currently marveling over plot points of the Santa Clause films.

this sounds amazing.

pplains, if he ever gets into politics you should drop the "Did you know that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and.." anecdote and then just kind of stare at him

try this one: Henry Adams wrote a novel called 'Democracy' in 1880 featuring a womanising politician called Clinton and a dull also-ran called Gore.

life would be sweet if i could just marvel away at Santa Clause

I may have mentioned this on some other thread but I cannot bear the odor of my immediate deskmate. I dont know if its a cultural thing or a male thing or what, but he reeks so intensely of a combo of cat piss, smokers clothing, cheap shitty south asian patchouli scent and BO that I can smell it *from 15 feet away when he isnt even at his desk*.

I mean I'm honestly at the point of quietly going to my team leader and ... saying something. But what?

people who "work long hours" that really just work slowly and chat too much... they really need to fuck the fuck off.

xpost just leave a box of Irish Spring on his desk

the joe rogan guy pissed me off again today. he is really bad at hiding his passive aggressiveness. You know that laugh these people do? with like no joy whatsoever? i just wish people would either a) COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY or b) fuck the fuck off

oh god I've always hated the awkward pass-agg laugh, my last client did that all the time and I wanted to force choke them.

I sometimes feel bad at laughing at a coworker's laugh because his "amused but not cracking up" laugh sounds like the Count from Sesame Street

Sometimes I unintentionally laugh like Dr Hibbert. I have no idea why.

been signed off for the past six weeks due to stress caused by a toxic working environment and a level of expectation that's completely unrealistic (I'm the third person in the role in two years, I didn't apply for the position but was coerced into the transfer). I'm meeting my manager this afternoon to discuss a possible return to work and I'm dreading it. It's hard to say No to your direct boss, but I know nothing has changed while I've been off and I don't see how I can go back to the same situation and not make myself ill.

7 people pair-programming in the space of 4 desks (next to mine). lots of space elsewhere in the office. show some common sense. (i've taken my laptop to completely empty desk, but they haven't spread out to use the space i vacated yet)

i mentioned being short of things to do in the daily standup. was told there were plenty of unassigned tickets. team-lead then launches back into whatever he was doing yesterday before assigning me anything so i'm sat here posting to ilx instead.

Sorry Boxedjoy, that sounds awful. Our office is having a toxic environment problem too at the moment, caused by (a) mass team restructuring and (b) arseholes. I used to be on our Staff Association, and they're doing a shitty job dealing with it. I'm trying to push them to organise a town hall session where staff can have a cathartic moan and hopefully figure out what our "you can't fuck with us past *this* point" line in the sand is.

Filling in for someone today on their project and helping report out s/ls. Someone wanted to know the combined service level for two skills and before i could quickly calc i get pulled aside and told not to because you can't simply just average the two numbers, it's a "complex equation".

No...it's not. You literally multiply the # of calls answered by the service level % for each skill, which gives you the # of timely calls answered for each skill. You add up the timely calls answered, the overall answered, and divide the firsr by the second, there's your combined s/l. 7th grade algebra.

I shared it anyway

Boxedjoy that sounds terrible. Sympathies and luck.

boxedjoy, recently went through something very similar. Sending you best wishes, hit me up via e-mail if you want to talk

thanks guys. I went to meet my manager yesterday with one goal, namely "tell him you're not ready to go back to work unless things have changed: can he take a few days to think about a possible solution?" But there is no possible solution. My manager is a really nice guy who 100% has my back and he told me believes that I'm capable of doing the job but (xpost to rolling depression thread) I'm not prepared to feel so tired, so defeated, so combatant, all the time. The reimbursement is lacking - my store department is bigger than 60% of store totals in the company and yet I don't approach the wage an actual store manager would get - but even if it was a rewarding salary I just don't want to do it, not in this environment. It has made me ill and without any change it will make me more ill.

the whole thing is an absolute disaster. There are no full-time positions in the region so the only way I can go back to work is to return part-time in a basic role ie a paycut of over 50%. My sick pay will expire so this is the reality of it.

And the reason I'm in this mess? Three months ago, I found out the role I was about to progress into was being made redundant (supervisor to assistant manager, but now we don't have assistant managers). My then-manager had a realistic conversation with me about my prospects. "You can't have my job cos I'm going nowhere but if you stay in this job you will be bored and unfulfilled and you are better than this role." So when a new job came up in a flagship branch I applied. I scored best of 10 candidates in the assessments but was told I wasn't to be offered the job because of a personality test (a tickbox exercise from Buzzfeed!) indicated my style was too similar to the people I would be working with and they wanted more diversity. Which is great if you work for the UN and not in a retail job to keep you in gig tickets and wine. So instead I was offered the job I've had to take sick leave from. I didn't want it because I knew the atmosphere would be toxic and the work would be demanding without worthwhile reward, but I let myself be persuaded into it because being overpromoted is a great ego boost. So I am literally in the position where I went to a job interview, was the best candidate, and yet this is the result. I don't know whether to be angry that I've allowed this to happen to me or simply relieved I don't have to go back into the culture of sniping and bitchery.

I mean, in the world of work you have to be tough and strong and resilient and not take criticisms personally and that's all stuff I accept I need to work on, not just for my career but for the sake of my own mentality in life. But there is a difference between "as your boss I have to tell you that this is not right" and the constant backchat of 30-40 people who have nothing good to say about you or anyone or anything.

sorry boxedjoy. That sounds crazy and miserable and I hope you find something better because you clearly deserve to.

also Buzzfeed tickbox personality tests for actual hiring decisions, overriding actual assessments and experience, wtf

(disclaimer: the thought of personality tests for hiring in any circumstances at all makes me itchy. everyone says psychologist Martin Seligman's self-help books are v good and as a kinda learned-helpless-depresso I ought to read them and take in his joyous self-improving message or whatnot, but when I got to the part where he rubberstamped some tickbox personality test for BigCorp to reject people who didn't think they were fantastic in every way and when they weren't it must be someone else's fault, I threw the book across the room and never finished it)

I scored best of 10 candidates in the assessments but was told I wasn't to be offered the job because of a personality test (a tickbox exercise from Buzzfeed!) indicated my style was too similar to the people I would be working with and they wanted more diversity. Which is great if you work for the UN and not in a retail job to keep you in gig tickets and wine.

this is appalling!

we did some personality-style testing in our team once and we're all pretty much the same AND WE LIKE IT THAT WAY although granted it's probably not for the best...

So the woman who was pissed off at me the other week congratulated me on my performance in today's meeting. So that's good. I was given her category and improved its performance by over 200%. The other campaign I was working on, I was able to create materials for it that performed around 185% better than the past materials they were using.

Now I've run afoul of the marketing manager. I was given a new project, and ended up developing a new vision for the product while doing research. I think it'll work. Today he tried to school me, but his schooling used scenarios that didn't match the fact pattern of our situation, so I know it's some dumbshit ego thing on his part... things got real fucking weird for the rest of the day after I submitted my proposal.

I wasn't trying that, I was just looking for something that worked, and invested a lot of time and effort into developing something that I thought would. And based on actual metrics, I've already got a pattern of doing just that at this place.

Today was a pretty miserable day. I've been dealing with crap like this since I was a kid. I have no idea what job or situation would be a good fit for me at this point.

It sounds like you work in advertising or similar - that work is full of toxic bloated egos.

Yeah, I just fell into this work. I probably just have to own this stuff and find a new way to live... you know, more self-confidence, all that bullshit.

The way I present myself is like some schlemiel, then it turns out I'm pretty damn good at things, maybe it throws 'em off what they expected. maybe my life's not geared to who I am properly. Whatver, just bitching here.

It's actually a lot more serious than that ... that woman tried to get me fired ... and today the marketing manager caused a fucking shitstorm that made me look terrible. The big boss likes my numbers, so he shrugged it off, but I'm tired of fighting battles like this.

I got fucking tortured at my last job for stuff like this. And I just limit myself because of it, because people really friggin' hate who I am.

I don't think I have any choice but to learn how to play with power, because I guess I got it whether I like it or not. Anyway, enough on my dumb shit.

half my office have these in-joke phrases that other coworkers have said over the years, inane shit that is only funny to them, and I swear it accounts for 50% of what is said every week

drives me fucking insane

Not only did one of my coworkers make the pun of a law firm called "Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe", but one of the others about shot hot coffee through his nose laughing so hard at it.

inane injokes? Fuck washing a hat!

also my boss does "impressions" of various managers & ppl in the company, and when he gets spun up about someone you get an earful of the impression du jour at full volume *at least 20 times*
he's like a hyperactive 10 year old just saying the same thing over & over

*headdesk*

Groovy, I had a coworker threaten to beat and murder me, and it freaked out me and another freelancer so much that we had to leave the building to process it.

Nothing was done about it after I reported it. And the marketing manager is now trying to get me fired because I came up with two new marketing campaigns, and he wants to keep trying the same shit he came up with that's done nothing but fail.

No idea why these people hired me. I have marketing experience and management training from some of the biggest corporations in the world, yet they keep saying I have "no idea what I'm doing", and I keep pointing to the numbers that shows I do know what I'm doing. After 2 months I've beaten all the KPIs of years-long running marketing campaigns by up to 200 fucking percent, and I was given no resources or help whatsoever to do it.

I honestly believe they hired me as a joke, they didn't seem like they intended me to actually do the job properly, and I kicked its fucking ass into the stratosphere with no resources whatsoever. And I fucking hate marketing.

And I'm nice to these people. I'm nice! For real, IRL, I'm an easy-going guy, hard to believe.

What the hell did they expect, then. I really need to own my own value... I'm tired of almost getting murdered and ending up in these awful environments.

going out for lunch in a huge group of coworkers can really be the worst.

yesterday like 12 of us went out to celebrate a milestone in the product we're building. one colleague, who booked it, tried to insist we should begin the set menu we'd ordered despite three colleagues not being there yet. the same colleague doesn't eat lamb, in a setup where there are like many, many sharing plates that don't contain lamb, decided to change a lamb plate for something else, rather than just the obv choice of everyone sharing a bit more of the other dishes her way or whatever. this is a situation with loads of other foods left over.

then there's the payment obviously and the fact that it's always below and nobody includes a tip. it's amazing how many filters of politeness, general decency and good humour people pass through before becoming actual friends, and how few of these filters those we're forced to work with would pass through.

in a setup where there are like many, many sharing plates that don't contain lamb, decided to change a lamb plate for something else

this is rude imo but then I like lamb. but I bet there were vegetarians present and nobody said "let's switch out all the meat dishes because there are 3 vegetarians"

although I should be careful what I wish for, that did happen at one of our work lunches, and the result was that lunch was cheese and pickle sandwiches with no choice, and I don't like pickle

(everyone will now post to say that I am wrong. perhaps I should have pretended to be lactose intolerant; that is more socially acceptable than not liking pickle)

I'm with you on the pickle front, aps - disgusting muck. Lettuce, or a little onion, in a cheese sarnie is acceptable tho.

fp'd u both, sorry

the one vegetarian got a large platter to himself! tho it was a mix of vegetarian stuff anyway so it wasn't as if others couldn't help out. indian food so the vegetables were not an afterthought.

xpost

Our office/company has a LOT of hindus and muslims who dont eat any meat, beef in particular.

So the company xmas party 2 years in a row was at a Brazilian BBQ restaurant that basically serves nothing but various meats on skewers.

I dated someone who had an anecdote about how she and her friend, in younger years, were really drunk and went into one of those places to eat when they were both practicing vegetarians

I think they demanded the baked potatoes and salads and ended up paying a stupid amount of money because it was a one-price-for-all place. I should have seen this as a red flag and not an amusing story of youth, because every week of the relationship had some incident of about this level of demanding idiocy

Huuuuuhhhh, I think I know why the marketing manager flipped shit at my marketing campaign. I figured out that he's more likely than not stealing money from the owner of the company.

He's been running all these bogus ad campaigns for huge amounts of money, that have not only failed, but damaged the company, and he keeps trying to convince the owner to go further along it. "No, this guy's a genius!" Fuck that, he created ads using Comic Sans that made fun of the audience for the product, and pissed off thousands of people! For over 50 grand! He convinced the owner to buy this horrible product for a million dollars, and keeps calling it a "race car", and he knows damn well it's not.

Dude's using it to steal money from the guy, who's getting older and is a little senile.

The other freelancer noticed some of the bullshit, too. Marketing manager keeps giving the owner this godawful advice that always fails and costs tons of money to do. My ideas came from my background working on actual marketing campaigns for major international brands. I only ended up at this place because my life took a shit-dick turn from my own set of bad advisers...

So now I'm in the cross-hairs of this guy robbing the boss. Yippee. I'm going to work my ass off to find new jobs ASAP.

You know, I wonder if he hired me because I put my corruption investigation experience on my resume ... he said to me "who is stealing my money!" What a weird fucking world, man.

Lad